Now that Vista (man, I’m having a hard time saying the new name after all these years of Longhorn) is in beta, it’s time to start seriously digging into it.  This post is just a very high level look/first impressions, and kicks off a new post category devoted to the topic.  I’ll dive more in depth in future posts.

First impressions aren’t that good actually; I do realize this is a beta and that at this point it’s only 1/3 feature complete (which kind of negates the whole point of being a beta IMO… .Net beta 1 was much more complete than vista beta 1…but that’s another topic).  Installation on a very fast machine took about an hour and a half; the second part of the installation after the reboot was gruesome at best…you get to stare at a screen with a green status bar that rolls on seemingly forever and an hourglass icon, no visual/text indicators as to what’s really going on.  It does finally get past this stage though.  The plus side of the installer is that it’s fully graphical and not text based.  I am sure the installer will get cleaned up in future betas/RC’s.

I won’t rehash what can be found in countless other blogs about what’s there/what isn’t at this point…I actually didn’t get too far after installation anyways because it absolutely refuses to recognize any NIC I throw at it correctly.  With one it reports a bad gateway address (which isn’t the case), with another it reports that it’s not connected to the modem (which of course it is)…ad nauseam.  I’ve seen other reports of similar issues.  What’s curious is that looking at the NIC properties, I see that Client for Microsoft Networks isn’t installed (a nice shiny yellow question mark is beside it); clicking install generates an error, something to the effect of “the necessary files could not be found”…this even with the Vista install disc in the drive.  There is no add/remove Windows components functionality either (graphically speaking at least…Bob thinks I should be able to do this via the command line, haven’t tried it yet).  I got pretty frustrated at this point and left it alone.

As far as the GUI goes, it looks great and is very snappy.  The window animations are a blatant ripoff from OSX (though not nearly as fluid…I know this will change in beta 2); that being said the new icons are nice and shiny, resizing them (in folder view) via the slider is kinda cool (though I don’t really see the point).  The icons actually displaying what is in them is pretty slick, but I don’t know how necessary this really is…nothing more than eye candy IMO.  And then there’s the transparency that everyone has been talking about.  I have a love/hate relationship with it at this point…it looks great, but functionally speaking is actually quite annoying once you get multiple windows open (it’s hard to explain, anyone who is test driving the beta should know what I’m talking about); when they overlap it’s confusing which title/menu bar you’re actually using.  I’m sure after time I’d get used to it (and I’m sure this is configurable).  That’s as far as I made it; would love to comment on IE7 but with no internet access…well, kinda hard to test a web browser without some pages to hit.

I hope as more people test (and write about) Vista that I can get the NIC issue sorted out.  As stated above I’ll do some more thorough under the hood looking around soon.  It should be noted this was all with the i386 codebase; I’m gonna install the x64 version over the weekend and see if the NIC issues persist.  At this point I give it a “meh.”

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