Windows Vista - A Not so First Look

This article is not complete and will probably never be. I ran out of time (University) and interest with Windows Vista. I have now had a chance to use it for an extended period of time at my co-op job. I must say that it is not much of an improvement over XP. Just a bunch of flashy eye-candy. It is also a resource hog. If anything, if I got a new computer now with Vista would partition and install a version of Linux on it. Much much more enjoyable in my opinion, just not for everyone. Below is the article:

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So today I decided to install Windows Vista Beta 2 just to get the Windows Vista craze out of my system. What will follow is my photo tour of Microsoft Windows Vista and you be the judge.

All images to follow are of a Microsoft Operating System and are therefore completely at the discretion of Microsoft to ask for them to be removed if they feel that free speech is wrong.



First off, my first boot. As you can see the screen size is only 800x600 because out of the box it doesn't like my nVidia video card. I can't blame it to much for that because its only a Beta version but still, its a proprietary video card, Vista should still use a higher resolution like 1024x768 because it should assume that the users monitor can support this because of the requirements of the OS.


Also if you look closely at the Spects of my computer it is telling, it can't see that its a Toshiba P10 - which Ubuntu can easily see and is happy to print out with lshw. As well, it is complaining that I don't have an antivirus application installed and that I will be at risk (Annoying Pop-up 1). Of course I don't have any antivirus software installed....I just installed Vista from scratch.



Next, looking at the save box.


Look familiar? Well it should its an almost complete rip off of GNOMEs save dialogs, coincidence, I think not. They added a touch of Windows extension showing and voilà.

Now on the Driver side of things, Vista also doesn't like my Atheros Wireless card or my Creative SoundBlaster card or my onboard AC '97 chipset. Why you may ask, because they are available from Windows Update. So out of the box, or downloaded ISO Vista likes none of my hardware and uses default drivers. Now I will download them from their site using my internal IEEE 802.3u card.

First off, I connected my wired network cable and Vista poped-up with a friendly message asking how I connect to the Internet. Not to annoying for the fact that I didn't configure any Internet connection. But then when I clicked ok to say that I wanted that Vista then gave me a dialog asking if I was me.

Now if I had assigned a password to my account then it would have bothered me for that (This would only be true for a limited user trying to access admin power). This is one of their "security" features that they have implimented in order to make the "users" experience more "secure". This is just like the Security Warning that XP SP2 has everytime you open a file off of a network drive. It is ok once or twice, but after a while it just gets annoying an people will just click it blindly and enter their password. How secure is it now? huh? huh?