So here's my personal review of Windows Vista Beta 2 (Build 5384). I finally downloaded all 3GB of it yesterday and installed it. My first question is what could cause the installation files of Vista to be about four times larger than that of Windows XP. Is there a whole secret library of videos somewhere that I haven't found?
The interface is nice looking. Edges are all rounded and shading looks nice. One big thing I find missing is this supposedly revolutionary Windows Aero interface that is supposed to make windows look like glass and basically take advantage of the video card more. I'm not sure why I don't have this feature. My video card meets the system requirements. Very odd.
I tried out some of the software and came across this "Windows DVD maker" so I tried it out. But I couldn't get past the first screen because apparently my video card does not meet the minimum system requirements! Well this wasn't a cheap video card so are they expecting me to buy a video card that costs more than the whole computer? It could run Battlefield 2 in Windows XP without any problems so I'm not sure what they're expecting.
So far my hardware hasn't worked too well with Vista. Windows automatically installed video drivers but is missing many of the features of the drivers that came with the video card. I tried installing from the CD but was told the drivers could not be installed.
Wireless keyboard and mouse, and my flash drive worked fine as they should have. My Linksys USB wireless adapter was not even detected my Vista. Once I had installed the drivers off the cd it was found though I manually detected it and then it installed fine. Vista seems to support WPA2 encryption so that is one thing better than XP. Vista wouldn't let me install the Linksys connection manager though so I had no choice.
The biggest problem was the integrated sound. Vista installed drivers for it and it appeared to work properly but there is no sound in Windows Media Player and Winamp worked for a few songs, then lost all sound. Now I have no sound at all.
I think the best feature of Vista is the new version of solitare :)
In conclusion, I will be keeping Windows XP as long as I can. Either until I buy a new computer with Vista pre-loaded on it, or Firefox is no longer supported on XP :)
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5 comments:
Well your blog is the first place that I have even heard the name of the new version of Windows! Wow, am I out of the loop! Thanks for posting this informative review!
Steph you're a hardware person, not a software person so you have an excuse :)
Jenni you're right on about what a Beta is. Its just a version that is still in development because it has some bugs still. Although final versions always have bugs too but they're just less obvious.
I actually installed Vista on an old hard drive so I just swapped the hard drives back and everything is back to normal :)
Sorry you couldn't get Windows DVD Maker running. What video card do you have? It's possible that the video drivers just don't expose what we need at the moment in this build.
Dean Rowe
Development Lead
Video Memories Group, Microsoft.
I was using the default drivers that came with Windows for my card, which showed up as an ATI Radeon 9200 Mobile. Not sure why since this isn't a laptop. I tried installing the drivers that came with my card but it crashed the installation program. Does it really need that high specs just to make DVDs?
We require the card to support Pixel Shader 2.0 and Vertex Shader 2.0 as we use those abilities of the graphics card to composite the motion menus. Unfortunately looking at the specs of the ATI 9200 (http://www.ati.com/products/radeon9200/radeon9200/specs.html) it looks like it only supports 1.4 pixel shaders and 1.1 vertex shaders which is why DVD Maker can't run.
I know this doesn't help you at the moment, but most cards you can buy today will support those requirements. e.g. I see that it looks like the ATI X300 card supports those requirements and they appear to be around $50, so you don't really have to get the latest and greatest video card to run DVD Maker. Obviously the better your video card the better things like interactive preview will be though and MovieMaker for Vista also uses the power of the video card so you can do things like edit high-definition video in real-time.
Sorry again that you card doesn't support this, but when you get a chance to try out the applications on a system that supports the technologies hopefully you'll see that the extra abilities make it worth it. Please don't hesitate to contact me (you can contact me through my blog) if you have any other questions.
Regards
Dean
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