windows vista

dawballz

Beta1 came out today for 20k msdn subscribers, here's some screenshots of it in action, including some of IE7:
http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow/0,1206,l=&s=400&a=156757,00.asp

MS came out with a few(6) 'official' ones themselves:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/windowsvista/default.mspx

Off to bed now.. not much else to say..
Dont think it was posted before.

DonkeyStyle \o/

Oooh, more dumbing down and big icons... it's like ULead made their own OS.

Goodshape

Don't like the look of the transparency effect. Not for the focused window at least.

Looks really graphically intensive allround.. needlessly so. A few of the other features look interesting though (virtual folders, ah... wait, maybe that was it.)

Can't help but think of this :

when I see IE7.

jesus_thats_gre

Oh I love new Operating Systems..

Ruu_Old

Improved security features me arse! any ideas what its going to retail at, presumably going to bundle with new PCs? and burn a crater size hole in everyone elses pocket for an upgrade?

Chad ghostal

Looking more like a mix of osx and kde every day..

jesus_thats_gre

Yeah with an intuitive UI thrown in on top...

ozt9vdujny3srf

Oh god.....


*vomits*

Zapho

Chad ghostal wrote:

Looking more like a mix of osx and kde every day..

My thoughts exactly. I dunno, it looks far too baby-ish. Like "Repeat my answer for all occurances" as opposed to "yes to all". Also who the hell wants a massively colourful interface just to copy a file? I'd say if you installed it, its need for resources would probably bring the most powerful rig to its knees.

stevenmu

Downloading it now, (7hrs 30 mins left :mad: ). I'll try and come back with some first impressions tomorrow

odie

IF this was built from the ground up as MS claim, then they should have been able to reduce the amount of resources required. Unlike XP which has legacy's from Dos throught to Win 2k.

Visually it looks impressive, except a nice skin job could give XP the same theme. As for Security, I reckon the intial OS will have it's own problems, as there has not been an MS OS yet that did not require updates and service packs.

However I am sure there is more support for more devices, and they will create Vista in such a way that it allows for downloadable upgrades for future devices.

I reckon it will be a slow take up, as most people on Win XP will stick with it, the same as when XP came out first, people stayed on 98, ME or 2k. Maybe the intial take up will be from people buying new PC's.

But sure I know I will try it when it comes out, as I like checking out new OS's.

zuma

2.47 GB!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Holy shít it cant be that big is it stevenmu????

stevenmu

Yep, that's what the download manager is saying. I think betas tend to be bigger than release versions due to debugging code and stuff. There's probably loads of "Welcome to windows" and "This is how you double-click on an icon" videos and fluff like that too. I've no idea what the install size is going to be like.

zuma

No I think its due to the huge amount of drivers included!!!

Damn it though...~2.5GBytes....if the final release tops 3GBytes Im going to go into shock!!!

CyberGhost

wait is this a new version or something? what happened to LongHorn?

I hope it has classic theme.

Goodshape

CyberGhost wrote:

wait is this a new version or something? what happened to LongHorn?

This is Longhorn ( <-- code name, real name --> Windows Vista).

zuma

This is longhorn....just as Xp is Whistler.

Its just been rebranded as Longhorn was the codename of the project.

CyberGhost

ah, Thanks guys!

ro2

stevenmu wrote:

Downloading it now, (7hrs 30 mins left :mad: ). I'll try and come back with some first impressions tomorrow

Downloading it from the MSDN site now, 7 mins remaining (7200KB/s). I could post it to you by tomorrow

rainbow kirby

Meh, OSX looks better

JackKelly

it looks nice. Although what non-graphical differences are promised?

zuma

ro2 wrote:

Downloading it from the MSDN site now, 7 mins remaining (7200KB/s). I could post it to you by tomorrow

Where have you access to a ~60Mbit(7200x8) connection????

ro2

zuma wrote:

Where have you access to a ~60Mbit(7200x8) connection????

