Starmen.Net

First of all, allow me to point out--quite vehemetley--that any anti-vista and anti-microsoft posts will be moved to the evidence bin. This is a topic strictly about the beta test of windows vista.

Anyway, I finally got a beta of Windows Vista the other day! I, of course, obtained it through "other means", but it's now happily sitting on my computer. The build I'm running is the pre-beta 2 build that's floating around the internet, so it has many more features than beta 1. My machine has modest specs, at best:

Athlon XP 1800+ @ 1.6ghz
512mb DDR Ram
120gb Hard Drive (Vista on 18gb partition)
32mb GeForce2 MX 100/200
Onboard VIA Sound

The first thing I noticed about Vista is that the installer isn't as "interactive" as XP. As a matter of fact, it asked me three questions and then it installed. First, it asked me for the license key (which is an obvious question,) then it asked me where I wanted to install the OS, and finally it asked me what I wanted to name my computer. After that, it went on its merry way. I was also quite happy with the fact that I was able to install it from an ISO via Alcohol 120%; it copies all the files it needs to the hard drive. The Vista installer is a definite departure from Windows installers of yore; it doesn't bug you with messages about how awesome the OS is and instead just serves you with a "VISTA IS BEING INSTALLED" message. This was both good and bad. It was great because I didn't have to read all the Microsoft propaganda about the new features in the OS, it was bad because it took almost two hours to install.

After installation, I was presented with the default desktop. Aero is an OK-looking UI, however it'd be good if they could tweak it slightly so it looked better. Needless to say my computer did not default to the glass effects, however I'll get into that later. The UI at first seemed really unresponsive and slow, but once I disabled a bunch of unneccessary services it ran a lot better.

I haven't had too much time to go into details about the OS, but I can tell you that most things have had graphical and usability overhauls. It detected my LAN card and my video before install, so I didn't have to find drivers for them. I did go to nVidia's site to find the beta LDDM drivers, and after downloading them I was kind of disappointed that they didn't explicitly support my card. After some fiddling with the drivers, I decided to leave the Microsoft ones in there, since they were already LDDM and ran fine.

The new layout of many things is really nice. I especially like the new Control Panel layout; it's not as "tonka toy" looking as XP's, but still retains the same style. You can still go into classic view, though. Also, the new save/load boxes are very nicely laid out, albeit a bit difficult to navigate unless you change the icon style.

Of course, I just had to see if I could get Aero Glass to work. I didn't think I'd be able to, but there was only one way to find out. I found a special registry hack online that allowed me to enable DWM (compositing) for "unsupported" cards, so I ran it not expecting too much. To my suprise, DWM worked alright on my GeForce 2, albeit a bit slow. After downing the resolution to 1024x768 (which was REALLY painful, considering I run at 1600x1200,) DWM was more or less fast enough to be usable. I fiddled around with it and turned off the animations, (they didn't work as nicely as the glass effects,) and soon I was running with a DWM-Enabled GUI.

After playing with the glass effects for a few minutes, I realized it was time for games. I haven't tried the games in Beta 1, although from what I understand they haven't recieved the "updated" graphical style that was present in Beta 2 screenshots. Luckily, in this pre-beta 2 version, games are very nicely updated. I was kind of disappointed to find out that I had to disable DWM to play the built-in games: it gave me errors saying it couldn't find a Direct3D renderer for everything. After disabling DWM via the regfix on my desktop, I started playing Solitaire. My, how it's grown. Instead of being the boring old solitaire that hasn't changed since Windows 3.1, it's now quite a lot more graphical. It also runs really well, considering all of the extra graphical stuff thrown in. I was very pleasantly surprised at the updates they've given everyone's favorite game. The other card games seem to run on a similar graphics engine, too, which gives them a bit more consistency than in XP.

There are a couple new games included with Vista as well. There's a Chess game called "Chess Titans" which runs in full 3D; A "baking" game called Purble Place; and a mahjong clone named "Shanghai." They all run quite well on my modest setup, and I was quite pleased at the new games (although purble piece is really kiddy.)

