I’ve just spent the last day taking Vista Beta 2 on a test spin, and it looks to me like Microsoft has a winner. There are a few rough edges, but overall, it’s a polished piece of work.
What’s big in it? Finally, the new search is in, and it works quite well. It’s fast, it lets you search in countless different ways, and you can create saved searches that are live and update themselves as you use Vista.
Microsoft has also fixed the obnoxious User Access Control (UAC). It’s a feature designed for extra security; when you make changes of certain kinds, you’re given a warning or asked to provide administrator credentials.It made the operating system practically unusable unless you were logged in as an administrator. I’m pleased to say that in this beta, much of the nagging is gone.
There’s some bad news as well. The Windows Firewall is still incomprehensible. And hardware support remains problematic. It won’t recognize my wireless network, or several wireless adapters. And I’m not alone in this.
The upshot? Hardware support might hold up the release past January, but other than that, this is a fine piece of work.
Preston, speaking as a long-time senior developer, I have some major issues with Vista, and I'm using Beta 2. The sheer memory overhead and disk requiements are staggering. UNIX has so many under-the-hood advantages compared to Windows, with less of the bloat.
Also, they really mucked up the UI with Vista. Oh, it's real cute, and that's the problem, it's too cute. You have all the cuteness contributing to the overhead issues, for what - aesthetics?
And UAP/UAC? Please, don't get me started. Paul Thurrott is being overly kind in that regard. The implementation while far less annoying in beta 2, continues to be a major joke for really no good purpose other than to make poor old Grandma feel more secure. How about this: I WANT full Admin rights without all those silly prompts, so what's wrong with that? I'll tell you - Microsoft has decided I no longer need it. Sorry, not good enough, I've been doing this for way too long for some neophyte at Microsoft to tell me how to practice safe conputing.
Come on, an OS is supposed to boot the system and facilitate system I/O, more than that is nice, much more than that is bloat. Near as I can tell, there is no compelling reason to upgrade. WinXP for all its problems is good enough.