In work. It's 300Mb/s, but sure who's counting

The vista install is long enough...

zuma

ro2 wrote:

In work. It's 300Mb/s, but sure who's counting

The vista install is long enough...

Where do you work???
i dont think they have a ro2 working for them...so spill the beams...my guess is thats its a US company...Y/N???

dawballz

Probably college/uni?

I downloaded at about 3MB/s at about 3pm one day at college.
Now during summer there's going to be hardly anyone making use of the big pipes in college so it could probably double?


maybe..?


ok maybe not.

Praetorian

Just started it now, 90 minutes to go. Better be worth the trouble!

heggie

glad i bought a mac.

ro2

zuma wrote:

Where do you work???
i dont think they have a ro2 working for them...so spill the beams...my guess is thats its a US company...Y/N???

It's an Irish company in Dublin, we just buy our bandwidth directly from the carriers instead of the Irish ISPs.

Screenshot

odie

Just being curious, is there somewhere the general public can download it or is it for Beta testers only?

CyberGhost

ro2, does it have a classic theme?

ro2

Does anyone know if there are any nvidia geforce drivers for vista? It's just picking the card up as a standard vga adapter.

ro2

CyberGhost wrote:

ro2, does it have a classic theme?

It does.

Vista Classic

egan007

Is this supposed to be new of just XP with a new skin i can download anywayere

danniemcq

no blue screen of death screens yet...

aidan_walsh

odie wrote:

IF this was built from the ground up as MS claim

It's not, it's NT 6. Backcomb is the "ground up" one, and it was originally palnned to be the direct successor of XP. However, they since decided to put out an intermediate version.

mp3guy

danniemcq wrote:

no blue screen of death screens yet...

didn't they change them to red?

MartMax

read a review of the beta, you fancy reading :

http://winsupersite.com/reviews/winvista_beta1_01.asp

Fenster

I'm fairly convinced my XFCE desktop has a better looking and handling UI than Vista's. Not to mention it doesn't hog half the resources that Vista would.

Just my two cents though.

I'll try it out when it hits open beta, as I don't use Windows all that much.

Someone mentioned it looks like a KDE/OSX cross. It looks a lot closer to Fluxbox, IMO.

ro2

Anyone manage to get the Aero Glass effects working with it? I read that you need one of these graphics cards before it'll give you the full effects:

Radeon 9500
Radeon 9600
Radeon 9700
Radeon 9800
Radeon X800
nVidia Quadro FX 1100
nVidia Quadro FX 1000
nVidia Quadro FX 3000
nVidia GeForce FX 2000
nVidia GeForce FX 5100
nVidia GeForce FX 5200
nVidia GeForce FX 5500
nVidia GeForce FX 5600
nVidia GeForce FX 5700
nVidia GeForce FX 5800
nVidia GeForce FX 5900
nVidia GeForce 6600
nVidia GeForce 6800
nVidia GeForce 7800

http://www.jamesproud.com/index.php?id=49

the_syco

Gonna try to get the 32 bit version, and not the 64 bit version.

ro2 wrote:

It does.

Vista Classic

Eh, f*ck. It looks like XP Me was hoping for a real classic (ie: 98 or 2K) version.

ro2 wrote:

Anyone manage to get the Aero Glass effects working with it? I read that you need one of these graphics cards before it'll give you the full effects:

Radeon 9500
Radeon 9600
Radeon 9700
Radeon 9800
Radeon X800
nVidia Quadro FX 1100
nVidia Quadro FX 1000
nVidia Quadro FX 3000
nVidia GeForce FX 2000
nVidia GeForce FX 5100
nVidia GeForce FX 5200
nVidia GeForce FX 5500
nVidia GeForce FX 5600
nVidia GeForce FX 5700
nVidia GeForce FX 5800
nVidia GeForce FX 5900
nVidia GeForce 6600
nVidia GeForce 6800
nVidia GeForce 7800

http://www.jamesproud.com/index.php?id=49

First EA (with BF2), and now M$ are telling me I must upgrade my graphics card? Bas*ards!

the_syco

http://www.win-vista.net/albums/Games/steam_cs2.png

More screenies @ http://www.win-vista.net/

stevenmu

Didn't get my copy down in the end untill 11 last night so it'll be tonight before I can install it. Has anyone had any success/problems dual booting it with XP (on seperate partitions of course)

Regarding Aero Glass, I didn't think it was included in this release, just an Aero-like theme, I've a 6800 anyway so I'll see when it's installed later on.

