Primordial Ooze

Earlier in the week, or last week, Microsoft made available a “Pre-RC1” version build 5536 of their new OS, Windows Vista..

I decided to take it for a spin. The first question that came to mind, of course, is where to install it? I have two machines at work, my old desktop and a new woodcrest-base dual-core monster. I could install it in a VPC t be hosted on the monster, for sure, but then I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the Aero interface. In the end, I wasn’t so keen on partitioning the drive on my new machine and my old machine was largely “at capacity.”

It was at that point when I settled my gaze on my laptop. I have an IBM ThinkPad T42P. I have always held this laptop in high regard. It has a 2GHz Intel Pentium M processor, 2GB of RAM, a fast 7200 80GB RPM drive, and a good ATI Mobility Fire GL T2/T2e video card which fully supports Aero, the new glassy UI. I also have a spare HDD, which I promptly swapped for my existing drive before I left work and headed for the train.

I picked Windows Vista Ultimate for the install when I was given the choice. I mean, it was free so why not go for it all. I tried to forget that Ultimate will cost a whopping $400 bucks when Vista ships in January. Installation was done on the train as I sped from NYC to Long Island. I think it took about 35 minutes before I was fully logged in with a fresh copy of Vista.

Vista has the concept of a Windows Experience Index. My machine rated 2.3. I think this is out of 5. The Vista Help says, “Computers with a base score of 5 were the highest performing computers available when Windows Vista was released..” So, my 2.3 doesn’t sound so good, but the experience is every bit as snappy as it was when I had XP on the laptop. Plus, there is Aero and all of those neat fading window transitions going on. Here is the “Basic information about my computer” screen:

I find Aero to be a bit clunky. Vista has finally updated most of the screens and icons which have been stagnant since Windows NT. Most. Still, I admire the fade effect used by Aero when screens appear and disappear. Dare I say that it clearly looks better than Tiger’s “Genie” and “Scale” effects. Shhh.

Personalizing the display is much improved.There is an awesome Aurora screen saver, choice of some very hi-resolution stock wallpapers (finally), choice of a slew of pleasant solid colors, and more.

There are still no sound schemes defined. WTF! Windows 95 had a ton… what happened?

Here is a whirlwind tour of other things that caught my eye:

• Apps which have had a stagnant UI for years get a face lift: Sound Recorder and Computer management (pictured) are completely revamped. Wordpad and Notepad are still very basic and very much unchanged.

• Lots of new games and all of the old ones got their interfaces updated:

• Here, a Chess Titans knight debates his next move:

• There is a new snipping tool, which enhances screen captures. Not you can take free-hand and window snapshots with ease. Oh, something the Mac has had for years ;-)
• There is a new Windows DVD Maker. It’s ultra-simplistic, but it looks like it will do the job nicely. Support for 16:9, too!
• There is a Windows Photo Gallery. Basic, likely to improve over time.
• Windows Calendar, with support for WEBDAV and remote calendars

I didn’t have a flawless experience. At one point I saw quite a bit of display corruption. The corruption was localized to a few of my open apps and seemed to go away when I closed those apps. The corruption started when I set Chess Titans to the highest graphics level and the display showed strange 3D garbage. Chess Titans ran fine when it was restarted.

Vista apps run in a more limited sandbox than what you get in XP. Applications that require access to privileges system components force a confirmation. This happened dozens of times as I went about my business. The experience is much like that found in OS X. Firefox had some trouble with this. Extensions such as flash were difficult to install, requiring a manual installation. Interestingly enough, the manual install icon had a little Windows Defender icon-thing overlayed:

In my next post, I’ll discuss how to write WPF apps under Vista with tools that are totally free, like Visual C# Express.