First Impressions of Windows Vista RC1

I have seen a lot of reviews lately coming out of Windows Vista Release Candidate 1. So far, the reviews all seem pretty emotional and based on anger and rage that Microsoft has taken 5 years to produce a new operating system. These people are up in arms about how if it took them 5 years, they should be producing something more spectacular than Windows Vista, and so on. The bottom line is that I have seen very few objective reviews of Vista, least of all objective reviews of Vista RC1.

I'm hopefully going to fix that. Last time I installed Vista, I installed Vista Ultimate on a Tablet PC and the experience was basically what I expected - it didn't recognize my video card, didn't recognize my sound card, and I had to spend some time downloading drivers. Even then, the experience sucked because it deemed my Tablet unworthy of Aero. This time 'round I installed Vista RC1 (build 5536, the pre-RC) on an IBM ThinkPad T60p. This machine has 2GB ram and a FireGL V5200 and is a Centrino Duo. This laptop also has a ton of proprietary drivers that come from the factory - it also has a hi-def audio device that I was pretty sure would not be detectable. After a roughly 30 minute installation, Windows Vista found everything in this machine. I mean EVERYTHING. It knows I have a DVD burner, it knows about the hi-def audio, it knows exactly how much RAM my video card has, and it detected and activated my Bluetooth and my 802.11b Wi-Fi , including activating Windows Vista online using the wireless device.

As you can see from the screenshot of the Window Switcher below, Vista figures my laptop is worthy of Aero (click for the whole picture, its big):

Vista rated me at 2.8 experience rating. It would have been 4.3, but Vista thinks my hard drive is slow. Its right: on a laptop running in performance mode, the hard drive doesn't spin nearly as fast as a new tower with hard drive speeds capable of 15,000 RPMs. My initial impression is that Vista is an extremely good upgrade to XP - its a no-brainer if you have a machine capable of running Aero and you have some kind of backup mechanism that allows you to save off all of your valuable files before you wipe your box clean (You WILL want to wipe your box clean when you install Vista).

So I clicked around and kicked the tires and I was quite pleased. The last version of Vista I ran was beta 2, and this looks a lot like beta 2, but things seem to be crisper, the reaction time of the windows is faster. A lot of people bitch and moan about the pop-up dialog that shows up and prompts you to give permissions to an application to do something as an Administrator. I like it. Why? Because I know how it works. I know that the technology underneath is actually putting that prompt in a completely separate, isolated sandbox from which nothing but the most secure function calls can be run. Stuff sitting in that protected desktop can't access the disk - it can't do JACK. That's comforting because I know that, unless I specifically authorize a piece of malware to destroy my machine, I am relatively without fear of hijack. Not to say that Vista won't fall prey to worms and virii, however, I feel a lot more secure running Vista than I do running XP. In fact, I no longer have XP running in my home.

Couple of times I ran into a situation where an app that relies specifically on XP-based technology failed, even in compatability mode.. But to be honest, it was a high-speed 3D game that definitely does not support Vista right now, and relies very heavily on specific versions of specific drivers from specific vendors - I was asking for trouble. When it did fail, it told me that the failure was "going to be fixed in RC1 later this year". I found that hilarious, considering I'm running RC1.

So now I'm on the train heading into work at around 50mph and I decide to have a little fun. I turn on the Bluetooth modem in my cell phone and then stuff it back in my backpack. Then, I ask Vista to find me some Bluetooth love:

It sees my PDA-phone and it sees the cell phone of the guy 2 seats back using a Bluetooth headset. I decide not to try and hack his headphones into playing the theme song from the Brady bunch and connect to my own phone. Within a few seconds, I am using Vista RC1 to talk to my Bluetooth cell phone's Dial-up networking (EV-DO @ 200kbps!) service and surfing the web and downloading MSN messenger and Trillian ... from the train. A lot of the cool factor there is due to my phone, but the rest of it is due to Vista. I can't get XP to do that without installing special drivers, and Vista did it out of the box - as it should. Vista should support more devices and more peripherals than XP out of the box, so its up to par there.

Does anybody know how they made the background pictures? They're so unbelievably crisp with so much more detail than any other picture I've seen on my desktop its just plain scary. I don't remember them looking this good on my non-Aero experience a couple months ago. Are there special Aero-only backgrounds? Anyway, they look great - nice eye candy to keep the end users happy after the first installation.

So, after 1 day with the new Vista, I'm quite pleased. It does everything that I want it to do, and it does it quite well. Next, I'm going to explore the programming experience on Vista and see if this thing really holds up to me pounding on it with a Visual Studio-sized sledgehammer. The "People Near Me" feature needs to be explored some. I need to figure out if its worth it to use that or simply roll my own using WCF, or if WCF can integrate with the signed-on feature of the PNRP/People Near Me feature.

Day 1 Ratings:
Eye Candy Factor: 4/5
User Friendliness: 3/5 (It took me forever to find out that "Add or Remove Programs" had been renamed to "Programs and Settings")
Sturdiness/Reliability: 5/5 (so far, not a single slowdown or crash, and I beat on it pretty good with some high-end games)
Security: 4/5 (it would get a 5/5, but that pop-up window prompting for security won't allow me to permanently answer "yes" for a specific application, which is annoying)

tags: vista  rc1  review  impressions  windows  wpf  wcf  wf  workflow  netfx3  net  

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