Sparky

is there any way i can get this, without being an MSDN subscriber.

Im an MSDN connections subscriber!

id love to test this out.

CuLT

Heh, should it be taken that the lack of response means everyone who installed Vista hasn't managed to get it working yet?

aidan_walsh

Sparky_S wrote:

is there any way i can get this, without being an MSDN subscriber.

Im an MSDN connections subscriber!

id love to test this out.

They'll be releasing it through Microsoft Beta on August 3rd.

stevenmu

I've spent a few hours playing with this now and I'm not hugely impressed.

The install was easy, if a little basic, the 'custom' install consisted of choosing a machine name and install partition. I'm guessing that because it's an early beta they want everyone running the exact same setup and that the release will have the normal options. SATA drives are supported out of the box, but the partition to be installed on must be NTFS formatted. Installing took roughly 30 minutes.

When I got in I was pretty underwhelmed. It's very, very like XP with a different colour scheme. Some of the graphical touches don't seem to be working for me, even though I've got one of the supported cards, altough it didn't recognise it during the install and I had to use the supplemtary drivers feature which installs XP versions of drivers to get it recognised, I'm going to look around for some beta longhorn drivers and see if they help.

Other than the gui the main change seems to be the the whole virtual folder/search concept and imho microsoft is taking this whole concept way too far. The idea seems to be that every file/document will have tags against it describing it's content, subject matter, genre, album etc. When you're searching for files, you're now supposed to search for them based on content instead of based on file name location. For example instead of going to c:\my music\ledzeppelin you would now search your whole computer for tracks with led zeppelin in the artists id tag. You can then save this search as a 'virtual folder' which is basically an automatically updated list of shortcuts to the search results. The problem I have with all this is

a) It's slow, very slow especially if you're trying to search removable media such as CDs or DVDs (altough perhaps in later realeases this can be disabled or at least optomised for removable media)

b) It's abstracting away too much from what's actually going on on the computer. People are going to end up too confused about what files are actually doing and where they are. This is all part of the dumbing down windows effort which is leaving people less and less able to understand what's going on in the first place. Plus if you happen to know what filename you're looking for, there's several extra steps to take just to do a plain old fashoined search :mad:

On the plus side performance seems pretty good when it's not scanning all your storage for files, it boots up in similar times to XP (for me anyway) and becomes responsive straight after login (altough it does keep loading stuff in the background like previous windows versions it's not as intrusive into performance). When it gets fully loaded up though it uses up about 400Mb of ram which is pretty signifigant for anyone with less than a gig. Ordinary programs seem much more memory intensive now, notepad was taking 2.5/3 Mb just sitting there empty :eek: (that was before I'd disabled No-Execute so that may have come down since).

I'm going to try throwing together some quick avalon apps later and see how they work out.

aidan_walsh

stevenmu wrote:

I've spent a few hours playing with this now and I'm not hugely impressed.

The install was easy, if a little basic, the 'custom' install consisted of choosing a machine name and install partition. I'm guessing that because it's an early beta they want everyone running the exact same setup and that the release will have the normal options. SATA drives are supported out of the box, but the partition to be installed on must be NTFS formatted. Installing took roughly 30 minutes.

That's actually a feature of Vista. This time, instead of dumping all the files onto the disk and setting the whole thing up on the fly, they are taking the approach of placing what is essentially an image file onto your partition. Some changes, such as the ones you mention, are made to ensure that the software will work. Overall, its expected to be a faster and much easier process to set up a Windows installation.

stevenmu wrote:

Other than the gui the main change seems to be the the whole virtual folder/search concept and imho microsoft is taking this whole concept way too far. The idea seems to be that every file/document will have tags against it describing it's content, subject matter, genre, album etc. When you're searching for files, you're now supposed to search for them based on content instead of based on file name location. For example instead of going to c:\my music\ledzeppelin you would now search your whole computer for tracks with led zeppelin in the artists id tag. You can then save this search as a 'virtual folder' which is basically an automatically updated list of shortcuts to the search results.

