Earlier this year I stumbled upon a (admittedly hacked) copy of Microsoft’s Vista, codenamed Longhorn. I was far from impressed with it, though, I realized that this was alpha software, and immediately removed the crap from my machine. Why? Because I couldn’t stand even the LOOK of it, and , well, quite frankly, it just was too slow.

This weekend, upon discovering that the beta had moved to PUBLIC beta , and , as a MSDN member, I was qualified to actually test it, I thought “what the hell”. The result? Good and bad, in kind of a mixed scenario. Since this is the “future” of OS software, I’m going to try to keep this up as much as possible. While it’s not exactly my ONLY OS (I do have a legal copy of XP installed as a failsafe in case something happens, and will happily revert back to it if necessary), Vista is beta, and it’s not exactly 100% stable. That said, on with the first part in what may (hopefully) be a reasonably decent length review/commentary/etc of Vista. Least to say, it got it’s own category, for now.

The first MAJOR change up for review? The start menu. I’m undecided whether it’s good or bad right now, but you can judge for yourself with the following screenshots.

Please note:
As this is beta software, I’m not even going to comment on the look (ie: skin) of things. This will likely change over time. My goal? Introduction and functionality reviews.

The start menu is a classic. This is something that didn’t change too much from 95 to XP (though, admittedly XP changed it a bit). This is something that should be left alone as much as possible, except (maybe) for aesthetic purposes.

The changes in Vista are both good and bad. Good, because you can stop fussing with the “sort by name” option. It’s automagically DONE for you. Yes, that’s right, it’s DONE, which is a VERY good thing. I can’t count the times I have to go searching through my XP Start Menu for crap, until finally I just organize it. This is ESPECIALLY bad right after reload, when I’ve got dozens of application folders everywhere.

The changes in Vista (to the start menu) are bad, because of how it’s designed. The user is used to highlighting on “all programs” and having the list pop up to the right of the menu with the program list, sortable, right?? Not so here. As you can see in the images, the programs are now embedded into the start menu, in the main content area, after the user clicks the “All Programs” link. Perhaps it’s just me, being used to the old way of doing things, but hey, it just doesn’t look right to me. Give me a week, and I may just think different, as I reserve the right (always) to change my opinion.

“Computer” (formerly my computer) got a HUGE (and very welcome, to me) upgrade to thingshere. There are a number of ways to “sort” your data, and the default shows how much of your drives/partitions are used, how much is free. It just looks very professional and good. See for yourself in the following image. You can store various things in there, I’m sure (such as you can with XP), like the Fonts Folder, Administrative stuff, Control Panel, etc.

Anyways, that’s enough for now. My goal is to continue to use this until such time as I can not do so, rather than use the other partition. Thankfully, I can (and do) load/save everything to a backup drive, for work. For example, mail, crt, etc, settings are saved off to a backup drive every day, so it’s not too much of a pain to go back to XP (simple reboot is all it takes) if it’s necessary to do so.

Enjoy the review, please, feel free to post your thoughts/comments on Vista in here,

-=T=-