Introduction

With Microsoft releasing Windows Vista Beta 2 to the general public via the Customer Preview Program, it’s a good time to take a look at the current state of the upcoming next generation operating system. I installed the OS when the Beta was first made available to developers in late May and I’ve been taking the OS for a spin for several weeks now. Join me as I go over the features of Vista Beta 2 and the pros and cons of the current state of the OS.

Before we go on…

It’s important to note that we are dealing with beta software at this point. Although this is the second beta iteration from Microsoft, this is by no means the final shipping code that you will expect from them. With Vista approximately several months away, Microsoft will undoubtedly make changes and fixes to the OS based on feedback from users from this release.

Hardware Requirements

Hey, Intel and AMD need to sell more processors right? Well it seems Microsoft is trying its hardest to make sure that happens with Vista. There are two classes of machines that Microsoft specifies for Windows Vista – a basic level machine that Microsoft refers to as a “Windows Vista Capable PC”, and a high end system called a “Windows Vista Premium Ready PC”.

A Windows Vista Capable PC has at least the following:

• At least an 800MHz processor
• 512MB of RAM
• DirectX 9 capable graphics card

A Windows Vista Premium Ready PC has at least the following:

• At least a 1GHz x86 or x64 processor
• 1GB of RAM
• A graphics processor capable of running Windows Aero – more on this shortly
• 128 MB of graphics memory
• 40GB hard disk drive with 15GB of free space
• DVD-ROM drive
• Audio output
• Internet access

So what does Windows Aero demand exactly?

• A DirectX 9 class graphics processor which supports features such as:

• Supports a WDDM driver
• Supports Pixel Shader 2.0 in the hardware
• Supports 32 bits per pixel

• 64 MB of graphics memory to support a single monitor less than 1,310,720 pixels
• 128 MB of graphics memory to support a single monitor at resolutions from 1,310,720 to 2,304,000 pixels
• 256 MB of graphics memory to support a single monitor at resolutions higher than 2,304,000 pixels
• Meets graphics memory bandwidth requirements as assessed by Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor running on Windows XP

Yes.. it appears Microsoft is also trying to help NVIDIA and ATI earn more money through the use of Windows Aero.

The Features of Windows Vista Beta 2

The User Experience – the Aero effect

Welcome to Windows Vista Beta 2

One of the first new features of Vista appears right when you first log in and it’s called the Welcome Center. With the Welcome Center, you can perform common tasks and get information about your system as well as help. Here’s what it looks like:

A look at Aero

What is Aero you might ask? It’s the official name to the new user interface found in Windows Vista which is built on top of the new Desktp Window Manager component. Aero brings translucency effects, 3D graphics, and animation effects to the Windows desktop. When you have all of these effects in operation, this mode is called Aero Glass. If your graphics hardware isn’t quite up to snuff, then Aero runs in a different mode where the advanced graphics are turned off.

The system I used to run Vista Beta 2 was powerful enough to run Aero Glass. In this current iteration of the OS, there isn’t much to customize when it comes to Aero Glass. Here’s a snapshot of the customization window:

The Start Menu is still there but something’s different..

Aero wasn’t the only change made to the Windows desktop – the start menu was also redesigned. First off, the start menu has an integrated search functionality built right in.

Click on the start button and start typing letters. You can bring up any program installed on your system simply by typing the application name. If I typed “Word” in the search field and then pressed Enter, Vista would launch Microsoft Word.

That’s not the only change with the Start Menu. The Programs menu has been changed to show a tree like hierarchy which is much much faster. Click on a folder and the items are shown in a list as opposed to cascading menus. The net result? The Start Menu is much much faster than ever before.

Explore your world

Windows Explorer really hasn’t changed a whole lot over the last decade ever since the introduction of Windows 95. Sure, Microsoft has added things along the way such as the integration of Internet Explorer and subtle graphical cues to indicate multimedia files but Explorer has largely been the same design. Well with Vista, Explorer takes a slightly new approach to things. The tree view on the left hand side of Explorer is now joined with shortcut menu items to popular items such as Documents, and Pictures. The top bar of the Explorer now includes clickable folders for each folder listed in the current path. You can also highlight the path and type in the path that you’d like to go to by keyboard.

