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GCN Home > 06/05/06 issue

Test Drive: Vista makes new strides

Beta 2 boosts its look and performance, but be prepared to upgrade hardware

By John Breeden II, GCN Staff

Last month, Microsoft Corp. officially released the second beta version of its much-anticipated Windows Vista operating system. It’s built to be a more polished preview of the OS that will ship for enterprises late this year, and for consumers early next year. There is still work to be done, a fact even Microsoft admits [see GCN Insider, Page 33]. But based on reviews in the GCN Lab, Vista is a compelling product that agencies will want to start evaluating sooner rather than later. Whereas the first beta of Microsoft Windows Vista was more or less a proof of concept [GCN.com, Quickfind 586], the second beta is loaded with features that feel more like a finished product. Microsoft has made significant improvements in two main areas: usability and security.

The overall user interface is a leap ahead of Windows XP. At a recent meeting with GCN, Microsoft officials said one of its development goals with Vista was to “eliminate the bottleneck between the user and his data.” In other words, the more transparent the OS, the better the user experience. Vista pretty well achieves this level of transparency, although its level of flair depends on which of four modes you run it in.

In Windows Classic mode, the screen and menus look pretty much like they did in Windows 2000. If you want to drill down through several menu layers to find the right tool, feel free. There is also a Basic interface, which looks like Classic mode but features easier menus. These two modes are here solely to ease the transition to Vista.

The Standard mode employs Vista’s new Windows Driver Display Model graphics technology, which means windows open quickly and programs generally run smoothly. For example, we opened a large folder of images and the thumbnails displayed almost instantly—a huge improvement over XP running on the same system.

But the way most people will want to experience Vista is through the new Aero interface. Aero is about the best way we’ve seen to manage and display information. A bit of warning, though: The Aero interface is resource-intensive. Your experience will depend on your hardware. Running Vista and Aero on a 1.7-GHz laptop with 512MB of RAM, for instance, the system tended to bog down, a problem we didn’t have running similar programs with XP.

More news on related topics: Software Applications, Enterprise Architecture



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