I was bored this morning and while I was waiting for the floor man to install our new kitchen floor I had the Vista install go. The drivers for the geforce 6 series work out of the box now which is a good thing since nvidia hasn’t released anything publicly that I can tell since the beta driver release way back in the summer time when microsoft hashed out beta 1. These drivers properly support the “high end” theme that everyone will see and it does indeed look pretty nice. Now some things that “suck” for me is that these drivers don’t support my native resolution 1680×1050. I don’t know if this is a driver limitation or if it just not optimized and running at 1680×1050 would be a complete joke when it comes to speed. I did have it running at 1280×1024 and honestly it didn’t even seem that fast to me. Certain things were fast but it did not feel snappy like windows xp does, probably just a driver issue as I remember betas of windows 95, 98, 2000 all sucking so I imagine they will get these things figured out.
The new media center + extender looks different and should be nice for the 360 in the living room, media player 11 is quite a bit different and looks totally awesome — kudos to them for making it less sucky.
Ok so one thing that is going to drive me and everyone else nuts is they have DRASTICALLY changed how you interact with your computer, I mean drastically. There is no more my computer, my documents, my music, my pictures, etc. Now they still exist but everything has dropped the “my” moniker in front of it — so it is just documents, computer, etc. The control panel is huuuuuuge, at least 4-5 times as many options as with a default windows xp / 2000 install. I was finding it harder to find things but that is because they haven’t really made any drastic changes to the user experience since probably windows 95. This will take some getting used to but I imagine if I had given it some time that it would grow on me and I would come to hate windows xp — only time will tell. I was attempting to install 1 of 3 available audio drivers for my audigy 2 zs and none of them worked which prompted the reboot into windows xp. This OS, like many other microsoft betas isn’t ready for prime time at all and needs some of that hard core Microsoft polishing that they excel at. That along with it not working with my sata drive made me angry enough to stop messing with it for the time being — If I attempted to install from booting the cd (which gives you a nice windows xp’ish looking install immediately, no more NT blue screen setup) it would boot off the hard drive and just keep rebooting over and over and over and over. If I attempted to install the other method it wouldn’t even detect my partitions at all, seriously wtf? If i require a driver cd for my sata controller serious negative points to microsoft. These things have been around forever and they should have support implemented by now. When I did a fresh install of xp media center edition I was pretty pissed that I had to go find a floppy disk + drive to add my little driver to the list. All of the automatic tools that integrate the cool stuff for you didn’t support media center edition and stripped it of its media center’ness. To those that are curious media center edition is nothing more than xp pro sp2 + a microsoft cab file that is a couple hundred meg with the media center enhancements.
Alt + tab is really cool, so is the expose like thing they stole from OS X, oh man its cool to see your windows get moved around in 3d and they still animate (movies, flash animations, etc). Taskbar previews, etc etc etc… lots of neat graphical g-whiz things they added that will HOPEFULLY have little system overhead since windows will now natively take advantage of your 3d graphics card for normal desktop usage instead of just for World of Warcraft / Counterstrike.
Ok so to review
- No sound.
- No 1680×1050.
- Had to install on my pata drive.
- Graphical bugs — A couple of times I saw some big nasty green ugly bars / null looking space, yikes!
- Long install time (1.5 hours maybe?)
I am hardly bashing this thing, its going to be awesome but I just thought I would share my poopy experience with you, the real release of beta 2 should be out soon and should be fairly representative of what the final product is going to look like, the xp beta 2 looked exactly like xp looks like us for now so it will be interesting to see how this next version of windows plays out. I hope everyone has a safe return to school this week and good luck with your new semester of school.
