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Some six years in the making, Vista is finally here. Is it worth the upgrade or a much-delayed lemon? |
It’s here! It’s new! It’s bigger, brighter, sexier! It’s the future! One day you won’t be able to compute without it!
Of course, we’re talking about Vista, the latest Windows operating system from Microsoft. After years of development, speculation and anticipation, not to mention a big handful of hiccups in the beta testing stage, Bill Gates’ latest baby is born.
Computer users contemplating newhardware or a software upgrade in the near future will have to seriously consider Vista. Within five years it’ll be the dominant operating system (Mac and Linux fans notwithstanding). Microsoft says it’ll continue online support for XP until April 2009.
So, after spending several days seeing what Vista can do and looking under the hood a bit, what do I think? I use Windows XP at work and at home on my work’s laptop. I also have a Mac Mini running OS X that I use as a media centre and in my study I have an old PC running Linux (Ubuntu) as a media server and for file sharing. Having heard about Vista for years now, I was curious to see how it would compare.
Microsoft states that the ideal system requirements for running Vista are a 1GHz processor, 1GB RAM, a 40GB hard drive and a DirectX 9-capable graphics processor. I was given a Toshiba Tecra laptop for the review with a 2.13GHz processor, 2GB of RAM and a 70GB drive; therefore a reasonably grunty machine. Vista Ultimate had been pre-installed. The first thing everyone will notice is Vista’s graphical user interface (GUI). For the first time users of Windows can feel proud. Vista is undeniably a pretty interface; in fact, it is more attractive than the Mac and Linux GUIs.
The new GUI, called Aero, really makes use of all that graphics processing power. Gone is the rather “workplace” look and feel that Windows has had since 2.0. Each window is designed to look like it’s made from a piece of glass. The title bar and window borders are all translucent, so you can see the desktop and other windows through them. Only the application area is solid. When windows are minimised or maximised they do so with a silky smooth animation (similar to the Mac). You have the usual control over colours, font sizes, mouse pointers, etc. so you can customise the look and feel to your heart’s content, but I’ll bet most people will be very happy with the defaults and Mac users will steal (secret) admiring glimpses.
The next thing you’ll notice that’s new is the Gadgets. On either the left or right side of the desktop is the Sidebar. Consider it like a large toolbar that contains useful little applets. Again the Mac has its Dashboard and people with a customised Google homepage will be familiar with these cool tools. There’s a huge range to choose from; clocks, calculators, currency convertors, stock tickers, news feeds, weather and traffic reports.
There are already a good number of NZ-specific Gadgets and I’m sure more will follow (see tinyurl.com/3dcc7p for the current list). You can keep your gadgets neatly organised in the Sidebar, or you can drag them off and scatter them around your desktop. You’re going to spend a lot of time deciding on which gadgets you want to use. I went for an analogue clock, NZ Herald news feed, BBC Radio and a calculator.
Do you use Alt+Tab to switch between applications in Windows? If not, I guarantee you’ll start using this method a lot more in Vista. Well actually, it’s not Alt+Tab (this still works in the old way, except now you see little miniatures of your windows). The all-new and better technique is [windows button] + Tab. This starts Flip 3D, which shows you all your open applications in a three-dimensional stack that you can flip between with cool animation using the Tab key. Once again, Mac users will see this as similar to the Album Flow presentation in iTunes.
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