Right now, I am blogging this post with Internet Explorer 7. I must say, they’ve finally gotten around to some stuff that’s need to be fixed with Internet Explorer. For starters, they finally have tabs. They also finally fixed a bug that’s been around since version 3: ICONS! (see screenshot). Finally, FTP support has been improved as well. I no longer need to use a FTP client to browse around my website. Cheers!
Screenshot: Internet Explorer 7
The only problem I notice with IE7 right now is no one knows how to deal with it. I attempted to check my Yahoo! email, and it notified me that I “should upgrade my browser to Internet Explorer 6, etc., etc.”. Obviously no one knows how to deal with this whole “version 7″ stuff…

Alas, I digress. Let’s start back to the beginning.

Installation
Installation was very straightforward and way too basic. You throw in your DVD, restart, a screen pops up saying “Windows is copying files”, and then setup starts. For setup, you immediately enter your activation key and agree to the EULA. Then you choose your installation location and computer name. Then you can walk away, as you’re done. No more interaction with setup. The setup is really quite boring, as it’s just a screen stating that Windows has all the information it needs, and that a restart is normal during installation. Admittingly, it’s much cleaner than the previous beta, and no longer has a screen stating that “this process may take an hour to complete.” On the test system (3.0GHz P4 HT, 512MB RAM), the installation took about 40 minutes. Once installation was complete, you were directed straight to Windows.

Windows Vista: First Impressions
The very first thing that caught my eye was all the eye-candy that’s packed in. One of the coolest things I’ve noticed is when a window is opened, closed, minimized, maximized, etc., it has a small animation that makes it fade in or out. Personally, I think it looks badass. Also, the titlebars are now pretty much transparent, except where there is titlebar text. It looks very clean and professional.
I also noticed that the sidebar is still gone. It was decided in the previous release that the sidebar was dead. T’was difficult to part with that resource-eating, screen-space grabbing monstrasity.
This first beta was geared towards being compatable with almost every piece of hardware it could. A driver pack is included that installs as many drivers as possible so your computer is up and running. Fortunately it installed my wireless drivers, so I didn’t need to bend over backwards to get that working.
Screenshot: Driver Pack Installation
I also noticed while copying the 1.6 WoW patch that the copy dialog has gotten a very nice facelift.
Screenshot: Copy Dialogbox

Windows Vista: Bugs found in 20 minutes or less
I had to make this section. After playing around with Vista for about 20 minutes I found 3 bugs. The first bug dealt with the Volume Control by the clock. It seems as though the little controls don’t close unless you explicitly click on the volume control, then click on the Desktop. You could also open more than one, so I had a small collection of about 10 before I realized I should get rid of the damn things.
Bug number 2 is the Internet Explorer 7 bug I mentioned earlier, about how websites have no idea how to support the browser. Although I won’t categorize this as a Windows bug, as it’s everyone else’s damn fault for not knowing how to deal with a browser that’s 3 days old…
Bug number 3 is an interesting print screen bug that I caught while making screenshots. Look at the following two screenshots. The first screenshot was taken by pressing “Print Screen”. The second was taken using “Control + Print Screen” so it captures just the window, not the desktop.
Screenshot using just Print Screen
Screenshot using Control + Print Screen
You’ll notice that the second screenshot looks all screwed up. The window looked fine when the screenshot was taken. It’s just when you take a screenshot using Control + Print Screen, the picture gets messed up.

I have not messed around with the OS enough to post more, and it’s quite late, so I’m going to end this as a cliffhanger. More details and screenshots to come…

~Jaker

Note: After extensive testing, World of Warcraft still works on Vista Beta 1. +25 points for Microsoft for not preventing the world from WoW’ing…

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