Explorer displays more information about the computer than ever before. Here’s a snapshot of my system from a hard drive standpoint.

The upper right hand corner of Explorer always has the integrated search feature – reminds me a bit of FireFox doesn’t it?

Finally, Microsoft added scalable thumbnails to the ways you can view documents in a folder. So you can now see more about a document than ever before.

It’s not your normal Alt-Tab anymore..

If you work with a large number of applications at the same time under Windows, then you’re familiar with using Alt-Tab as a way to quickly switch between apps. Microsoft has updated the Alt-Tab to something called Windows Flip and Windows Flip3D.

When you press Alt-Tab under Vista, a new feature called Windows Flip kicks into play. Live thumbnails of all your applications are shown as you switch or flip between applications. These thumbnails are visual cues to help you decide which application you want to bring forward.

You can take these visual cues a step further with Flip3D. Flip3D lets you view your open applications via a 3D stack design. You can activate this using WindowsKey-Tab or via the mouse scroll wheel. Here’s a picture of it.

Security – are you sure you want to that?

Yes it’s true – Windows Vista is more attentive to security than in any previous version of Windows. The biggest change comes in the form of User Account Control which basically says that regular Windows users need administration authority for low level Windows activities such as installing applications or drivers, deleting files or changing system settings. The hope is that UAC will catch many background activities such as spyware applications being inadvertently installed or things deleted by accident in the background.

While this is a good idea, it doesn’t quite come across well in practice. Simple things such as deleting files can become cumbersome because Vista asks for your administrative authorization. In fact, even if you are logged in as the administrator to your machine, UAC will still stop and tell you that you need administrative authority to perform certain actions – and trust me – this comes up quite a bit. After about a two days of UAC, I ended up turning it off in the control panel.

Here’s a snapshot of the Control Panel applet to turn off UAC (thank goodness)

Vista comes with Windows Defender built right in to help stop malware from getting onto your computer. Defender joins Windows Firefall, and Automatic Updates to help keep your system as up to date and protected as possible. We’ll look into Updates shortly within the Control Panel but here’s a shot of Windows Defender.

It’s a Dashboard erum.. Widget..erum.. Gadget world

Apple has it’s Dashboard, Yahoo has it’s Widgets and Microsoft of course has its’ gadgets. Microsoft Gadgets are essentially small applications that either run on their own or can connect to other applications and services. You can have Gadgets littered all over your desktop or you can dock and organize them onto the Microsoft Sidebar which is a perfect addition to those with widescreen displays or multi-monitors. If you have a normal 4:3 ratio display, then the Sidebar may take up a bit too much space. Here’s a picture of the Gadgets:

Backing things up

Let’s face it – backup has never been a strong forte of Microsoft under Windows. With XP, things got a little better with System Restore but Vista changes things by making shadow copies of files or folders at specific points in times. Vista can do this automatically or you can tell it to do so. One of the neat side effects of Shadow Copying is you can now look at previous versions of files simply by bringing up the properties of a file. Here’s a snapshot of the Properties window:

Windows Backup has also been updated to allow you to backup your data to another hard drive or to a CD/DVD burner spanning multiple disks.

Keeping things up to date

Windows Update has been well.. updated under Windows Vista. You now have the ability to download both important and recommended updates in the background automatically. In XP, you could only automatically install important updates.

Windows Update is also much more integrated into the OS since you don’t need Internet Explorer to actually perform the update. Clicking on Windows Update in the Control Panel brings up the new Windows Update application UI.

