Windows Vista Beta 2 review

By asdfoi83wyrl
in Member Reviews

 Share

Recommended Posts

Veteran

asdfoi83wyrl

Posted
Posted (edited)

Note: links to full-size versions of images are available for Part 1 of this review. Somehow there's no link for me to edit Part 2 of my post...

But here's the directory which I stored all my original pics in, so if you match up filenames you'll be able to view the full size for the screenshots in Part 2 :)

I got Vista Beta 2 downloaded and installed, and here are some screenshots of programs in action.

Click on an image to view its original size. The original sizes are much better in terms of quality ;)

Welcome screen

welcomescreen.png

Quite elegant, IMO. Shortly after you login, this screen smoothly fades to black, and then shows your desktop:

desktop.png

The icons are huge, as you can see.

Welcome Center

welcomecenter.png

The first time you start Vista, you'll be greeted with Welcome Center, which lets you finalize your computer setup by installing drivers, changing the theme, etc. The only thing Vista missed for my laptop were audio drivers.

Start menu

start.png

This part of the Start menu hasn't changed much, but it may take some time to get used to the "All Programs" list:

start-all.png

Internet Explorer 7

ie-neowin.png

IE7 renders pages fairly quickly. The one in Vista is pretty much the same as the one you can download for XP.

Windows Mail

mailsplash.png

Outlook Express has been renamed Windows Mail, but the features and stuff haven't changed much. Setting up an IMAP account was a snap. Synchronizing folders and sending/recieving messages was equally easy and quick.

mail1stmsg.png

sendmail.png

Media Center

Windows Media Center was quite sluggish on my laptop, and I felt that the one in XP MCE 2005 was easier to use and probably looked better with a lighter shade of blue.

mcwelcome.png

mcphotoshow.png

mcmovie.png

Mobility Center

As you have probably heard, Vista has increased support for laptop power management. Power-saving options can be changed via the Mobility Center:

mobilityctr.png

In another area of the Control Panel, you'll get more power options which are currently found in Windows XP, such as customizing what you want your laptop to do when you close the lid (sleep? hibernate? do nothing?)

Performance Ratings

Windows gave my laptop a rating of 1 :rolleyes:

rating1.png

It told me that drivers were causing my computer to start slowly, but sadly offered no real solution besides turning them off. It didn't really matter to me, though, since my startup time was reasonably short given the specs of my machine.

performancerating.png

Windows Explorer

MS has revamped Windows Explorer with lots of useful features:

mycomp.png

You can see how much free space is remaining in hard disk drives as well as in removable media.

picfolder.png

Thumbnails of photos are displayed nicely, and folders containing images have nicer previews:

thumbs.png

Another nice thing about the new Explorer is how I can click an item in the address bar to go to a higher level directory:

uplevels.png

Network Center

This is another one of those things that would take a while to get used to. To me, XP's My Network Places was easy and straightforward enough; Vista made many things confusing (something that isn't obvious just by screenshots alone; you'll need to actually try it out yourself).

netwkcenter.png

One aspect of networking that seemed to be improved (but not by much) was connecting to a wi-fi access point.

wificonnect.png

3 access points? In XP my laptop could detect several more, but of course signals to those would generally be unusably weak.

wifikey.png

(Side note: shouldn't "set up" be two words in this case? ;) )

And now you can actually see what you're typing in when asked for your WEP/WPA-PSK key!

I don't know what the USB flash drive thing there is about. Would you just save all these settings in a text file, or what?

WMP 11

Nothing that great here:

wmp11.png

Vista comes with much more sample music, in case you're wondering.

Windows Photo Gallery

A new app to organize your photos has been introduced, but as you can see it's not very feature-filled. Serious photographers would probably want something more powerful.

winpicgallery.png

Continued below...

Edited by Jason He
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Veteran

asdfoi83wyrl

Posted
  • Author
Posted (edited)

Continued from Part 1...

Games

Vista ships with some much-needed new games with somewhat better graphics. One of these games is targeted specifically towards kids; the others are classics, like "Chess Titans":

chess1.png

chess2.png

You can't drag-and-drop pieces; you have to click on the piece you want to move, and then select the square you want to move it to

chess4.png

Mid-game; I didn't feel like finishing

chess3.png

There's not much you can change about the look & feel

Windows Sidebar

This feature isn't enabled by default, and a shortcut to it is hidden somewhere in the Start menu. It's not as exciting as Mac OSX Tiger's Dashboard or the Yahoo Widgets application:

sidebar1.png

The gadgets gallery:

gadgetgallery.png

Windows Calendar

We're now seeing even more similarities to the Mac OS...

wincal.png

I guess it kinda resembles the Calendar found in Hotmail/Windows Live Mail, or a lighter version of the one in Outlook. As long as you're not overloaded with appointments, activites, or other things during the day, this calendar should suffice. I'm not sure about this app's synchronization abilities, but I'm guessing it'd work with at least Windows Mobile-based smartphones.

