Windows Vista Beta 2 Review 28 Jun, 2006
Installation
Although my machine at home has been Linux for about 14 months now, and I’ve been using a Mac laptop for two and a half years, some things occasionally force me to use Windows. I had Windows XP dual-boot on my home machine, but was running out of space on its drive (a paltry 20MB of the total half-terabyte on the box) so I needed to reinstall anyway. On that same day, Vista Beta 2 went public, so I figured what the heck.
The install process is definitely slicker than XP-Pro, although it’s still a bit more annoying than the OSX installer. I would say, from the installer’s perspective, it’s the best Windows yet. I especially like the progress bar, which is much more like the Adobe CS2 progress bar, if you’ve ever installed that (although the breakdown is pre- and post-reboot, rather than switching discs).
Once it finished installing (taking something like an hour and eight minutes before finally getting a usable desktop), it looked pretty. Definitely some elements stolen straight from the Mac. The driver for my Realtek 8169 card is finally included with Windows, which saved me a bit of time. Everything was automatically detected on my dual-processor box, including the nVidia driver for my video card, so I was pretty impressed on that point.
Use
Most of my relatively simple programs installed fine. Firefox even has some theme elements that take advantage of some of the reworking in Vista. IE7 on Vista looks much less lame with Aero Glass enabled, so don’t diss it based simply on how it looks under XP. It’s still kinda classic IE-y, with weird drawing and odd selections when you use the mouse with absolutely positioned elements.
I probably spent a good 10 minutes playing with the blur effects that occur on the window frame against the things behind it.
Compatability
Specific apps that work include Photoshop CS2 and PTGui, along with DVD Shrink. Polling the mouse seems a bit slower unless the mouse button is down, which is rather odd IMO, but things are workable. Some of the window animation effects are a bit gratuitous and slow stuff down, but I got used to them pretty quickly. They do look nice, I just wish they were a bit faster.
The biggest thing I’ve found that flat-out doesn’t work is the unxutils, which are absolutely essential to my everyday work. Zsh just crashes whenever it tries to fork a process, probably due to some sort of SEP being triggered. All other apps seem to work okay for the most part, just need a little tweaking (Neat Image, for example, tries to write camera noise profiles to its app dir… obviously not something that’s allowed).
Vista seems a little more hungry on ram, in that it doesn’t let go of it as quickly (my guess is it’s finally using a filesystem cache more like Linux, but that’s not based on fact at all). It’s able to fully utilize my gigabit network card, which had some issues under XP that would cause all USB devices to turn off every second or so while data was going over the wire.
Gaming
I tried to get Battlefield 1942 working, since that’s something that doesn’t entirely like Cedega right now (vsync especially, but PunkBuster also doesn’t work). The quick answer is that Battlefield 1942 doesn’t work under Vista. The installer off the CD worked, IIRC, but the patches to 1.5, 1.61b, and the installer for Desert Combat all looked like they worked, but then a message popped up (from Vista itself) saying that the install probably didn’t work (it didn’t) and I should try running it in a different mode (which I did), but this actually didn’t help.
Upon launch, it appeared to work, but then there was a hidden message from the firewall in the background (which I spidey-sensed and summarially dismissed), but it never performs the hand-off when the splash screen shows before it starts the level. Thus I cannot vouch for its speed for gaming, or whether PunkBuster works… because I wasn’t able to launch the game.
Wrapup
- rating for usability: C-, stuff is too sluggish even with Aero Glass off
- rating for prettyiness: B+, they’ve copied enough elements from OSX to give it a nice look, but keeping the fat borders from XP. I’d definitely say it’s an improvement over the Blue XP look. Progress bars and buttons are actually pretty.
- rating for security: B+, it starts with a limited account and the warnings make it clear you’re about to do something dangerous. I think it makes it a little too annoying, but I honestly don’t use Windows that much so I think it’ll just make me that much happier to be back on other OSes.