Our Impressions
Immediately upon trying to install Vista, it's obvious Microsoft has been making some long-awaited changes for the installation procedure. The last of the console view for the installer is gone, and it has been replaced by an entirely graphical process. This includes the recovery console, and while it's still not a walk in the park, it isn't so intimidating any more. More importantly though, Vista is now USB-aware, so the days of the floppy disk are now truly limited, as drivers can be loaded off of USB devices such as flash drives. We can't state enough just how happy this makes us. The installation procedure is otherwise nearly the same as XP: it asks a few fewer questions, and doesn't spend the entire time boasting about its features (though that may change at release), so installation overall is not exceedingly different from XP.
Microsoft has also included a basic memory testing utility as both a recovery and advanced startup option. This can either be taken in a positive light or negative light, depending on whether you're happy that you may no longer need external utilities like MemTest86, or troubled that bad memory is now so common that Microsoft is bothering to include a memory testing utility. The utility seems sound enough; on the surface it seems a workable replacement for MemTest86, but as we don't have any bad DIMMs at the moment to test with it, an actual capability test will need to wait. At least until we break something.
Once installed, our fresh copy of Vista Ultimate Edition x86 ate up 10GB of hard drive space, and in the out-of-the-box configuration was using approximately 512MB of RAM. Running Vista x64 while trying to get real work done can push memory usage up to the capacity of physical memory in configurations we tested (though we never tested with more than 2GB). The actual RAM usage should drop a good deal once Vista is in shipping condition, as many debugging features are still in the code for this beta of Vista. XP 64-bit edition was eating a similar amount of memory when it was in beta, and dropped by over 100MB for its final release, so we'd expect something similar with Vista.
In order to get a good feel for Vista for writing this, we "dogfooded" (Microsoft's new term for beta testing) this for a week, and our reactions are overall mixed. As we previously mentioned, some of the UI changes that have replaced the traditional menus are just very hard to get used to. It's not so much that these changes represent a significant shift in how Windows operates, but rather it's that a lot of things have been moved, combined into buttons, etc. For most of these layout changes, there's little that directly improves Windows or its productivity for most users; people will adapt over time, and these changes essentially make more or less sense depending on how much you like the current XP interface.
We've managed to adapt to these changes for the most part, but it's the kind of paradigm shift not everyone will be ready for, and since the old menu structure is still available that's okay. At the end of the day most users will end up using Windows Vista the exact same way they ended up using XP. The real productivity features powered by Aero potentially have the most impact for changing how users work, such as giving up Alt+Tabbing for Flip3D, but as we mentioned earlier that's not going to happen with the current incarnation of Flip3D: it's not effective enough to replace Alt+Tabbing, let alone the improved Alt+Tabbing of Vista.
To Microsoft's credit, there were to places where we did end up changing our habits a bit thanks to Vista. The first is with the inclusion of a much smarter searching system that can use the search index to instantly pull up results and mix in partial results (very similar to Tiger's Spotlight feature), searching isn't nearly as painful as it is with XP. Given the current implementation of this quick search and indexing service however, there's still some work to be done. By default only the start menu and a user's home directory are indexed, so searching from anywhere else loses the instant results and becomes a normal search. It's also flat-out buggy at this point; quick searching from our home folder for a specific image didn't work, but it did inside of the pictures folder of our home folder.
IE7+ has also picked up a major overhaul, both in terms of new features (sandbox mode, anti-phishing filters, etc.) and its interface. The main thing here is that IE finally has tabbed browsing, and in fact this is one of the few things at this point that really shines compared to Safari/Firefox. For IE's tabs, a new view has been added to help manage tabs by showing a scaled down version of all open tabs at once, effectively creating an Exposé for tabs. It's hard to put in words, but it's similar to looking at a folder full of pictures using the thumbnail view. This is a very useful feature that we're glad to see in IE and it undoubtedly makes it easier to use than any other tabbed browser.
The implementation of Gadgets (aka widgets) also gets a nod, even though Microsoft is very late to this particular party. If you're looking for something innovative in the field of widgets here, you're going to be disappointed, but there's little to be said about these kinds of utilities that hasn't already been said. Users accustomed to Tiger's widgets will be happy to know that these widgets are active all the time and do not have the refresh delay that Tiger's do, at the cost of memory and CPU usage.
Immediately upon trying to install Vista, it's obvious Microsoft has been making some long-awaited changes for the installation procedure. The last of the console view for the installer is gone, and it has been replaced by an entirely graphical process. This includes the recovery console, and while it's still not a walk in the park, it isn't so intimidating any more. More importantly though, Vista is now USB-aware, so the days of the floppy disk are now truly limited, as drivers can be loaded off of USB devices such as flash drives. We can't state enough just how happy this makes us. The installation procedure is otherwise nearly the same as XP: it asks a few fewer questions, and doesn't spend the entire time boasting about its features (though that may change at release), so installation overall is not exceedingly different from XP.
