Windows Vista, Codename: Longhorn

[David Harrison]

Just thought I'd create a new thread about the latest OS from MS. For those of you who don't know, they're calling it Windows Vista and I'm using the first Beta version at the moment.

There are some screen shots of Vista on Albino Black Sheep (http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/image/vista/) as I'm sure that some of you are already aware, but I thought I'd post a few of my own anyway. Enjoy.

Here's a shot of IE7 (http://david.hddkillers.com/Vista/IE7.JPG) on the firefox download page, it renders everything pretty much the same as IE6 does, but that's because they haven't been working on IE7 for very long. I hope that they don't balls it up like they did with IE5 and IE6. You may also have noted that IE7 is as ugly as sin, for some reason they decided that the address bar and the tabs bar would be put ABOVE the file/edit/view buttons, and even though you can move the toolbar around, you can't put it at the top of the window where everyone is used to it being. Hopefully they'll correct that in the next release.

Here's a couple of shots of the desktop 1 (http://david.hddkillers.com/Vista/desktop1.JPG) & 2 (http://david.hddkillers.com/Vista/desktop2.JPG), nothing too special here, just some new wall paper and a space-age-looking recycle bin. All of the other desktop backgrounds are the same as you get with XP.

For the start menu (http://david.hddkillers.com/Vista/start_menu.JPG) they seem to have eliminated the traditional menus that branch out to the side, and instead they've replaced them with a menu structure similar to that of windows explorer, whereby when you select an item, some more items appear below it, slightly indented.

Here is a screeny of the folder (http://david.hddkillers.com/Vista/window.JPG) I was saving the pictures in and here is a screeny taken when I closed the window (http://david.hddkillers.com/Vista/window_mid-close.JPG), as you can see, it's as if the window leans backwards and fades out at the same time. Niftiness.

Well, I hope that this was a good read and if there's anything that anyone would particularly like a screen shot of to compare with XP, let me know and I'll take one.

[Ben Rogers]

I'd like a screenshot of the display properties>appearance menu. WinXP doesn't allow for much customization, how does Vista do? What default colours does it offer, things like that? I'm still looking for a decent theming program for XP, Sharp-E (http://www.sharpe-shell.org/news.php) wasn't too enjoyable to use.

Good stuff, though.

[David Harrison]

Well the appearance tab (http://david.hddkillers.com/Vista/appearance.JPG) is pretty much the same as XP so it looks like you might have to put up with Sharp-E for a while I'm afraid.

Incidentally, no I don't know what the system requirements are, however I can tell you the specification of the machine I'm running it on.

AMD Athlon "Barton" 2500+
MSI KT4AV-L motherboard
nVidia GeForce FX 5200 128Mb AGP 8x
768Mb (3 * 256Mb) Kingston Value RAM PC3200 DDR400
Seagate 8Gb ATA-100 HDD (yes, this HDD did come right out of 1999, literally)
LiteOn 16x DVD-ROM drive

This PC runs Vista quite easily as this (http://david.hddkillers.com/Vista/resources.JPG) hopefully demonstrates. Pretty low CPU usage when idle, I reckon that the only reason it's on 2% is because it has to keep updating the CPU graph. Also, if you look at the physical memory, it's using just over 1/3 of the RAM leaving plenty left over for anything else. The little spikes on the graph are from when I was dragging the task manager window around over the My Computer window. If you haven't noticed it, the top of the window is translucent and there's also a drop shadow around it.

If anything I'd say it's easier on the PC than XP is, on my main PC I have 1Gb of RAM with just over 1/5 of that left available. Although perhaps that is a somewhat bad comparison because I am a bit harsh with my main PC and the other PC is just sitting there doing nothing. I'll put it through a little stress test by using it for a few hours and tell you how it fares later on.

Also, I'm not sure but I think that effects such as the window's fading out when you close them use the graphics card. Like I say, I'm not too sure about that, but I wouldn't have thought that even an onboard graphics card would struggle, so there shouldn't be any problems for anybody there.

[Mausau2000]

does it have tabbed browsing???

[Stephen Philbin]

It's using over 256Mb and it's not even running any applications? Isn't that a bit excessive? I've got about 10 applications going and I'm only using 232, even with Firefox leaking memory. :eek:

Is it because it runs two firewalls or something?

[JPnyc]

Looks like XP with a different color scheme. Anyone find any significant differences yet?

[Stephen Philbin]

It is the same isn't it? Isn't it the 2005 update of XP? I heard there was supposed to be some minor update to XP?

