MS Vista first impressions

I received an MS Vista beta DVD on Friday. The note tried instilling a sense of urgency by giving me a deadline of Tuesday for feedback. Unfortunately, very little of the beta support infrastructure was in place. When I did run into problems, the first person I talked with on the support line had no clue there was a super special Vista beta program going on. The email, chat and web site forums were all 404. Having just finished a beta program of my own on Friday, I cringed at the idea of my friend cancelling another vacation because the beta prolonged itself unnecessarily. I sent him a note and muttled on.

Based on the survey/Vista Ready tool, it said I needed “Vista Ultimate.” However, the “upgrade” option didn’t work because I didn’t have 15Gb free on my windows drive. (I had “only” 6.9Gb free.) The fresh install on another disk partition ran for two hours, finishing sometime after I got my kids to bed. Its lack of chattiness and prompts is a huge improvement over the previous installers. As a bonus, it automatically selected the proper maxxed out video resolution instead of the pedestrian 800×600, 16-color minimalist. The total footprint was just over 10Gb, without any additional applications. To my knowledge, no official system requirements have been published yet.

I’m not sure how much the initial space requirement will be an issue. See, I repartition my windows disks for two unrelated reasons. First, it’s a way to avoid all of the hard-coded upselling game crap and internet service crap that gets added from the Dell Windows XP media edition installation CD. The second reason is a smaller system partition takes less time to check, fix, defragment, scan, etc an uber partition. This has also saved my application data when there have (previously) been issues with something horking the system partition.

Out of the box, Vista was very functional. The only problems I ran into were with setting up wireless networking and my modem. Normally if I have problems connecting to my own, secure wireless network (e.g. I couldn’t remember the unbroadcast SSID), I’d pop onto my neighbor’s unprotected network, which also works becaues he hasn’t changed the login or password of his router, either. The wireless wizard wouldn’t show me the insecure (unsecure?) networks with the built-in card. I couldn’t figure out how to get connected sans hardline, so I rebooted into XP and grabbed the settings. The built-in modem, which I wanted to try just for giggles, caused a BSoD. On the ensuing reboot, the machine phoned home. I didn’t try to mess with the modem again.

The overall user interface is very crisp, except for the bulbuous icons. (There is a way to notch them down a bit.) There’s a dahsboard on the right with a stock set of widgets. This looks similar to what Google was doing with their own portal. The default photo rotate tool (and its stock imagery) were very distracting. Each time it would flip, I kept looking over. The other widget, an analog clock, seemed out of place with its digital cousin lurking in the bottom right corner. Some of my twentysomething friends may have difficulty knowing what the “hands” mean. 🙂 The deashboard widgets all have transaparent backgrounds, making them look smaller than they would have in previous OSes.

How many prompts must a man click through?

The start menu rocks. For keyboard shortcut-artists like me, I can just do windows and start typing commands I want to run and it finds them (like Google Desktop). For example, I downloaded my company’s product from the web site and just typed the “setuptecplot” and it figured out which directory the browser had saved stuff in. No more skulking to c:documents and settings!

Security seems much tighter than before in a very, very annoying way. When I ran my setup script from the command line, I initially received an “are you sure you want to do this” type message. (Picture 1) Yes, dammit, that’s what I typed. Next, I get a “The publisher could not be verified” message. After that, I get a “User account control: An unidentified program wants access to your computer.” With each of these prompts, the screen dims (except for the dialog) and all user control is locked out until I select Cancel or Allow. If the program were signed, it would say “A program needs your permission to continue […] User Account Control stops unauthorized changes to your computer. If you started this program, please continue. (Description of program)” I understand why they’re doing this, but dang is it annoying.

I installed my company’s product with the wrong license type. “No problem,” I thought, “I’ll just edit the local configuration file…” no dice The system sets it up so the casual user can’t do that sort of thing. In fact, most of the C drive is set up this way. The takeaway is application vendors will definitely want to streamline the installation/startup and make it consistent. Or they’ll ratchet down security.

There’s a system performance rating tool. My laptop is a “3” on their scale:

It appears the intent is that applications will publish their performance ratings. To quote from the help: “[…] You can use the performance rating number to confidently buy programs and other software that are rated to match your computer’s performance level. For example, if this computer has a System Peformance Rating of 3, then you can confidently purchase any software designed for this version of Windows that requires a computer with a rating of 3 or less.” There’s a link to “View software available for my rating” that goes to windowsmarketplace.com, which I never quite understood. However, visiting the site tickled the IE7 security thing again because it wanted to install the Flash8.exe player.