Microsoft has also included a basic memory testing utility as both a recovery and advanced startup option. This can either be taken in a positive light or negative light, depending on whether you're happy that you may no longer need external utilities like MemTest86, or troubled that bad memory is now so common that Microsoft is bothering to include a memory testing utility. The utility seems sound enough; on the surface it seems a workable replacement for MemTest86, but as we don't have any bad DIMMs at the moment to test with it, an actual capability test will need to wait. At least until we break something.
Once installed, our fresh copy of Vista Ultimate Edition x86 ate up 10GB of hard drive space, and in the out-of-the-box configuration was using approximately 512MB of RAM. Running Vista x64 while trying to get real work done can push memory usage up to the capacity of physical memory in configurations we tested (though we never tested with more than 2GB). The actual RAM usage should drop a good deal once Vista is in shipping condition, as many debugging features are still in the code for this beta of Vista. XP 64-bit edition was eating a similar amount of memory when it was in beta, and dropped by over 100MB for its final release, so we'd expect something similar with Vista.
In order to get a good feel for Vista for writing this, we "dogfooded" (Microsoft's new term for beta testing) this for a week, and our reactions are overall mixed. As we previously mentioned, some of the UI changes that have replaced the traditional menus are just very hard to get used to. It's not so much that these changes represent a significant shift in how Windows operates, but rather it's that a lot of things have been moved, combined into buttons, etc. For most of these layout changes, there's little that directly improves Windows or its productivity for most users; people will adapt over time, and these changes essentially make more or less sense depending on how much you like the current XP interface.
We've managed to adapt to these changes for the most part, but it's the kind of paradigm shift not everyone will be ready for, and since the old menu structure is still available that's okay. At the end of the day most users will end up using Windows Vista the exact same way they ended up using XP. The real productivity features powered by Aero potentially have the most impact for changing how users work, such as giving up Alt+Tabbing for Flip3D, but as we mentioned earlier that's not going to happen with the current incarnation of Flip3D: it's not effective enough to replace Alt+Tabbing, let alone the improved Alt+Tabbing of Vista.
To Microsoft's credit, there were to places where we did end up changing our habits a bit thanks to Vista. The first is with the inclusion of a much smarter searching system that can use the search index to instantly pull up results and mix in partial results (very similar to Tiger's Spotlight feature), searching isn't nearly as painful as it is with XP. Given the current implementation of this quick search and indexing service however, there's still some work to be done. By default only the start menu and a user's home directory are indexed, so searching from anywhere else loses the instant results and becomes a normal search. It's also flat-out buggy at this point; quick searching from our home folder for a specific image didn't work, but it did inside of the pictures folder of our home folder.
IE7+ has also picked up a major overhaul, both in terms of new features (sandbox mode, anti-phishing filters, etc.) and its interface. The main thing here is that IE finally has tabbed browsing, and in fact this is one of the few things at this point that really shines compared to Safari/Firefox. For IE's tabs, a new view has been added to help manage tabs by showing a scaled down version of all open tabs at once, effectively creating an Exposé for tabs. It's hard to put in words, but it's similar to looking at a folder full of pictures using the thumbnail view. This is a very useful feature that we're glad to see in IE and it undoubtedly makes it easier to use than any other tabbed browser.
The implementation of Gadgets (aka widgets) also gets a nod, even though Microsoft is very late to this particular party. If you're looking for something innovative in the field of widgets here, you're going to be disappointed, but there's little to be said about these kinds of utilities that hasn't already been said. Users accustomed to Tiger's widgets will be happy to know that these widgets are active all the time and do not have the refresh delay that Tiger's do, at the cost of memory and CPU usage.
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aeschbi99 - Wednesday, July 5, 2006 - link
HiI just loved your article about Vista....especially the comparison to TIGER...I am a big MAC fan! But what MS did with Flip3D it appears to me is a copy of SUN's "Looking Glass" - which was out I believe even in 2003.
Redmond --- start your copy machine.... the real invention starts somewhere else....
see link http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/J2...">http://java.sun.com/developer/technical...s/J2SE/D...
absynthe49 - Saturday, July 1, 2006 - link
I really enjoy anandtech but I didn't really like the style of this article. When I read it.. I was quite sad that vista was looking so bad at this stage... particularly the game performance.But then I remembered that I read in a few places that Vista would not support native DirectX 9. That it would be in a way.. emulated. So there was an expected decrease in numbers. My understanding was that new powerful hardware would be coming out and that it would run the older games fast enough to overcome the loss from emulation.
The article almost seemed to say that gaming looks doomed in a way.
