Submitted by “With today’s release of the Windows Vista February CTP, Microsoft has publicly passed a key milestone on the road to launching its new operating system. This release of Vista is ‘feature-complete’, the company says, meaning that all of the fundamental capabilities that Vista will eventually offer are now baked in.” Lots of screenshots included, so go ahead and praise halleluja or declare end of days, boys and girls.
The thing that interests me most with this is the fact that it is ‘feature complete’. Hopefully this release is pretty good, so Microsoft only has to iron out the last wrinkles before Vista is released later this year/early next year
Wish I was a registered beta tester or msdn/technet subscriber.
I am a MSDN subscriber (universal / Visual Studio Team Suite) and I do not see a new copy of Vista… the latest build is December. I wonder how/why they got an early beta…
Edited 2006-02-22 19:49
MSDN does content releases on either Tuesdays or Thursdays, but more than likely for this they’ll have it up within the next couple of days. More than likely this build is about a week old, and they had it the hands of PCMag the second they stamped this build as the February CTP thus giving them some time to play around with it. As to why they would get an early beta? MS ships early betas to A) anyone of noteriaty who will review it and give them some fanfare, and B) all of their largest customers long before we lowly MSDN folks get them :-).
I would score this up, but there is a bug in OSAlert that prevent me from using my 5 votes a day, I used to have.
How much did Microsoft pay Apple for the OSX license?
That joke is getting old …
And it was never funny to start with.
How much did Microsoft pay Apple for the OSX license?
hehe, I was thinking the same thing, looks likes a OSX/gnome
Well, we know the linux community didn’t pay much. They just stole it blind.
Any wagers on how long it takes for the linux community to steal aero glass?
T-t-t-t-rollllll.
Why can’t everyone just get along? Borrowing / stealing of ideas happens all the time. In the end, it makes a better product, as I’m sure we can agree. And truth be told, most users just care about the end product, not who stole what interface in what year and under what circumstances.
I had to laugh at the computer rating screenshot. A 2.8 P4 w/2 gigs of ram and a GForce 5200 128MB only scored a 2!(I assume out of 10, but even if 5 is still sad) Although that is not a top of the line machine, it seems to me to be adequate for most general comptuer work. I wonder how it performs with all of the graphic goodies, but I believe that MS lets you disable the eyecandy for slower machines.
The GeForce 5200 is what is holding it back. Do not be fooled by the “128 MB!”. The GeForce 5200 is quite possibly the worst graphics card in the history of the world. My 5-year-old Radeon 8500 128 MB beats the 5200 handily in virtually any benchmark.
That same Pentium 4, with 1 GB of RAM, and a Radeon 9600 XT would score much, much higher.
That same Pentium 4, with 1 GB of RAM, and a Radeon 9600 XT would score much, much higher.
No, actually, it will not (my own GF6600 Go 128MB Pentium M 2Ghz box only scores a 2).
The mistake is thinking the score is on a 1-10. It’s not. And I quote:
“The rating system is designed to accommodate advances in computer technology, so the standards for each level of the rating system stay the same. For example, a computer rated as a 5 should remain a 5 unless you decide to upgrade the computer’s hardware. Newer computers with the latest hardware will usually have higher ratings than older computers, and newer computers can usually run more advanced programs with better performance.”
In short, your 2009 Vista machine running a 4 Ghz Quad-Core 64bit 16MB L2/L3 cache CPU with 16GB of RAM and a 2GB dual core GPU will score a 12… not a 10. The idea is the scoring method (which is generated with a real built-in benchmark test) will remain constant, allowing OEM’s to use the rating to market a machine.
Uhh … ?
I know how the scoring system works. What you’re saying, though, is akin to “Your score will stay the same if you upgrade key components of the system”. It will not.
I’m sure that a 9600 XT 128 MB with a 2.8 GHz P4 and 2 GB of RAM would bump up the score to a 3.
I know how the scoring system works. What you’re saying, though, is akin to “Your score will stay the same if you upgrade key components of the system”. It will not
Actually if you upgrade too many key components, I should think it’s quite likely that Vista will shut down on you and your data and order you to buy a new copy for a “new” computer.
I’d like to know how much ram Vista is typically going to use out of the box, how many services it will have running and other overheads. I know it looks nice, but after a month of two of staring at a screen, Vista’s look won’t seem quite so special any more. How well it works is the real deal.
No, actually, you should find a clue. They’re free. What you speak of only applies to OEM licenses of Windows and motherboard upgrades. *ONLY*.
You’ve got a point about how well it will work though. I have no doubts that Vista will be a better experience than XP, seeing as how they’ve had 5 years to improve things, and XP is already a reliable worhorse.
