neurological dryer lint

i've had windows vista RC1 running on a test PC at the office for a few weeks now. specifically the 64-bit version running on my xeon engineering workstation.



said this before: i would pay $10 for this OS. what you have here is a more attractive interface that, while aesthetically pleasing, is otherwise worthless. you have built-in gadgets that i think some people that don't want to download konfabulator will find useful. you have more closely integrated searching and all-the-time indexing of everything on your PC. some (read: the lazy or unorganized) will find this valuable.

it's only more secure in that it attempts to annoy you into doing less with your PC. instead of intelligently nailing down some of the more potentially dangerous tasks that could damage your computer and limiting those, UAC blanket-prevents you from making any changes to your PC without clicking a button in a dialog box. changes like the system time on your PC, or where a shortcut to an app points. adding extra steps never hurts, except for when (as in this case) the dialogs look the same - so whether you are modifying the time or a critical registry key, the prompt looks nearly the same, and users will get so used to saying "accept" that they will do so even during a malicious activity - defeating the purpose of the feature.

(to be fair - this feature is customizable by an administrator to be more selective, from what their blog tells me, but out of the box it's pretty oppressive)



enjoy the shots, where IE7 does its best firefox impression. i love that microsoft sent a cake to the firefox team after v2 came out. considering the new IE's changelog is 99% stolen from two-year-old releases of firefox - tabbed browsing, built-in RSS support and a modular search bar - they owe them a little more than a cake. like half their salaries.

performance-wise it runs well. it better on a box this powerful. running in parallels on the macbook at home (where it gets one core of the core duo and 512MB of RAM) is a different story - crawls quite a bit more.

some of the visual effects are tasty. the 3d alt-tab replacement (using windows-tab) is quaint but gets old after two uses. much was adapted from OS X - the look of windows opening, closing and minimizing; the counter showing the # of files being copied during a drag & drop; the sherlock-esque search bars... one new feature is a thumb of a minimized window when you mouse-over a button on the taskbar. again, cute but ultimately small potatoes.

i still haven't received my RC2 discs from Microsoft, so i'm reviewing an older build, but i hear that it's mostly behind-the-scenes changes. there is no chance i'd pay retail - in fact, very little chance, given a free copy, i would install it on my home PC.