So basically... the drivers are not tweaked yet... this is still a beta... there may still be a debugging layer running... and I think vista runs directx 9 through an emulation layer.
So unless this is false and it actually runs directx 9 natively... is it really a surprize at all that directx 9 games run from 20 to 30 frames per second slower? This did not seem to be addressed at all in the article and I thought it was kind of premature worry so much.
NullSubroutine - Monday, June 19, 2006 - link
they can say every hardware/software limitation they want. i dont buy that they 'cant' make dx10 for xp and they 'cant' have full opengl support. just too convienent for microsoft.mongo lloyd - Sunday, June 18, 2006 - link
Although Microsoft may not consider itself to be in direct competition with Apple, this is the match-up most people have been waiting for. Only people who give a shit about OSX, which is far from "most people".drewintheav - Sunday, June 18, 2006 - link
I thought the staged install method was supposed to be so fast?It took way longer to install than it does for me to install XP.
The Vista Media Center is not useable at this point...
The video stutters, the audio drops out, and it crashes all the time.
I had always heard Mac fanatics saying how much better OSX was than XP
I didn't really believe it could be "so much" better
I tried out OSX after I installed Vista.
And now it is very obvious to me where Microsoft has gotten most of its new UI ideas.
At this point I would say that Microsoft's has executed them very poorly
which is a little disappointing.
It is disappointing to me that even if everything worked perfectly in Vista
it would still lag behind OSX on a number of points
In fact if Apple sold OSX for Intel as a retail product
and added a Media Center application
I would switch to MAC and just run windows Windows apps with an emulator or a VM
and dual boot XP for games.
Microsoft really has a lot of work to do and I hope they get it together...
OSX is way more innovative than Vista at this point...
AndrewChang - Wednesday, June 21, 2006 - link
Well, after months of deliberation, it looks like my next personal computing platform will be a merom/leopard based mac book pro. I don't expect to be using a vista based pc until at least the first or second service pack. A fully intergrated bookcamp/virtualization in this next OSX release should take care of my legacy applications (games on xp). Thanks Anandtech, w/o your Macintosh articles I would have never considered all the wonderful options available to me. It'll be fun learing how to use a new OS, especially one that is already superior what us PC users have to look forward to.Pirks - Monday, June 19, 2006 - link
There's no point - since Dell with the same configuration as iMac and with the same set of basic apps (like DVD burning/mastering etc) costs the same as iMac - why would you buy Dell in the first place? To me it seems that if you spend $1500 on a Dell plus retail Mac OS X instead of iMac - you'll get lower quality product.
Hence no retail Mac OS X - nobody is interested because iMacs are priced on par with comparable Dells.
There is Front Row - check out decent Mac sites, read reviews - you'll be surprised how much you missed, hehe ;-)
nullpointerus - Monday, June 19, 2006 - link
Not everyone who wants to run Mac OS X wants to purchase a prebuilt computer for it. You should know that if you're posting here because this site is mostly made up of enthusiasts.Mac OS X w/ Front Row isn't comparable to Windows MCE. Show me the integrated program guide and automatic recording capabilities. You may as well compare Paint to Gimp or Photoshop.
Pirks - Monday, June 19, 2006 - link
Same can be said about the post of the guy above asking for the OS X retail version. If I should know this site is for enthusiasts - THEN HE SHOULD KNOW what OS X is and why it is so successful and generates lots of buzz in IT press - pecisely because it DOES NOT have a retail version. Hence asking OS X to give up it's number one advantage - smooth integration with hardware because hardware is NOT open - is not much smarter than my post above.Depends on what the user wants. I suppose some users are happy with limited functionality of Paint and don't need/don't want Photoshop.
nullpointerus - Saturday, June 17, 2006 - link
"We also tested the boot times for a clean install of each operating system, using a stopwatch to see how long it took for the OS to boot to the point where it presented a usable login screen."Um...you must have something seriously wrong with your system. I'm using a lowly Athlon64 3000+ Winchester and 2GB PC3200 RAM. I did a clean install of the x64 version and timed it with my digital watch; it took ~50 seconds to get to the desktop, not the login screen. I had to switch to the 32-bit version because of driver support, and I can tell you it doesn't take 48 seconds to get to the login screen.
Now, if you rummage around in the control panel's performance applet, you can look at services and drivers which are slowing the boot process down; USB audio and nVidia's drivers affected my system, and even so it starts nearly 30 seconds faster than your clean x64 system. Maybe there's something on your PC that's causing problems?
Also, something on my second boot will chew up large amounts of CPU time, making the login screen unresponsive. On subsequent boots this problem disappeared, and I was able to enter my password immediately and login fairly quickly. I have drivers for my Linksys WMP54GX and Creative Audigy installed now, too, so my PC should be worse than your clean system.
Maybe you could check these things out and retest?