Controlling the OS

Ahh the good old Control Panel. It’s still there under Vista but it’s been heavily changed and modified. Of course every iteration of Windows comes with a slightly different Control Panel so there’s no surprise that Microsoft would change things up yet again. This time around, the Control Panel is grouped into the following major categories:

• System and Maintenance
• Security
• Network and Internet
• Hardware and Sound
• Programs
• User Accounts and Family Safety
• Appearance and Personalization
• Clock, Language and Region
• Ease of Access
• Additional Options

I’m not totally crazy about all of the categories here but they are what they are. Here are some snapshots underneath some of the categories. For Appearance and Personalization, you can do the following:

Here are some lower level snapshots of what you can do for personalization:

Here’s a look at System and Maintenance:

For User Accounts and Family Safety, you have the following options:

If you’re running Vista on a laptop, then you’ll be particularly interested in the Power Options section. There are several Power Plans that come default with the OS but you can create your own if the Power Plans in place aren’t good enough for you.

For Network and Internet, you get the following display:

There’s a neat little feature called the Network Center which shows you a graphical image of your network setup as determined by Vista:

One of the more interesting additions to the OS is the new Windows Performance Rating. This application attempts to benchmark your hardware to see if your system is up to snuff for Windows Vista. For my system, I received an overall score of 3 – mostly because of my lower end NVIDIA graphics card which had a paltry 128MB of RAM. Heck, I only got a 3.8 for my 2GB of DDR2 memory! Can’t win it all!

Finally, here’s the User Accounts/Manage Accounts section of the Control Panel. As you can see, there isn’t a whole lot going on here.

Other goodies

If you’ve been looking at the snapshots closely, you’ll have noticed that Microsoft removed a key word from their OS vocabulary. That word is “My”. You won’t find “My Documents” or “My Computer” or “My Pictures any longer. It’s just “Computer”, “Documents”, “Pictures” etc.

These personal folders are also no longer under “Documents and Settings” which is normally found in your root drive. Vista now makes a “users” directory on the root drive and each user gets a folder in that directory. Documents, Pictures, Music, and Images are all grouped under each user.

Microsoft updates mini-application suite..

With Vista, Microsoft also added several new applications to the OS as well as updated some of the more familiar ones. Let’s see what’s under the hood of Vista.

Windows DVD Maker

First off – there’s a new DVD application in Vista called Windows DVD Maker. You can create videos or photo slidershows using the application although the app did end up crashing on me when I was trying to compile a picture slideshow of my wedding. Here are various shots of the DVD Maker application (which is a wizard driven app).

One of the downsides that I’ve seen with the program is the inability to save your session. You have to start over every time. Hopefully Microsoft will change that in upcoming releases.

Windows Photo Gallery

There’s a new picture viewing application called Windows Photo Gallery which tries to organize your pictures based on time of capture – similar to the way Adobe Photoshop Elements works. The application is divided into a tree like structure on the left and a viewing window on the right. You can tag keywords to pictures and sort them by date. You can also directly see the picture collections via the folders that they are stored in.

Windows Calendar

Here’s a new software app called Windows Calendar which basically keeps tracks of your appointments and events. You can publish your calendar to an online WebDAV supporting websites also. Here’s a snapshot of the application.

Windows Collaboration

There’s a new collaboration application called Windows Collaboration. I didn’t get a chance to test this out but here’s a snapshot of the startup screen.

Windows Fax and Scan

Fax and Scan has been updated in Windows Vista to reflect a more email like application user interface.

Windows Movie Maker

Doesn’t look like a whole lot changed here.

Windows Mail

I still prefer Outlook…

Finally..

There are still several things that I have not talked about in this article. I’ve avoided Media Center support since I’ll cover that in a separate article but yes – MCE is in the OS as long as you have the right versions of the OS. Other new features is of course the latest version of IE 7 and Windows Media Player 11. You can see those apps running on XP by downloading the latest betas from Microsoft.com.

Finally, Vista will see Xbox 360 consoles on your network which is important because 360’s can act as Media Center Extenders to your system. A 360 can also connect to your system via Windows Connect and stream music and photos from your box to the console.

Overall usage

We’ve covered many of the new features with Windows Vista Beta 2 but now the more important question – how is it overall? Well like I said early on – it’s still beta software and as such, there’s a lot that isn’t quite working yet. Let’s start with some of the cool things.

