Windows Vista, Thoughts & observations Options

[*mipadi*]

I went to a talk by one of Microsoft's Vista developers (and an alumnus of my university). It was pretty interesting. He demoed some of the new features and talked about some of the technical aspects of Vista. His demonstration was with build 5600 (Release Candidate 1), which is available to the general public for testing purposes. He expects a final release candidate to be released in mid-October, followed by the consumer release in January 2007 (only about two and a half years late! ).

Some of the features were pretty cool, although I didn't see a lot of "new" stuff in it. The Gadgets were pretty cool. They would've been cooler had they come out years ago, before Konfabulator and Dashboard. Not sure if the implementation is the best. Gadgets can be developed using programming languages such as C#, as well as web technologies; I wonder if gadgets developed using something like C# will end up using up a lot of resources.

Vista has a lot of eye candy which is cool at first, but doesn't seem to be that useful. It really bogs down the system, too. The guy was using a laptop with 1 GB of RAM and at least 128 MB of video RAM. I didn't check it out but I'm guessing it was pretty nice—I doubt Microsoft would send him to do a demo with a low-end piece of hardware. Even so, the OS seemed to really get bogged down. Windows Media Player took an agonizingly long time to load a video, and Windows Media Center took a few minutes to load. When WMP was playing, the fluidity of the graphics transitions effects declined. Still, almost everything uses vector graphics, so that was cool.

IE 7 looked okay. Nothing spectacular. Tabs and RSS feeds—again, would've been cool a few years ago, but now that every other browser has them, it's nothing to get excited about.

Demoed Office 2007 Beta. I'm not into the interface—too cluttered, not simple enough. For all the efforts Microsoft seems to be putting into interface design, it's amazing they still can't get it right.

Security aspects seemed improved. IE runs in a sandbox now, and there's finer security on the rest of the OS. Seems like it could get annoying, though, but it's a start. Then again, XP was supposed to be much more secure, too.

There's some pretty cool searching stuff in Vista, but again, OS X's had it in Spotlight for a while now, so I can't get too excited about it. Maybe WinFS will offer some cooler search features…if WinFS ever comes out.

One cool feature is the ability to use a USB thumb drive as extra RAM. When you plug it in, Vista prompts you to allocate space on it to use as extra RAM, so it's nice for giving a bit of extra RAM to a system, if need be.

Anyway, overall, Vista looks good, but it'll probably take a pretty hefty machine to run it well. Don't know if the features in it are new enough to warrant dropping a couple hundred dollars on an upgrade, though.