Vista is something of a roller coaster ride. It’s easy to get really excited about it and just as easy to feel at times let down. Some of the shortcomings in RC1 are sure to be remedied by the time Vista goes gold, but Microsoft is unlikely to tinker with most of the basic design flaws that make Vista a little frustrating and occasionally bewildering to use.
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Vista comes with an assortment of new tools, technologies and applications, some of them so-so, some of them real showstoppers:
The Beta 2 version of Vista was buggy and unstable, far more so than one would expect from a late beta. That led to fears that the early 2007 release date for Vista would slip once more. But then Microsoft came out with a series of vastly improved interim builds and surprised much of the testing community with its prompt release of Release Candidate 1 (RC1), on which this review is based.
Each new version of Windows has provided more sophisticated handling of photos, audio and video, and Vista is no exception. With Vista, Microsoft now provides applications for managing all types of multimedia: WMP 11 for music and video; Photo Gallery for images; Movie Maker for video editing; DVD Maker for burning audio and images.
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At first sight, Vista appears to be comfortably similar to Windows XP. Desktop icons have a slicker look and the new Sidebar with its Gadgets occupies the right of the screen, but it’s still recognisably a Windows desktop.
Click the – now-circular – Start button (renamed the Start Orb), and this impression is reinforced. Until, that is, you let the mouse pointer rest on All Programs, waiting for the sub-menu to pop open. It doesn’t. Instead the left side of the Start Menu is replaced with an in-situ Programs menu that scrolls in place. That scrolling menu takes a lot of getting used to. Read the rest of this entry »