Finally, Internet Explorer has gotten a complete overhaul. It now supports tabbed browsing that actually looks good, and is very minimalistic. Some people don't like the look, but I think it's a nice departure from the cluttered IE of XP. I haven't had time to fiddle with it too much, but it's cool.

All in all, Vista is pretty nice. I have encountered a couple bugs related to old XP programs running in Vista (for example, mIRC has a couple bugs where the text input box turns white when typing in it,) and the registry editor has major issues with RAM usage. I was easily able to get my audio drivers from XP to work in windows, which was a plus. I'll probably report back with more compatability reports, but so far it looks like Vista is shaping up to be a good successor to XP. It has quite a few graphical changes but also a lot of usability changes that help make your computing experience that much better. I'll definetely be testing Vista more often, especially now that I have a laptop to do stupid crap on

Hear hear.

I had the Beta1 "procured"...but I never got around to putting it on a test machine (you wouldn't honestly run beta software on a live system, would you?)...and I think I removed it. I might just have to look into "getting" it again.

What the hell is purble place?

Heh, yeah. I was really surprised how well it ran considering the crappiness of my video card. Still, it also could be the fact that my drivers were LDDM, which afaik only ATI and NVIDIA have beta support for.

Also, Purble Place is this really weird 2-in-1 game where you can either bake a cake or guess what these little monstrosities look like. It's hard to explain the second game, think mastermind with monsters.

See if alt+shift+2 still works in solitare. It had better have the same awesome ending cinematic.

I've used it and I can't tell any difference from XP other than what's either A) cosmetic, or B) functionally impossible with an XP theme editor.

This is so like, last year.

My bro is in the beta, and we were also in the beta for XP and berore.

the_artic_one wrote on Thu, 29 September 2005 01:39

Sexier than mine?


(Alienware darkstar theme)

Ugliness seconded.

I was in the SIGMA version of Windows 3.1

http://www.nvidia.com/page/technology_vista_home.html

Dude, I invented Windows. What? WHAT!?!?!?

Yeah, one thing that I hope they change in the future is the fact that everything is so big. It's nigh impossible to navigate folders with the normal settings.

And the transparency is nice

If all the windows I had open right now were transparent, I think I would just turn off the computer and start over.

I like it ok, but if I can use windows classic, I'll probably stick with that. And I will wipe every hard drive I see with it on it unless I can make things smaller.

A little off topic, but here's a screen I took of IE7 in XP. I don't think IE7 deserves it's own topic yet, considering it's still in beta.

http://fronline.net/kelim/ie7xp.PNG

I've actually been having issues with the transparency; that is, it keeps turning itself off and on. It was originally on when I first installed everything, then I tried installing the vista drivers for my video card and the transparency turned itself off. I screwed around with the video settings for a little bit, and the next time I restarted I had transparency; I installed a few media players and the transparency turned itself off.

Not that it really matters; it was pretty, but I'll probably just end up staying with the Windows Classic theme, same as I do in XP.

That could be it; Quicktime was one of the things I installed. But you said you found a way to force it to do the transparency, even if the system thought the card was unsupported? Maybe doing similar could fix it for me?

What I just want to know is if I'm going to need to patch EVERY piece of software I have (like Nero, FFXI, all my college programs that I need for homeowrk, Office, etc.) before I install this sucker *I have also obtained this through other means*. If you could clraify on that, Sling, it would be much appreciated.

You realize that is is most likely customizable (i.e. you can move the search engine wherever you want), right? It really depends if it was modeled that way in the picture, or if that is the default location. Either way, IE7 is based on Firefox, no? Tabbed browsing and all. Either way, I'll stick with good ol' Firefox.

Vista looks weird, although I do kind of like the transparent task bar. Other then that, I see no point in transparent effects like in the title bars. Also, I'm just curious; what does the start menu look like in Vista?

double post holy crap!!!

I'm running the new beta, 5231 (which is only slightly newer than the other one I was running.) It's introduced a few new bugs, but I think I've worked around most of them. The bugs that are there are forgivable, since AFAIK this was only intended to be a demonstration build yet somehow it leaked. I was pleasantly surprised to see it supported my sound right out of the box. Glass effects were sort of wonky with the default drivers, so I installed the XP ones--it works REALLY nicely now, especially considering I'm running a 32mb card that shouldn't even be supported. The only thing that isn't supported (which was pointed out to me,) is the blur effect, which REQUIRES pixel shader 2.0. Anyway, without further ado, here's a screenshot--can anyone point out what's wrong with it?

