Windows Vista Beta 2 has been released a few weeks ago, and I though it was about time for me to give it a try.
Clean installation has been pretty long, mainly because I've burnt the OS ISO Image on a DVD-RW disc, which is not particularly fast. It almost took an hour to complete, but after that the machine is usable. Almost no user input, just at the beginning for the partitions, locale and Product Key and again at the end for the locale.
I'm testing on a Dell Latitude D820 with a NVidia Quadro 120M, and the official drivers from NVidia do not support this one. However, with a little bit of tweaking in the inf file of the driver, Vista is able to enable the sleek Aero glass UI, which is pretty neat ! I like to be able to look through the taskbar, and to use the 3D task switcher. It's also interesting to see pixel shaders in action on something else but a game. I'm a little bit curious to see what kind of UI graphic designers are going to create... Imagine something like a fish tank around your windows :) Ok, that'd be pretty annoying, but you get the picture.
This build of Windows Vista includes the Windows Media Center. This is a cool peace of software but there are some bugs left, like the mouse not in synch with the actual clicks on the screen, or the Aero look disapearing for a while when a run it on my second screen. I don't know who to blame for the latter, but I think it would be because of my hack around the video driver.
The system is pretty responsive, even with the Aero UI enabled. I'd have expected it to be far less responsive considering the whole bunch of new features pressuring the system. It still has some slowdowns here and there, but I can't figure out why. Vista features ReadyBoost, which allows the system to "cache" the page file on a USB Flash Drive. Since a flash drive is about 10 times the speed of the hard drive, it speeds up the read of evicted memory pages. With this feature enabled, I find the system more responsive and applications are returning far more rapidly. I'll be trying to do some charts on overall system speedup. Intel SpeedStep is also natively used, the processor frequency is changing when the cpu usage increases.
I also had some bluescreens during the boot, and with the help of WinDBG, I figured out it was the USB driver that was faulty. Not that it actually is the USB driver, but rather the USB Audio driver I have that is messing up the system. It's not a Windows Vista compliant, so I'm not surprised...
Also around system performance, Vista maintains a performance index, which allows to see if system performance, like booting, is degrading, steady or improving. It also gives you what kind of device driver slows the boot or standby process, and an history of the changes on the system.
About mouting ISO images, Daemon Tools 3.33 - the latest version crashes the system - allowed me to install Visual Studio 2005, and SQL Server client tools SP1, which also both run fine. The only application that does work as well as on XP is VLC, which forces Vista to fall back in visual compatibility mode where aero is disabled. I'll try to talk about applications compatibility in a future post.
Mass storage does not seem to have changed at lot, though there is now the possibility to shrink or extend online partitions. When you shrink a volume, it only allows you to remove the free space at the end of the volume, and does not seem to defragment or compact it. Anyway, a long time missing feature...
Networking seems to have improved a lot under the hood, for what I can read about. The only part that held my eyes is the IPv6 support with, for the first time, a UI to configure it. Wifi's working like a charm.
On the mobile side, the "so-called" Windows Mobile Device Center is nothing more than ActiveSync in disguise. Dialogs are a prettier, but I really hope this will not stay the same crap it is now.
Last, the Windows Explorer has a lot of improvements, like the copy files dialog which now gives an optional throughput in MB/s and total size, or easy file filtering in the column headers. There is also a feature that allows to fully or partially restore a previous version of a folder. This is a really interesting feature that kind of legitimates a 500GB hard drive for a secretary computer ;) It will certainly bring out some security problems, but it's nice it exists.
Overall, I'm neither amazed nor disapointed in Windows Vista. I've read that the latest build fixes a lot of the slowness, and on a Core Duo 2.0GHz, to my perception, it does not run as fast as XP does. I'll wait for the RC1 to fix my mind :)