Yes, Aero is here and yes Aero is pretty cool. Sure most if not all of Aero’s features can be found today under OS X but that’s ok – at least it’s finally coming to Windows. Having translucent windows makes for a strange desktop at times since everything has a slightly hazy look on the borders. However, the new desktop definitely provides more information to the user via visual cues. Everything from the new desktop to the way Explorer looks now to the revamped Start button is definitely a step in the right direction.

The new search indexing features under Aero are also very good – you can easily find programs and applications from wherever you’re at. Search wasn’t very useful under XP or in any other incarnation of Windows but Vista could change all of that.

With every new version of Windows comes concerns about backward applications compatibility. Most of the applications that I installed under Vista Beta 2 worked on the first try although some did have a few quirks. The hardest part about getting an application to work under Windows Vista is just getting past the installation step. If for whatever reason it fails to install, try forcing the app to think the OS is XP or earlier (via the Properties menu).

Finally, for a beta piece of software, the OS was fairly responsive although some operations took longer than I would have expected (such as copying files). Let’s not kid ourselves here – Vista is a beast of an OS in many ways. It pushes the envelop for desktop graphics requiring users to upgrade their graphics cards if they want to full desktop composition power of Aero. But once you work with Aero, you’ll quickly get used to the overall graphics effects that the desktop provides (making Windows XP desktops boring looking).

So what are the not so cool things.. well, things don’t work correctly. I didn’t talk about Windows Mobile support and that’s because Windows Mobile support is incomplete under Vista at this point. There is no more support for Microsoft ActiveSync software – that will get phased out in favor of this new component called Windows Mobile Sync. However, the program can only copy files to your device at this time – there is no feature to sync up contacts, calendars or notes as of yet.

Windows Explorer is still somewhat buggy. I’ll lose the left hand tree display every so often for no particular reason at all. The directory path located on top of Explorer doesn’t autofill when you type in the path via the keyboard – what a pain!

Aero is cool but as I mentioned earlier, it’s a beast to operate. You need A LOT of graphics memory and horsepower to get it running smoothly. On top of this, the DWM component sucked up a great deal of my memory after a few days of operation. By the 3rd day of continous operation, Windows Aero was consuming 900MB of memory on a 2GB box with no other major apps running. Hmm, could there be a memory leak somewhere?

Although I applauded the Aero graphics, I have to sometimes wonder whether all of this is really useful. I like the new Start menu design but let’s face it – that was a long time coming. The graphics are cool but they come at a high performance price. Surely this stuff could have been up and running with less powerful hardware right?

Hardware support will be spotty at times folks. Don’t expect all Windows XP drivers to work correctly under Vista. I had several pieces of hardware fail on me but I didn’t look into it too deeply so take my comments with a grain of salt.

Summary

It’s taken us a long time to get here with Windows Vista – over five years since the last official major release of Windows actually and we’re still not quite there yet. However, Vista Beta 2 is definitely promising. The new OS sports many changes – both to the GUI and to the security aspects of the system. There are also many changes underneath the hood that we did not cover here today. Perhaps, I’ll take a look at them down the road. However, if you’re thinking about getting a new PC down the road, make sure it has the horsepower to run Vista because the OS will definitely use it. Beta 2 is a great look into what’s coming down the road for Windows. It’s not perfect; it’s got bugs; and it’s a bit of a memory hog – but hey – we said that of Windows NT and Windows 2000 (maybe not XP). Microsoft’s done a lot to Vista and they’ve also removed a lot of promised features along the way. I’m not sure how they will finish all of this in time for release but they’ve got a ton of programmers out there so who knows? It just might happen on time (sorta). In any case, if you have some spare machines, give Beta 2 a try. I would not try it out on a main machine like I did (unless you don’t care of course) but definitely download it and give it a spin in your free time.

Vista Beta 2 is a good step in the positive direction but there’s a lot more work to be done.

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