Uhh, mIRC says the only channel you have open is #bemani, but you're in #flatface?

I'm currently "coming by" a copy of this release.

Updates to follow.

Sorry to revive an old topic, but there's a new build! The build number is 5270, and it's actually one of the better builds I've tried. There have been a few changes to the UI.


There are minor changes in glass, but they're there. For example, on cards that don't support blur (like mine,) the text is surrounded by a soft white outline so it's easier to read stuff. Also, as you can see the start menu button looks different... What could it possibly be hiding??????


OMG! New start menu design! I like this much better than the old ones. You can customize it however you want, which is REALLY awesome. The "all programs" menu still doesn't flyout anymore but I'm getting used to this new design. It's awesome to note that when you hover over the icons on the right hand side the user picture actually changes to that icon!


zomg! flip 3D! It's the new feature in vista that all the cool kids are talking about. Basically, it causes all the windows to fan out in 3D so you can easily scroll through them. it's been slightly changed in this build so the windows go more in a circular pattern. It's awesome.


Ooh, here's the sexy new network center. Actually, I have no clue what the point of it is; from what I can tell it's a program that shows you how you're connected to the internet. It's actually kind of useless. And buggy. When I closed it, explorer crashed.


Err, new Windows defender. It actually is sorta useful... When I installed the nVidia drivers, it popped up asking me if I wanted to allow certain things to start next time I started my computer. I'm not sure exactly what this is supposed to do, though, but from what I can gather it's a spyware thing.


New save dialog. It's interesting to note that Paint DEFAULTS TO PNG!!!! Also the save dialog now initially has the filename and the filetype, you have to press "show folders" at the bottom to get the full-blown dialog box. IMHO it's sorta GTK-y, but whatever.


New media player! It also queries somewhere (not sure where) and gets album covers/titles. Pretty SWEET. Although with visualization on, it REALLY slows down the computer :S

A few extra things:

- Solitaire has been updated this build. It's alot snappier and less buggier. The dialog boxes for it also have been revamped so they have less explaination--before, there was a paragraph on what each option did when most of them were self-explainatory.
- Alt-Tab switching has been changed, before it "scrolled" through everything and now it tries to fit all open windows in it. It's kinda hard to explain, but it's alot better than before.
- A LOT of the control panel things have been changed. They range from slight (System dialog) to INSANE (display properties, theme and color scheme are now three completely different things.)
- They changed where DWM stuff was stored. If you're running 5270, drop this into a .reg file and run it:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\DWM]

"UseMachineCheck"=dword:00000000
"Glass"=dword:00000001
"Animations"=dword:00000001
"AnimationsShiftKey"=dword:00000001
"Blur"=dword:00000000
"Composition"=dword:00000001
"UseDPIScaling"=dword:00000000
"ForceSoftwareD3D"=dword:00000000

Basically, they changed it so it's in HKEY_CURRENT_USER and they changed "EnableMachineCheck" to "UseMachineCheck". Also, if your card supports blur, change "Blur" to equal 00000001.
- Aero Express (the non-glass version of aero) has also had some slight changes, mainly in the fact that the buttons at the top-right corner are colorized.
- No sidebar from what I can tell
- Vista now prompts you when you have to do system administrator-type stuff, like entering a regkey. Although it takes forever to load up the prompt. They'll eventually fix it, but for now it's a pain to get the prompt loaded.
- Smnet snow is slow on vista

if anyone has any other questions, drop me a line.

[edit] OH, also note that my video card doesn't support pixel shading, which is WHY I HAVE NO BLUR. I REPEAT, THERE IS NO BLUR IN MY SCREENSHOT. DO NOT COMPLAIN THAT THINGS ARE HARD TO READ BECAUSE WITH GOOD CARDS THERE WILL BE A BLUR BEHIND THE GLASS MAKING THEM EASIER TO READ.

No clue. It runs alright on my computer, but your mileage may vary.