This is probably one of the remnants of the WinFS file system. They want to try to make it easier to search for related items by searching metadata as well as (or even rather than) the original file. I wouldn't be surprised if components of the Desktop Search are running underneath it, or if this is what the desktop search is based on.

stevenmu wrote:

a) It's slow, very slow especially if you're trying to search removable media such as CDs or DVDs (altough perhaps in later realeases this can be disabled or at least optomised for removable media)

Hadn't heard any comments on this until now.

stevenmu wrote:

b) It's abstracting away too much from what's actually going on on the computer. People are going to end up too confused about what files are actually doing and where they are. This is all part of the dumbing down windows effort which is leaving people less and less able to understand what's going on in the first place. Plus if you happen to know what filename you're looking for, there's several extra steps to take just to do a plain old fashoined search :mad:

Again, they want to make it as much like searching the web for information as posible, rather than searching for a file. I can't see this being a massive problem, and it might even prove to be a much better system in the long run.

As for leaving people more confused, I don't know. Most end users don't need to know what the inner workings of a computer are, how the file system is put together, etc. They just want it to work. I'd be surprised if they didn't pick this up fairly quickly.

As for the traditional file search, they should have some sort of shortcut to it.

stevenmu wrote:

On the plus side performance seems pretty good when it's not scanning all your storage for files, it boots up in similar times to XP (for me anyway) and becomes responsive straight after login (altough it does keep loading stuff in the background like previous windows versions it's not as intrusive into performance). When it gets fully loaded up though it uses up about 400Mb of ram which is pretty signifigant for anyone with less than a gig. Ordinary programs seem much more memory intensive now, notepad was taking 2.5/3 Mb just sitting there empty :eek: (that was before I'd disabled No-Execute so that may have come down since).

Most of that is nice to hear. I'm looking forward to playing with it myself (should I be chosen in the beta program).

bounty

really uninspiring reviews


in a new windows i want

fast bootup, < 10 seconds would be nice
minimalist resource consumption
automatic driver and codec download for everything
really fancy gui, 3d desktop
more versions for different user types

aidan_walsh

fast bootup, < 5 seconds would be nice

Back to Windows 3.1 with you so.

minimalist resource consumption

I'm sure they do their best. Maybe.

automatic driver and codec download for everything

No thanks, I would like to choose my own.

really fancy gui, 3d desktop

3D desktop? Hell no, those things are a productivity abortion.

more versions for different user types

Explain?

quarryman

Here's mine.

stevenmu

aidan_walsh wrote:

That's actually a feature of Vista. This time, instead of dumping all the files onto the disk and setting the whole thing up on the fly, they are taking the approach of placing what is essentially an image file onto your partition. Some changes, such as the ones you mention, are made to ensure that the software will work. Overall, its expected to be a faster and much easier process to set up a Windows installation.

I hadn't heard that one before, it makes sense though when put like that.

aidan_walsh wrote:

This is probably one of the remnants of the WinFS file system. They want to try to make it easier to search for related items by searching metadata as well as (or even rather than) the original file. I wouldn't be surprised if components of the Desktop Search are running underneath it, or if this is what the desktop search is based on.

Yes, the impression I got is that it's some of the functionality that would have come with WinFS. The problem this causes is that WinFS was going to be designed from the ground up with this kind of metadata storage in mind. Getting it to work on NTFS has meant beefing up the indexing service from XP to handle all the extra metadata used, and XPs indexing service is well renowned for being a great performer. It probably wouldn't be too bad if I let it index everything first, but that doesn't really help with things like CDs where it seems to be trying the read through every file in it's entirety when you do a search for something.