Vista RC1 Review |
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| Author:
| h00t
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| Submitted: |
17-Sep-2006 14:40:53 |
| Imported From: |
zZine (original author: h00t)
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Introduction
Microsoft's new release of Windows has taken a lot of criticism so far. There are a number of reasons for this, such as the constant delays, minimum specification for running it and pricing.
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I've been looking at Vista since the first beta came out. As with nearly every MS Beta release, a full 'review' comes out the day after; listing the new stuff, what's wrong and where problems have been found. In my mind, you cannot review beta software in this way. Its pre-release software designed for testing.
For this reason I've put off commenting on Vista until RC1 has been released, along with official hardware guidelines and prices. It's not the final product, but it's the one just before the RTM which is out in October (Enterprise edition will be released in November).
User Interface
Vista has the biggest GUI changes since Windows 3.1 to 95 - and before the Mac activists start, I'm not really talking about the glass 'aero' affects either. The whole virtual folders implementation is great, and once you let your paranoia go it actually works very well. Not too sure about the start menu changes - but maybe it's just taking a bit of time. As a techie, I was horrified that the run option has been removed from the start menu by default!
To be honest, the whole interface is going to work so well for general users at both home and office that I can't complain about the Start Menu changes too much. Once you look at the remote support and management tool that businesses will have with Vista, I shouldn't need to visit a desktop as much as I had to anyway.
The glass effects are very cool, and whilst I've always admired and been jealous of the Mac's supreme UI - I need to say that I think MS have carried this off even better. Apple may revamp the glass effects on the next release, but side-by-side I have to take my hat off to MS. (*Tip: Use Winkey+Tab instead of Alt+Tab... Looks great!)
Finally, I hated the Windows XP control panel. First thing I did when building an image file or performing a fresh install was to change it back to 'classic' Windows. Microsoft is insisting that the WinXP format is the way to go now - but it actually works. I don't want to admit this (as I love the simplicity of the old school control panel), but it really has worked this time. There is no need to guess as to where icons are hidden! A lot of thought has been put into this, as well as the entire UI in general. So much more is crammed into the Control Panel that the old model would not have worked any more. System Performance, Windows Updates, Parental Controls, even file extension associations are all in the new control panel.
Other items such as the 'sidebar' don't really inspire me as much as MS would probably like.
The whole UI experience is truly terrific. If you take the Aero feature away it's still a great user interface, and as someone who is still in love with the old Windows 2000 UI I picked up everything within a few seconds. Being both very intuitive and very attractive makes the UI a winner in my book.
Pricing
I really want to clear this up. Forget a lot of the nonsense published on the Internet about Vista costing $399. It's technically correct, but not in the real world. Windows XP had two flavours - Home and Professional. Vista has five.
The editions and associated RRP's are:
- Ultimate Edition $399
- Home Premium $239
- Home Basic $199
- Enterprise Edition (N/A, only available through volume licence)
- Professional Edition $299
Today, on the Wal-Mart website I can purchase a copy of Windows XP Home for $196, or Windows XP Professional for $299. Therefore, the pricing differences aren't all that steep. Business owners are going to be paying the same amount as they paid for XP Pro - which I would say is good value. Unless you want your PC to do everything - and I mean everything - you probably won't need Ultimate Edition. Home Premium does pretty much what MCE does but won't join a domain. Pro does everything XP Pro already does and loads more. So unless you want the enterprise functionality of Pro with the end-user toys then you don't need Ultimate.
And the above prices are actually rubbish anyway - as who is going to buy a fresh copy?! The upgrade for Home Premium is $159 and for Professional is $199! This is the same cost to go from either Windows ME to Windows XP Home or Windows 2000 Pro to Windows XP Pro.
Security
Ah, Microsoft and Security. Not had the best of partnerships have they?
Well, since Windows 2000 Pro SP3 I've always maintained that it's the administrators on Windows rather than the product itself. Microsoft has really tried over the past five years to sharpen security, from a decent base with the WinNT Kernel on Windows 2000 though to XP SP2 and now Vista. In Vsita, Microsoft has finally taken a leaf from the Linux camp and added proper user access levels in Windows. No longer will users be administrators by default, and there is much better support for keeping users as users: legacy apps will work much better in Vista due to some changes to the Registry and the file system. As part of this, MS has had to not only improve the application support for older software that won't adhere to MS development guidelines, but also ensure that companies can be more flexible in what administrators can let end-users do. This is done by the wonderful Group Policies support that now really does cover pretty much everything in Windows.
Other new security functionalities are TPM and BitLocker support. Again, I've read about this elsewhere with people moaning that what happens if you forget the password and you cannot use a boot-CD to reset it with. I have a few points with these comments:
- Full drive encryption is only on two editions of Vista
- It's optional
- The point of encrypting the drive is so people can't get into it.
- Microsoft was criticised for having a backdoor reset tool, and now they are also getting criticised for giving you the option of stopping it?
Other improvements were made to the Windows Firewall and there is an entirely new addition called Windows Defender. The firewall has come a long way from the Windows XP SP1 days. It's evolved into a proper, near enterprise level firewall. Proper SPI, inbound and outbound packet filtering, both port and process exception rules etc. This combined with Windows Defender (which admittedly they bought rather than developed!) is going to take on Symantec, Network Associates, Sophos, etc. in the security arena. Decent spyware prevention, detection and removal along with a very good firewall is going to take the wind out of the annoying and over-the-top Internet Security Suites people keep on purchasing. With only anti-spam (which Outlook 2007 / Windows Mail have pretty well sussed - in particular if you use Exchange 2007) and anti-virus left - why pay for it again from another company?