You’ve got a point about how well it will work though. I have no doubts that Vista will be a better experience than XP, seeing as how they’ve had 5 years to improve things, and XP is already a reliable worhorse.
Babe, most of the work on Windows Vista lay below the surface – XPS as part of the Windows Presentation Foundation, DirectX, acccelerated GUI, Indigo, WinFX (replacement to Win32).
Many of the features won’t be fully appreciated until third party software vendors bring their software up to date and using the new APIs, so of course to the geek who can’t be bothered reading a white paper will find the features unappealing, but for those who have spent a little time on Microsofts site, looking at all the technology they’re cramming into this version in terms of technology overviews (not marketing documents), there is alot there to digest.
Windows Vista, although marketed to the computer illerate end user will appear to be nothing great, to the developer who has been pleading for the issues to be fixed in Windows, they’ll be pleasently suprised with the changes.
What’s with the “babe”? It’s not like you stated information that I don’t know.
Sorry about that, I now feel like a right nitwitt, I replied to the wrong person – oh well, threw my 5 cents worth into the pissing pond that is osnews.com – let the trolls bitch over Windows XP vs. Linux vs. the rest of the known universe.
Oh, as for screenshots; they’re not too bad, and personally, it’ll be like Windows XP, shocking at first with the new colour scheme, then people get used to it, then suddenly start whining because its boring.
Ahh.
No harm done.
Exactly. Vista has big under-the-hood improvements many will not appreciate. They will however switch and eventually enjoy software which will use it.
But sincerely, XGL effects look better. Nature of open source GUI’s will enable them to evolve to extreme eye candy, as soon as this year!
I don’t think vanilla windows will have have plugin-based combined compositing-window manager. I doubt that they even declared compositing API for third party developers (at first they will probably use it only internally with their task switcher and Avalon).
However, they can add something like that anytime, there isn’t a big roadblock.
I don’t think vanilla windows will have have plugin-based combined compositing-window manager. I doubt that they even declared compositing API for third party developers (at first they will probably use it only internally with their task switcher and Avalon).
However, they can add something like that anytime, there isn’t a big roadblock.
There is no public API for the DWM that I know of at this point. There are APIs for adding custom filters at the app level. Look up “Visual Layer” or “Visual Tree” on MSDN or Microsoft.com for more info.
There is no public API for the DWM that I know of at this point. There are APIs for adding custom filters at the app level. Look up “Visual Layer” or “Visual Tree” on MSDN or Microsoft.com for more info.
Not to sound bitter, but personally, I think they should shut alot of the API’s off – stop third parties from ‘extending’ (more like hacking), application developers relying on those ‘extensions’ but then everything turns to shit when Microsoft wishes to fix something, but end up having to do 100 work arounds to accomodate the ‘extension’.
Create an API, publicly declare that anything not based on that publicly decared API will not be supported – tough shit if your application stopped working, you should think twice before using undocumented calls.
I’d like to know how much ram Vista is typically going to use out of the box
Task manager reports 550 MB used after bootup (for the previous build). Keep in mind that this is a debug build and this number will likely go down.
As for the number of services and gadgets, this is a concern for me as well. Sure processors are powerful and can easily handle it, but what about on a laptop? Is windows smart enough to turn off all the background services when I’m running on battery?
I’d like to know how much ram Vista is typically going to use out of the box
Task manager reports 550 MB used after bootup (for the previous build).
It would help to know how much RAM you have. XP scales it usage to the RAM installed so I imagine Vista does as well. [Extra points for your XP task manager memory usage after bootup].
Floyd
http://www.just-think-it.com
It would help to know how much RAM you have.
1GB
Extra points for your XP task manager memory usage after bootup
Sorry, too lazy to reboot right now, but after a couple hours of usage, with Firefox, Bitcomet, 1 explorer window, and miranda open, task manager says 206MB used.
It would help to know how much RAM you have.
1GB
Ok that is good to know. Sounds like Vista will take double the RAM of XP. Thief!
Floyd
http://www.just-think-it.com
So, it’s just like Futuremark’s 3dMark software!
I think it’s a good way to know how fast your computer perform. Just as your 3dcard do with 3dMark.
Some vendors, claim that their PCs score like 10,000+ in 3dmark to sell gaming PCs.
Now, we’ll see major vendors fighting for the crown in the windows rating world!
Nice.
I don’t see the point of the rating anyway.
You cannot just take the whole setup and say “it’s good” or “it’s bad”, it depends on your needs.
These shots demonstrate this by giving a crappy score to a machine just because it has a crappy graphic card, even though it’s more than enough for office applications.
