After more extensive testing, I have discovered that WoW does not play well with Vista yet. I guess I shouldn’t expect to get awesome performance from a game on a beta operating system (although surprisingly, you do get very good performance from your machine with this OS, which is confusing as it’s an early beta. I wouldn’t be surprised if Vista runs better than XP on the same hardware when it’s released)….

The Start Menu
As we’re all used to, the start menu always had it’s infamous “All Programs” sidebar that would block your screen. Vista seems to remedy that by putting the “All Programs” in with the rest of the start menu.
Screenshot: Start Menu
Screenshot: Start Menu, viewing All Programs

The Control Panel
Vista still has the categorized and classic views of the Control Panel. They’ve just added a few more icons for your viewing pleasure (I’m sure they’re really supposed to do something)
Screenshot: Control Panel Normal View
Screenshot: Control Panel Classic View

Other odds and ends
Screenshot: Autorun
Screenshot: Permissions
Screenshot: Typical Folder View

Of course, there’s the winver: Screenshot: Windows Version
You’ll note that, like most betas, the artwork was not updated in time for the name change. The Longhorn brand may be running in the betas for awhile, as artwork generally isn’t a high priority right now…

Before I continue, here’s one more bug I found: Look what it calls the “OS Name” when you run systeminfo: Screenshot: Systeminfo

Namespace Changes
In Windows XP and 2000, Microsoft introduced the concept of the Documents and Settings folder structure (previously, there was a Users folder in the C:\winnt folder in Windows NT 4.0). Under this folder are folders for each user account, so in a Windows XP system, I see a folder for you as well as a folder for All Users, which contains information that applies to, well, all users.

In XP, you also see various folders such as Desktop, Favorites, My Documents, and Start Menu under the Paul folder. And inside of My Documents, you see three special shell folders: My Music, My Pictures, and My Videos.

In Windows Vista Beta 1, Microsoft has blown most of that away. Instead of a Documents and Settings folder in the root of the system drive, you’ll see a Users folder. And inside of that folder, you’ll see folders for individual users (Jacob and Administrator, for example) and a UNIX-like folder called Public. Inside of the Jacob folder are several folders: Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Favorites, Music, Pictures, Videos, and Virtual Folders. Note that Music, Pictures, and Video are no longer subfolders under Documents.

As with XP, all of these folders are “real” folders. That is, they exist at a discrete place in the shell hierarchy and can contain real files and folders. They are literally identical to folders in XP. However, Windows Vista, as you may know, also introduces the concept of Virtual Folders. These are not “real” folders but are instead XML-based containers for links to other files and folders. Virtual Folders do not “contain” anything. Instead, Virtual Folders point to lists of other files and aggregate data in meaningful ways.

Basically, these Virtual Folders are making queries and updating their contents automagically. If you create a Virtual Folder with Pictures, it will update itself with all the pictures it’s instructed to find. A very nice concept, as the previous XP concept limited you to placing your pictures in the “My Pictures” folder (if you wanted it to stay organized).

The down side to these Virtual Folders is that it can get a little confusing. You can’t save anything to a Virtual Folder. But if you save a Picture in a pictures directory, the picture will appear in the saved directory and the Pictures Virtual Folder. Think of the Virtual Folder as a query displaying the information it finds in, say, a database or excel spreadsheet.

The “My” prefix on these folders and many other familiar items (”My Documents”, “My Computer”, “My Network Places”), a concept which was introduced in Windows 95, has been dropped. It was initially used to make the computer more “user-friendly”, back when computers weren’t as prevalent as they are today.

Windows Explorer
A very nice feature in Windows Explorer is the “breadcrumb” navigation. In previous versions of Windows, if you were in the directory “C:\Program Files\Winamp”, to navigate to the “Program Files” directory, you’d have to click “Up a folder” or the “Back” button. With Vista, each directory is it’s own “button” and navigating around the filesystem requires just a click. To get to the “C:” in “C:\Program Files\Winamp”, you just click the “C:”. Something that I learned to love all too quickly…

More Internet Explorer 7 Goodness
Hmm.. Let’s see what else Microsoft fixed in Internet Explorer 7…
Ah yes! RSS feeds support!
A Phishing Filter! (which, as of now, does nothing)
An “Internet Explorer (No Add-ons)” version! (You can start Internet Explorer with no add-ons.. good if your system is compromised)
Outlook Express upgrade! (Although Beta 1 still uses our old faithful OE6)
Printing fixes, oh my! (Yes, they fixed the common IE printing errors [3 words: "Shrink to Fit"])
Did I mention tabs?!? (I still wonder how they got away without those for so long)

Network Presentation
Windows Vista Beta 1 includes technology designed for giving presentations over a wireless network using any standard network projector. It’s unclear why this esoteric functionality is provided right there in the system tray and Start menu by default, but there it is.

Speech Recognition
In addition to the accessibility tools Microsoft included with Windows XP, Windows Vista Beta 1 has a new Speech Recognition application that lets you control your computer with your voice. The first time you run this application, a wizard steps you through the process of adjusting the system microphone (using a new Microphone Wizard, Figure), training the computer to recognize your voice, and then optionally prints out a cheat sheet of the 10 most often used Speech Recognition commands.

Final Call
About a year ago I wrote a paper in my Written Comm class about Longhorn. I remember doing all the research and getting really excited that this new operating sytem was going to be the Microsoft Everything-But-The-Kitchen-Sink (TM). It had a new file system, a new display engine, and all this other new and exciting stuff that would be the must-have for everyone.
Then Microsoft halted the project in mid-2004 and restarted the Longhorn project by using the Windows Server 2003 code base. All the extra goodies that were there before were either low priority or scrapped all together. What everyone thought Longhorn would be a year ago will not be anymore. As Beta 1, it looks like an enhanced version of Windows XP, which was probably not intended. Granted this is just the first beta, that’s what my first impression was.
Thankfully, Beta 1 is a huge improvement over build 5048, and that says something right there. At least Microsoft is correcting it’s mistakes early in the game.
While Beta 1 does look like XP on steroids, there are many many underlying features in there that makes this OS, even at beta, powerful. You really can’t judge the OS completely at such an early stage (as you may recall, Windows Whistler looked impressive but not quite there yet in it’s beta builds). I say the beta 1 is a modest improvement and a successful release, and I hope that Microsoft can meet and, God forbid, exceed our expectations in future builds.
Here’s to Vista Beta 1, a name that is slowly starting to grow on me…

~Jaker

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