[MstrBob]

The web has been filled with so much Microsoft bashing that it has been near impossible to get an objective and knowledgeable review if Vista. From what I have gathered though, most of the work in Beta 1 isn't very visible, and Avalon still needs polishing. The technologies used in Windows Vista actually seem very interesting, and if it were any other company but Microsoft I think there would be a lot more positive feelings towards it. As it is, a large number of people are unwilling to acknowledge anything from MS positively. It's getting very annoying. :mad:

[Stephen Philbin]

What the hell is it?

[MstrBob]

What the hell is it?

What's what?

[Mausau2000]

I think people should stop bashing microsoft as most people would be OS less with out it.

[Stephen Philbin]

I mean what is this "Vista" thing. I thought it was a 2005 update for XP, but Dave explained to me that it's Longhorn by another name. I'm not bashing MS here, but hey, if you guys are nuts enough to use Windows, then good luck to ya. You're braver than I am. ;) *chuckle*

[JPnyc]

It's mostly fashion and bandwagon, but it's partly MS's fault. They tried to do everything and as most people know, it's nearly impossible to be everything and be great at everything. That said, they've done a pretty good job at most things.

[Ben Rogers]

Herer, I'd use Linux, but, see, I like it when I can get a thing or two to work on my PC. I'm just weird like that, I guess. :p

[Mausau2000]

i still will stick with MS.
it is mainly the software that is the problem (or the hardware if u use a dell)s fuilt not the os's

[David Harrison]

Well after 2 and a half hours (http://david.hddkillers.com/Vista/stable.JPG) of running the CPU at 100% (the first hour of which I was using the PC myself, nothing too taxing really, just MSN and Solitaire) it seems to be pretty stable.

The only time when it buggers up a bit is when I want to install something, the whole PC will just freeze up and then after a short while the installation will begin. Also, I plugged my webcam in and it couldn't find any drivers for it, the webcam is pretty old but XP has drivers for it. Not exactly a critical point but I don't wanna buy another webcam just because M$ can't be bothered to include a driver, I even tried searching windows update for one.

Anywho, I decided to benchmark the PC to see how it held out, first I ran 3DMark03 (http://david.hddkillers.com/Vista/3DMark03.JPG), the score was pretty low at 1425, but that wasn't the point, I just wanted to see if it would even finish the benchmark. Next I ran 3DMark01 (http://david.hddkillers.com/Vista/3DMark01.JPG) and again got a pretty low score of 6852. And finally Aquamark 3 (http://david.hddkillers.com/Vista/aquamark3.JPG) and got 9002.

The low scores are due pretty much entirely to the less than spectacular hardware, I'm afraid that I don't have any scores for the PC running XP, maybe I'll get those at a later date. Just for comparison though (and maybe a little bit of showing off), my main PC which I use for gaming has pulled 12,852 for 3DMark03 and 59,402 for Aquamark 3. Here's a random cool shot (http://david.hddkillers.com/Vista/massive_overdraw.JPG) form the Aquamark 3 benchmark.

I'm going to leave 3DMark01 on an infinite loop while I sleep and see if it's still going when I wake up. I've not got a clue what it'll prove if it is still running when I wake up, or even if it isn't, but it's not doing anything else so I may as well make it draw as much power as possible just to harm the environment.

Also, when I was copying some files over the network, I thought I may as well take a shot of the dialog box (http://david.hddkillers.com/Vista/copy-paste.JPG), no particular reason, but you gotta admit, it looks a lot nicer than the one in XP.

[buntine]

The web has been filled with so much Microsoft bashing that it has been near impossible to get an objective and knowledgeable review if Vista. From what I have gathered though, most of the work in Beta 1 isn't very visible, and Avalon still needs polishing. The technologies used in Windows Vista actually seem very interesting, and if it were any other company but Microsoft I think there would be a lot more positive feelings towards it. As it is, a large number of people are unwilling to acknowledge anything from MS positively. It's getting very annoying.

Respect. JP also mentioned the Bandwagon, which I also agree with. Luckily, it's only in the amature environment that I ever hear MS-Bashing.

A couple of weeks ago (not on this forum) a few people were bashing .NET. As it turned out, none of them knew anything past basic PHP and had never used the .NET framework. Took about five minutes to leave them speechless.

Regards.

[Ben Rogers]

Oh, yeah, Dave, so they changed the file structure bit? Good, good...that whole "C:/Documents and Settings/<whole lotta crap>/tworld.exe" -p thing was getting old, and it shouldn't be so much work to get into the application data. And .com apps (I only have one, but they rule a lot for simplicity) in My Documents ran on a file in a subfolder? Gah.