I can’t help but think that the ultimate goal of this thing is to help alleviate the “competing with old windows versions” problem in the future by encouraging people to think that their pc needs to be upgraded or replaced instead of just sticking with it because it already does everything they need.
I can’t think of any other obvious point in the whole rating stuff.
Edited 2006-02-22 21:16
It looks remarkably like MacOS or Gnome in the way it draws many of its windows. Is this part of the Innovation microsoft has been raving about ?
Hate to burst your bubble, but the common Joe end user will think Microsoft is innovating like nobody’s business. To them fancy floating transparent jazz will be a whole new world, and they will love Microsoft for it. So to them, it is innovative, and therefore Microsoft can market it as such.
I’m sorry, but I don’t see how it likes like OSX or Gnome at all, aside from the fact that all operating systems use windows and wigets.
the windows are identical to OSX, minus the brushed metal gradient. oh and the icons are on the other side. So yeh its toally diferent from OSX *rolls eyes*
How are they identical?! Either be specific, or stop making stupid claims.
okay please. please observe:
http://www.masterfreelancer.com/graphics/gpx001-screen10.gif
now minus the brush metal, but buttons on other side, make buttons square……..
http://common.ziffdavisinternet.com/util_get_image/11/0,1425,sz=1&i…
I also spy an ipod shuffle button.
http://common.ziffdavisinternet.com/util_get_image/12/0,1425,sz=1&i…
Edited 2006-02-23 01:10
You think those look alike? Wow wow wow. Wow.
As far as the shuffle icon. Um, ok. It’s a small shuffle icon, of course the general look of the icon might be the same as another product.
Christ dude, you are REALLY reaching.
okay okay, I guess it may just be all the glass and shading. and the rounded corners.
thats basically what the screenies provide. But it will leave us with this OSX clone once thats done. an OSX clone that cant work on anything older than a year. wich will hurt for MS but they’ll survive. only the good die young.
I don’t see any glass in the mac osx screenshot.
And rounded corners?
Ok, now I know you’re trolling. My mistake for engaging you.
Mac os has allways had rounded corners on all their windows. you havent noticed. and no I’m not trolling. If I were trolling I’d be alot louder about it.
so windows vista has rounded corners on the windows now aswell. look. zoom in. you know.
glass=transparency and pretty shading
yeh thats all over OSX use it sometime. your head will start spining in the over use of “glass”
but the same can be said for Enlightenment, and a tweaked out fluxbox. Fluxbox folk are pretty crazy for their transparent windows, transparent bars, even “dockapps”.
1) xp had rounded corners. and sorry, but apple didnt invented rounded corners. wow.
2) glass = frosted transparency. your screenshot doesnt even show any transparency at all.
I honestly do not see anything on Windows Vista that looks like OSX.
The pictures you provided did not make your case at all and in fact made you look more like a troll than anything real.
I don’t know what you’re looking at, but those two screenshots look absolutely nothing like each other. Also you can’t say things like “minus the brush metal, move this over here, make it this shape, etc”. You could do that with anything and make it similar to something else.
you can’t say things like “minus the brush metal, move this over here, make it this shape, etc”
erm. no. this
http://static.flickr.com/24/103239342_7146b32ece.jpg?v=0
and this
http://istpub.berkeley.edu:4201/bcc/Winter2002/Images/macosx.screen…
are different. It takes alot more explanation to make them similar. though it is possible at both ends to tweek preferences to look identical.
If you dont see the similarites than I wont put you down for it. But when you do, dont ever say Mac OSX was mimicing windows. Cause the collective ass was kicked by apple first.
I put my case to sleep, though the likelyness you’ll leave it there is low.
No, that’s where your case belongs because its absolutely ridiculous.
Drawnstories_studios: I wish AI works like your brain, it would be so easy to recognize human faces. He move his nose to the left, move the eye to the mouth and whoa we match a human with a dog..lol
Anyways kidding aside, the screenshot you showed earlier were not same at all. In fact they were totally different.
that hurt.
I think I allready said: I feel that they are closely related but no one on here does. when they do they will say that apple is a copy cat. dont.
I can’t wait to buy my copy! The UI is stunning.
I can’t wait to purchase Vista. Sad to see that they still haven’t learned that “widgets” idea was/is a bad to begin with. And thumbs up for the media sharing.
On a side note, I wonder how fast will the KDE guys implement a “sidebar” of their own. Not that I am suggesting that they dedicate themselves to cloning Windows. Not at all…
They won’t. They already have superkaramba and it is being integrated nicely with KDE4/Plasma.
rofl I already have one. I have had one since KDE 2. And yeh, all you do is make a second panel. alighn it to a side. and load it with widgets or panel apps. and Bam!! you’ve picked it up a notch.
get with times meng…
all though I am more than kinda pist off that plasma has adopted XP vomit colors.