Calculator

Nothing's changed, or at least I didn't notice any changes:

calc.png

Defragmenter

You can now schedule defragmentation,

defrag1.png

But you no longer get a graphical representation of your drive's fragmentation status.

defrag2.png

WordPad

Ew, the toolbar icons are still ugly.

wordpad.png

Help & Support Center

I don't think there's a way to download/upload files via FTP from Windows Explorer anymore. If you type in an ftp:// address into IE7, it appears that you can only download files. So I searched Help and Support to see if I could upload to an FTP server without installing another application...

help.png

...and what I got wasn't too helpful.

helpans.png

Accessing XP files via Vista

Instead, I copied all my screenshots to my My Pictures folder in my Windows XP partition, rebooted into XP and FTPed the files to my school's server from there.

xpdocs.png

Paint

To wrap up this review, here's the program responsible for saving all my screenshots:

paint.png

One last thing...

Something called "User Account Control" is pretty aggressive in defending your computer settings, and will alert you even for simple things like a network setting change you made. I think MS has said that the final version of Vista will have a less annoying UAC.

uacnotice.png

Edited by Jason He
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Grand Master

Evolution

Posted
Posted

hmmm I'd have to disagree about the start menu. I'd say it's made everything a whole lot easier due to indexing.

Here are some examples:

Want to open up one of your documents, know the name or the text within? Just type it in and press enter, and the appropriate apps opens (ones I've tried were Word & XPS). I love this feature, I use it all the time to open my office documents in seconds.

Just recieved an error saying look it up in the event viewer, just type event plus enter :)

Other than that, not much has changed except aesthetically.

BTW they ported a number of Outlook 2003 features to Windows Mail i.e. Junk Mail Filter. And don't forget to mention the feature of Virtual Folders, they're especially helpful :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Veteran

asdfoi83wyrl

Posted
  • Author
Posted

Hmm, I don't think I came across Virtual Folders.... I've heard of them though.

There are a few other great new features missing because my graphics card can't support them, such as Alt-Tab previews.

Yeah, the Junk Mail filter has been added.

What I meant about the Start Menu is accessing programs in that now, accessing programs in folders in the Start menu is more complicated.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Grand Master

Evolution

Posted
Posted

The Virtual Folders has been renamed to Search Folders. To see an example of ones already created goto>Computer then click Searches on the left panel. i.e. Unread messages, Recently Changed, User's Files, etc. To create your own, just open up Search, click the down arrow to expand, to refine your search even more. Then click Save search, and pick where you want the folder to be located (Searches or browse folders).

One feature I'd like added, is for the option to place Search Folders on the Favorite Links panel. Then again, the search box in the start menu will also work :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Grand Master

Malisk

Posted
Posted

I'm currently trying out the Beta 2 a bit to see what's been going on the past few months about Vista, and a question that keep popping up is: which bonehead at MS decided to let DefragNTFS run while you actively use Vista, also sometimes while the Search Indexer works, and while you view a large folder. I guess you can figure out the results yourself.

I have nothing against these services, but don't let them collide, and don't let them run while you do actual work on the computer. Please retry, Microsoft.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Grand Master

Tech_Dude_5000

Posted
Posted

They changed the "paint" icons. they might do the same with word pad.

nice job on the PNG shots. Imo that is the best format to do screenshots in, especially vista screenies. Makes me excited because i'm getting the DVD kit in a few weeks.

question: does your system have Aero? if so would you post some Aero shots?

Again great job! i loved them :D

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Grand Master

Malisk

Posted
Posted (edited)

As a minimalist guy, I like how you can sort of disable the desktop and only leave the wallpaper on it. All icons go away and you can't even draw selections on it anymore, and the build tag also goes away. The only it can then be used for is for the usual right-click on it to change settings and such things. :) Instead of desktop icons, one can use the Start Menu, QuickStart bar (for single-click availability and perhaps a shortcut to your user folder), and possibly Sidebar. It looks so clean. :)

Btw, the default User folder now includes a "Downloads" folder too. :)

Edited by Jugalator
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Grand Master

Echilon

Posted
Posted

I found the UAC annoying in Beta 2. Within 10 minutes I found myself instinctively clicking on 'Allow' on every UAC prompt. I really don't think it'll reduce the effect of worms, it'll just become second nature to click OK to get rid of it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Grand Master

Scirwode

Posted
Posted

I've got Intel integrated graphics, so that means no Aero for me :(

Still, I'm glad that most of Vista runs fairly smoothly on my laptop.

It rus worse on my notebook, and I have an ATi Mobility Radeon 9200. I'm limited to a resolution of 1024 x 768 on a widescreen notebook :wacko: .

PSG22?

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Apprentice

Enzan Arikado

Posted
Posted

Nice pics and pretty interesting but I have a question, does it delete everything in your computer and is it worth trying and switching over?

Link to comment
Share on other sites
This topic is now closed to further replies.
 Share
Go to topic listing

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.