iP3K

I have been testing the next version of Microsoft’s operating system for a few months now and here is my review. I’ve been through five different build from pre-Beta, Beta, RC1, 5627 and now RC2. I went from a non-functional operating system from one that I can use on a daily basis (with a few bugs still).

I can hardly believe how come it took so long for Microsoft to develop a new OS considering that since Windows 95 they were releasing something almost every two years. I would consider Windows Vista RC2 (build 5744) to be almost ready for release; what really needs to be worked on are the third party software we rely on to do whatever we use the computer for. I have a lot of media on my hard drive. If I consider music and videos compressed by various codecs support for these need to be adopted quickly. On earlier builds I could not even play mp3 or videos without using Winamp. All those bugs aside are now corrected. I believe Windows Vista to be one serious OS. They look out for the security of their users by integrating tools such as Anti-Spyware, Firewall, Anti-Phising and permission management for running software. It is doubtful that this new version of Windows will be void of attacks because as anything becomes popular it will be attacked even more.

Key features of Windows Vista

The tester license I’ve been given gives me access to Windows Vista Ultimate witch has all the features the OS has to offer. We can highlight the next version of Internet Explorer ( IE7+) and Windows Media Player 11. Those are available to Windows XP users under beta. Nice add-ons include Windows Media Center and Speech Recognition. You can litteraly tell your computer what to do and what to write down. I takes some time to use to but that feature will develop nicely.

If I look at the performance of my system I am running a Pentium 4 2.4GHz, with 1791 MB of RAM, a 250 GB hard drive with an ATI Radeon 9550 256 MB video card. As you might already know Microsoft as released a tool that let’s you evaluate your PC for the Vista experience. My score was 3.3, set by the lowest score of the list because of my graphics card. I let myself impressed by the Aero interface. It’s not full transparency (that I find confusing) but a gentle glass look to all your windows. I could set the color theme and most applications I use were compatible with the Aero Glass theme.

I tend to use a lot of Beta (pre-released) software along side Vista, I got to test Office 2007 at the same time but will not review it now. I will focus on the few features I like. The Gadget sidebar is quite useful; I get to see a sleek calendar, the weather, a few RSS feeds, my pictures and a currency converter. Are those features essential ? Of course not, just like Aero this is Eye Candy. What gets my worried is that right now I use Google Desktop Search and Opera to provide my widgets/gadgets and if Windows gets it’s community to create all the appropriate items there will be no need for third party software.

We’ll have to wait for January for a complete version with a better compatibility with existing programs and a few months before you get everything up and running like you’d like it. Screenshots are via My Opera Albums!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 18th, 2006 at 9:04 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.