That’s a ToolBar silly. Windows had that since the Shell Desktop download upgrade for Windows 95.
And no the “Little Fishes” in ToolBar doesn’t count as a widget. Even if it’s the first thing people are gonna download…
http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow_viewer/0,1205,l=&s=26945&a=171997&po…
But seriously, it looks pretty decent overall. Not “5 years worth of work” decent but “incremental improvement” decent. I’ll settle for that.
Even though clocks now have that “glassy” feeling to them, it’s still Windows and it has all the same apps. Basically not much has changed. This does leave a strange feeling of the same Windows featuring a new skin, but surely MS can get away with that this time.
Maybe before you open your mouth and make a fool of yourself, you should do some research on all the changes under the hood. But no, you see a new interface and assume they are wasting all their resources on that and not making any other changes. Way to go.
Hopefully they included more optimizations in this build, or at least the beta Nvidia / ATI drivers got better. I know the last build I tried was not as snappy as one would hope, and this was on a decent machine (3ghz P4, 1gb RAM, Nvidia 6600GT).
I doubt I’ll buy Vista, unless some groundbreaking game is released that only runs on Vista. Considering the current dry market, I doubt this will happen. Featurewise nothing jumps out at me, I would rather they had kept WinFS instead of dumping it for things like Sidebar. NTFS + defragging should not have to happen in 2006.
Although they may have taken ideas or built on previous UIs, it’s still good to see Microsoft being forced to keep up with everyone ones. Competition is always a good thing for making the slow giants move.
It actually looks like a pleasant environment, unlike the eyesore that is Win XP. Fortunately, my interaction with XP is usually limited to double-clicking on the WoW icon
Edited 2006-02-22 20:58
when I get a DVD Burner.
More bloated, inept, garbage from Microsoft…nothing new.
“More bloated, inept, garbage from Microsoft…nothing new.”
That’s right, everything Microsoft makes is “bloated and inept.” Just ignore the fact that OpenOffice takes far longer to start and much more memory that MS Office, despite the fact that it has less features.
And I just hate Microsoft for how “inept” their software is. Just look at Windows, and the way it’s capable of autodetecting hardware properly and allowing for easy binary driver installations. I, for one, find this irritating; we should have to recompile modules to install drivers! All this ease of use hurts the computer industry!
(that was sarcasm)
And I just hate Microsoft for how “inept” their software is. Just look at Windows, and the way it’s capable of autodetecting hardware properly and allowing for easy binary driver installations.
(…)
(that was sarcasm)
Yes, thanks for reminding me! Windows is great at detecting hardware. For example in how well it detected my USB controller as a “Not supported VIA USB controller”. To make it work, I had to choose the Reinstall Driver option, and then choose the “Generic VIA USB controller” to make it work.
The stupid thing is, both drivers come with Windows by default! Why does that stupid Windows choose the not-working dummy driver, when the real, working driver comes with Windows as well!?
Or my ISA sound card, consisting of a SB16-compatible part and an extra virtual device to control some things. NetBSD just recognises it as SB16, under DOS a normal SB16 driver works as well. But not under Windows. It fails to auto-detect the card as SB16, and when I tell the SB16 driver that I have such a card at IRQ this and DMA that, Windows simply refuses to accept that.
Of course, there is an official WDM driver, but then the computer crashes constantly when playing sounds. Yes, the binary driver system of Windows surely is great!
Edited 2006-02-22 22:31
You’re complaining about it not recognizing an ISA sound card? Who in the world still has ISA slots anyway? ISA is not plug and play, and it’s not even supported in Windows anymore. I seriously doubt anyone is going to be running Vista on an ISA based system. Next you’ll be mad because it won’t recognize your 8-bit MFM fixed disk controller card.
Edited 2006-02-22 23:23
why not ? microsoft makes a big deal about backwards compatability. This applies to more things than your games you know.
Yeah, app-wise.
If you’re using a system with ISA still, it’s probably not really a computer you should be running Vista on anyway.
why ?
there are some solutions that onlt an isa card card fix. like irq problems if the card uses jumpers.
ISA is no longer supported in Windows. If it happens to work, then great, but I don’t think MS does any testing with it. Windows XP isn’t meant to be an embedded OS or compatible with all hardware out there, so why make a big deal out of this?
Yes, yes… linux might handle ISA hardware. But if you’re running hardware that still has ISA, you’re probably not in MSFTs target audience.
