A Work List for Windows Vista

Windows Vista -- Microsoft's years-late successor to Windows XP -- has moved from being a speck on the horizon to a figure in the middle distance. It's still far enough from stores to be easily ignored by most customers, but close enough for enthusiasts to chatter away feverishly about its features.

To get the attention of people in the first group and give those in the second group something to play with, Microsoft recently offered a free download of the second beta-test Vista release. Six months before the announced release date in January -- a date that could still be moved back -- a preview edition may not tell much about the finished product.

But after a week of tests on a few machines, Windows Vista Beta 2 does make a few things clear. Vista will be the biggest change in Microsoft-style computing since Windows 95, making fundamental alterations to foundations and facade.

For those changes to deliver their advertised benefits, however, a lot of work remains before Vista's debut.

The upgrade experience: Vista's belated arrival means Microsoft has to make it as quick and painless as possible to upgrade a computer from XP to Vista. But Vista's hardware requirements may stand in the way: Microsoft suggests a gigabyte of memory, 128 megabytes of video memory and a 1 GHz or faster processor. (Vista needs the extra video memory for its slick optional Aero Glass interface.)

Vista's interaction with an existing XP installation can also cause trouble. On a new Hewlett-Packard Pavilion desktop computer, Vista Beta 2 didn't accept its Glass-capable graphics card, even after a driver upgrade, and downshifted to its plainer standard interface. Yet on a new Apple iMac, a clean installation of Vista (added using Apple's Boot Camp software) displayed Aero Glass without any tinkering.

On both computers, Vista displayed a ravenous appetite for memory. If only a top-of-the-line machine can run Vista acceptably well, Microsoft will have a disaster on its hands.

The Pavilion upgrade took an hour and 40 minutes, while the from-scratch installation on the iMac took just an hour and 18 minutes. But on a four-year-old ThinkPad meeting Vista's basic requirements, the installation stalled. After a forced restart, the Vista installer gave up and reverted the poor machine to XP.

Security. Vista aims to fix XP's biggest weakness by limiting the ability of individual programs to mess with the system. But it also must coexist with thousands of old programs that require that level of access. Vista's solution: You grant permission to each such application, or it won't run.

That feature needs serious work. On the Pavilion, the permissions dialog -- which seizes your attention by denying access to every other program and dimming the rest of the screen -- popped up incessantly while providing too little information on the program in question.

Even on the iMac, where Vista didn't have an old Windows setup underfoot, the permissions dialog kept surfacing. Just deleting an icon from the desktop brought up three of the alerts.

The more users have to deal with these warnings, the better the odds of them blindly clicking their "Continue" or "Allow" buttons when viruses try to run.