Also in the security area is everyone's favourite - Internet Explorer. I'll be honest, I gave up on IE when Firefox got popular, and not through security, but through functionality. IE 5.5 / 6 can't touch Firefox when it comes to features like Tabbed Browsing, Integrated Searches and RSS. Microsoft has finally realised this, and IE7 has been revamped. It now has a better sandbox mode, native RSS support, tabbed browsing and a whole host of other items - it is quite literally Microsoft's take on Firefox! It's hard to look at the overall security until it has been more widely released, but the theory behind it looks good. The protected mode combined with user privilege lockdown and Windows Defender is going to make IE less of an attack surface that it has been in the past.
Until I can compare security with Firefox, I'm willing to take the gamble and play with IE7 as my new main browser until further security news is about. It does everything Firefox does plus more (phishing filter, etc. - although that's also in the next Firefox release) and does it very well.
Compatibility
When I was testing the beta versions of Vista I was in driver hell. I couldn't get sound to work regardless of what I did, my DVD-RW drive packed in completely and worked only as a CD-ROM drive, and I gave up on my Bluetooth dongle. Other drivers were useless at startup, but eventually with hours of troubleshooting I got them to work - just.
RC1, however, is a different story: not a single driver issue, and all my hardware was automatically installed without a problem. Now this is something of a feature, considering I used two different machines - one was a three-year old AMD Desktop, and the other was an almost new Centrino laptop. Microsoft has included a tremendous driver catalogue. I don't think I've ever tested any MS OS in a RC1 or RTM release that picked up all of my hardware automatically. I'm impressed.
The same applies now for software. Beta 1 was really awful, with about 4 of the 20 or so applications I tested failing. Beta 2 was a dramatic improvement, allowing 16 of them to work, and RC1 had no problem with any of them, from Doom 3 to PhotoShop CS2, WinRar to Office 2000 (and XP and 2003 and 2007!), and even Lemmings for Windows and DosBox!
I realise that that's not an extensive list, but there's a range of products from nearly 10 years ago to the latest heavyweight desktop apps. All seemed fine, but I should point out that I have not done any testing on Vista x64 yet. I've heard reports about compatibility being poor on the x64 version, though.
Hardware
I'll be honest, when I was using the beta versions of Vista, my machine was screaming for a better processor and more RAM. I've got 1GB of cheap RAM and a P4 2.6 GHz chip. Not a high spec, and the rest of the system is ancient (60GB IDE drive, old Radeon card of some sort) - and I was quite upset that my machine won't even make it with an upgrade for when Vista is released.
However, RC1 seems much quicker. Generally, it feels like MS has refined it a bit from the Beta 2 release. Still slow, but usable at least. I can get away with Vista on my current spec, so hopefully if RC1 is a good benchmark to go by I can slap in another gig of RAM and possibly upgrade my processor and it should still be alright. In fact I'd say it's not too far off the performance I am getting off XP at the moment (dual boot). I haven't got the performance tools to hand - but probably around the same area.
This brings me to the MS hardware specs. To be honest, they're misleading in the extreme. The minimum supported spec is:
800 MHz CPU
512Mb RAM
15 GB HD Space
That may get you to run command prompt, but that'll be about it. Realistically, I would recommend:
2.2 GHz or better CPU (Pentium or Athlon only)
1GB RAM
80 GB HD
Decent GPU (think 256MB or better from a big name company)
DVD-ROM
Whilst this seems pretty heavy, take a look on the Dell website. For $990 you can get a PC that exceeds the spec by a fair bit. In fact you can even get one for $749 that just about meets it. They both include monitors too! The point is that the above specs are not super high - they are industry standard. The reason there is a lot of general moaning and groaning about the specification is that Vista has taken so long to be developed that the current spec dates from years ago, when it was a very high specification - but now that Vista is nearly released its requirements can be met by most PCs that have been purchased in the last two to three years.
Overview
Vista is not perfect, and it won't be perfect when it's released either, and not because it's from MS but because it's a new OS. There's a number of small niggles in RC1 - although nothing show stopping. With a truly beautiful interface, combined with much improved security and the management improvements, one cannot say that Vista has no improvements compared to XP. I never saw XP as a big change from 2000 (Win2k was listed as WinNT5 and XP was WinNT5.5), but I think Vista's improvements will make it worth the money for home users. As a network administrator, I am always screaming out for better management tools and higher levels of security; features such as user account control combined with more flexible GPOs will save me a lot of time, as will general security measures like BitLocker for our laptops and Secure Start-up.
Pessimists who challenge the pricing or hardware requirements haven't looked into it enough and are speaking from 3rd hand information that is inaccurate or just wrong. There's too much in Vista to cover in one article - and whilst I am a heavy Windows user, I don't by any means consider it to be either the best OS or the only OS. However, it's evident from the many improvements in Vista that MS has listened to its users and is also starting to take the Linux threat more seriously. Introducing some of the best bits from other Operating Systems (Aero from Mac OS, User Account Control from Linux, security from everywhere!) and combining them with the Windows experience is going to make Vista a much bigger improvement to the Windows platform compared to anything we have seen yet.
This article was originally published by CyberArmy.net in the CyberArmy Library.
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