I still think Vista is ugly. A blue sphere that protrudes from a black taskbar! What were they thinking? I also dislike the bigger than normal close button on the titlebars. It looks uneven. I really hope Vista comes with themes other than the default because whoever designed the interface is totally lacking in artistic ability. Of course it makes senes considering the fact that the default theme for XP is disgusting as well.
From screenshot:
These programs are causing Windows to start slowly
… svchost.exe
… explorer.exe
Interesting, how many users will attempt to disable loading of these resource hogs?
High support need expected
It’s getting closer all the time. I didn’t like the way Vista was shaping up but it’s really starting to look nice now. I just hope they got rid of that dumb looking disembodied user pic that hovered above the start panel.
Microsoft refused to release the latest build they got because they are even more buggy than this one they settled on. By now, IMO we should not encounter any explorer.exe crash as it is the 2nd most important application in windows after iexplore.exe; besides performance wise it’s so slow to crawl on modern hardware.
I really don’t understand why do we encounter software bugs so serious like explorer.exe from financially capable giant like Microsoft; aren’t they mature enough to give us at least linuxs’ betas stability. Didn’t they say they will ban their programmers if they produce bugs to that horrible level.
By the way explorer.exe crashes every 2 minutes even if you don’t use it and while it’s minimized!
On 2GHz, 640 MB RAM, 7200rpm 100GB HDD it took 2 hours to complete the installation!!!
My final judgement: SLOW for sure.. BUGGY for sure..INSECURE quite
They look like thery’re straight out of Linspire
>More bloated, inept, garbage from Microsoft…
>nothing new.
It’s nice to know that you haven’t tried the product troll.
This is yet more proof of mental midgets. How do people like you hold a job?
>Interesting, how many users will attempt to disable >loading of these resource hogs?
>High support need expected
Hey jackass, it’s called a beta. Lets see your programming. Show everyone in the forum how you can create something better than vista.
<Hey jackass, it’s called a beta. Lets see your programming. Show everyone in the forum how you can create something better than vista.>
Well einstien, the fact is Apple Mac OS X is already an established OS not a beta.
And it’s highly rated, if MS was so good then how come the NTSA drop them from possiblities of controling AirPlanes. They even said we don’t want our radars crashing.
No general purpose operating system should be used to control airplanes, OS X included.
>Well einstien, the fact is Apple Mac OS X is already >an established OS not a beta.
>And it’s highly rated, if MS was so good then how
>come the NTSA drop them from possiblities of
>controling AirPlanes. They even said we don’t want
>our radars crashing.
Well I wouldn’t want OSX or Linux running planes either. See in case you don’t understand people’s lives are at stake here and any OS that is available to the public should not be used for things like this.
After this weeks issues with OS, I surely wouldn’t trust it to put on Airplanes either. I wouldn’t trust linux or Windows either.
It’s called being safe and not allowing any open source or closed sourced public operating systems being used. If it was me I would not use any public uNix, linux, MacOS, or Windows to be used by any government agency. I would have a seperate non public high secuirty (read military security) OS used that would not be public anywhere and would be on it’s own encrypted network outside of the Internet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Vista
For everyones Info about both
Regarding Windows Vista and that whole rating scheme, it isn’t out of 10 I think, its based on most to least important in regards to its impact on performance, and what it is out of is based on its importance, for example, the first one might be out of 10, whilst the bottom one might be out of 5, depending on its contribution to over all performance.
Why are only some getting an overhaul? It may still not be done but we saw the same coming to XP where there still are tons of icons from Win95/98 in places.
http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow_viewer/0,1205,l=&s=26945&a=171997&po…
http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow_viewer/0,1205,l=&s=26945&a=171997&po…
I’m not saying either look better just that side by side one will look out of place, just as when you open anything admin related in XP today.
Not a biggie but thought someone might know, one would think it’d be such an easy thing to take care of.
Why are only some getting an overhaul? It may still not be done but we saw the same coming to XP where there still are tons of icons from Win95/98 in places.
The icons are still being worked on. There could still be some old ones by RTM, but at this point it’s too early to make that judgement.
Well if you are running ISA hardware even on Linux, you must not be doing much with it.
If you are still running on an old 486 running useless programs then maybe it’s time to upgrade. You can still run the latest version of DosBox that will run all of those programs.
This isn’t highly known, but watch this 41 minute
video from Microsoft’s Channel 9 about Peer To Peer
API and other support built right into vista.
This video is free and does not require any signup, just click to play and you are ready to go.
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=165133
Also if you want to learn more about TCP/IP and Vista’s Networking stack you can check this video out here:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=116349
This video will talk about the redesigned networking stack that uses Compound TCP/IP instead of just the standard flavor.