Warning: this post is waaaay too long (sorry)

Anyone who knows me will know I freely admit to disliking Windows for a great number of reasons… However, I thought I’d give the latest beta (sorry, Release Candidate apparantly) a try and see if Microsoft truly have managed to clamber above the mediocre at best standard that we’ve seen in Windows 95,98,Me and XP.

In a word… erm, no. 

The installation process for Vista was considerably smoother (and simpler) than previous versions of the OS, however it still took around 45 minutes and needed to reboot three times. Despite this it was incapable of detecting my (fairly standard) NVidia graphics adaptor or indeed my (even more standard) sound card, meaning when the install eventually did complete it started up in 640×480, silently… What makes this more confusing is the actual installation process made a far better attempt at graphics.

So, two visits to the Control panel, multiple “Confirm Access” dialogs and a restart later, yes apparantly you still need to restart the entire computer to change certain video settings, I have it running at a proper resolution, and with sound (the start up chime is the same as always sadly!) 

So now that I actually have Windows running, what shall I do? Well there’s a number of applications included in Windows now like iPhoto Windows Photo Gallery and iDVD Windows DVD Maker (to go alongside iMovie Windows Movie Maker)

Well Windows Photo Gallery actually works, and seems like a reasonable piece of sofware, it’s not on par with iPhoto or even Google’s excellent Picasa. But it’s nice to see them trying.

Windows DVD Maker and Windows Movie Maker would not run. My computer apparantly isn’t powerful enough (AMD64 Athlon with 1GB of RAM)… this is worrying considering iMovie and iDVD will run happily on a G3 iBook!!!

Internet Explorer 7 is impressive, well at least the rendering engine in it is … The actual UI of the browser is sooo inconsistent with anything else (they’ve dropped the menu bar for once, or at the very least moved it into a sort of drop down menu of menus) and Microsoft Office 2007 (also now menubar-less and toolbar-less) is even more ‘interesting’

At WWDC 2004 Apple poked fun at Microsoft with banners like “Redmond, Start your Photocopiers” and “Introducing Longhorn… Today” and sadly it seems VERY obvious that the photocopiers were indeed started (but they must be the really slow Canons from the 1980s to take this long!) and some features are just direct copies of Apple’s OS X.

• Windows Search -> Spotlight
• Aero is very “inspired” by Aqua
• Sidebar -> Dashboard (but implemented badly)
• iPhoto / iTunes / iMovie etc… - Win Photo Gallery / Win Media Player / Win Movie Maker etc…

Also if Microsoft’s idea of improved security is to dim the ENTIRE screen and ask me to verify I want to do what I just asked it to do, then they’re really not trying hard enough.

It took me about 20 mins of playing with Vista to get it to crash in one form or another … and Matt managed it (admittedly by being cruel and trying to get it to do more than three things at once, a 300% increase in previous versions of windows however) in about 10 minutes. At least when it crashes it tries to fix itself, and the blue screen of death so far hasn’t reared it’s ugly head.

Oh I started typing this post on the Windows box, but I couldn’t bluetooth the pics of my phone, windows kept throwing silly errors at me… then IE7 crashed twice on the Wordpress admin interface.. so I gave up and went back to my PowerBook.

This is supposedly “Release Candidate” software, meaning Microsoft are actually considering releasing this version… obviously we know they wont and there will be an RC2 and possibly RC3 before it get’s anywhere near the shelves. However Microsoft have announced a release date for Vista of November 2006 (Business Edition) and January 2007 (Consumer Editions) … Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard is still considerably further away and from what I’ve heard… a lot more stable even at this early stage, and with some very impressive features.

Also remember Apple are currently keeping a number of these back from the general public eye… i.e. until after Vista ships and it’s too late for Microsoft to copy yet more innovations from the fruit company.