By Rob Pegoraro
Sunday, July 16, 2006
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.
The new interface(s): Aero Glass or not, Vista won't look too familiar to Windows veterans -- but Mac users may feel at home. As in Mac OS X, every file-browsing window in Vista has a search box at the top-right corner, a list of important folders at the left and a toolbar at the top.
That file search operates off an index that Vista compiles in the background; in Beta 2, however, it took more time to catch up on changes than either OS X's Spotlight or Google Desktop -- and was dismally slower at full-disk searches.
People familiar with OS X's Dashboard or Google Desktop's "widgets" will also recognize Vista's optional Sidebar, which floats at the right edge of the screen for quick access to such "gadgets" as a clock, a notepad and a calculator.
The Start Menu gets a welcome revision in Vista. Instead of an "All Programs" listing that blocks the entire screen with a seemingly endless tree of branching sub-menus, its list of programs is confined to the left two-thirds of the Start Menu. A search box lets you find programs quickly.
Aero Glass provides extra, sometimes entrancing, visual effects. Windows shimmer into place, their borders appear translucent, and mousing over taskbar buttons or hitting the Alt and Tab keys brings up thumbnail previews of each open window.
Throughout Vista, traditional text menus are hidden (the Alt key reveals them). Instead, toolbar buttons atop each window both execute commands and reveal drop-down menus of their own. That's a big, potentially upsetting shift-- a gutsy move for Microsoft.
On the other hand, will the final release of Vista still reveal parts that appear unchanged from Win 95 or 98 (for example, the Options screen in Windows Mail, a souped-up version of Outlook Express)?
Maintenance: Over time, the ugliest aspect of Windows can be its care and feeding; the phrase "soul-numbing tedium" comes to mind when contemplating such tasks as regulating what software runs at start-up.
Will Vista make sufficient progress on this front? Beta 2 leaves that question open.
Its Control Panel screen provides a clearer, searchable view of system settings. Its hierarchy of folders on the hard drive is simpler, with just three folders at the top (Windows, Program Files and Users) and only one folder in each user's directory for such program data files as Web bookmarks and e-mail archives (too bad it's still invisible).
But debugging a balky driver dumps you into the same old Device Manager interface. The Task Manager still offers nearly no help in identifying all the software active on your machine. And the system registry and the Registry Editor look as horrifyingly awful as ever.
Between now and January -- or whenever Vista arrives -- those issues could get better or linger unfixed. Unfortunately, six months go by fast when it comes to operating-system development. You have to hope that Microsoft makes the most of that time or postpones Vista if necessary. If not, who knows how long the next one will take?
Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro atrob@twp.com.
View all comments that have been posted about this article.