![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Wednesday, April 04, 2007
- Author:
- Brian Boyko
- Editor:
- Jason Wall
- Google +1
30 Days with Windows Vista
Comparisons, conjecture, and controversy. Microsoft's new operating system is here, but is it ready for primetime? We spend 30 days with Windows Vista to see if it's worth the leap or if Microsoft should go back to the drawing board.
Installing Programs & The User Interface
System Update:
I had to reboot to install Windows Updates, but it was already automatically downloading information. For the most part, Windows Updates ran in the background without much of a need for me to do anything. I experienced no problems with it and it worked as it should.
Adding and Removing Programs:
This is a simple process because of its familiarity, and it has remained essentially unchanged from Windows XP. Programs are installed by double-clicking on the install file (sometimes .msi, but usually .exe) and are uninstalled by going to the Control Panel and uninstalling the program from a list of installed programs.
IE7's tabbed browsing works acceptably well, but it's still playing catch-up to Firefox. I replaced the built-in Windows Live Search with Google (setting it to the default), and then used IE7 to download OpenOffice, Gaim, Firefox, AbiWord, and Xchat - each individually from their respective websites. One annoying thing - if IE7 doesn't trust the website in question, it will block you from downloading a file and requires separate confirmation. Most annoyingly, this happened on SourceForge.
User Interface:
The default UI for Home Premium – which all of you have probably heard by now - is Aero, which adds some eye candy to the desktop. Essentially the entire desktop is rendered in DirectX; this has some unobvious advantages. For example, each window is drawn individually (instead of rendering the entire desktop as a faux-3D plane) so you'll never find that a non-responsive application is left with blank space when another window is moved over it. It also allows for those much-vaunted Flip 3D effects.
It turns out that Flip 3D is a poor UI. First, as a way to view all of your open windows to find the one you're looking for, it's ineffective because your windows are partially obscured by the windows above and below it. If you're looking to read text, the text will be distorted by the 3D perspective. Furthermore, Flip 3D brings up the window you click on – but I spent more than a few minutes in confusion as I believed that I could select the window you wanted by flipping it to the front and then clicking anywhere on the screen to exit the interface. This in effect was making “no selection” and it brought me back to whatever program was previously on top. Because of its poor implementation, we thought that it seemed like it was added on as an afterthought to "compete" with Mac OSX's Exposé feature.
I also noticed something strange about the title-bar transparencies in Aero. As you can see in the images, while the windows were tiled, the title bars were partially transparent. (Translucent may be a more appropriate description, as you can’t see anything underneath the bar, i.e., you can’t read text.) While lacking any immediately apparent functionality, it certainly had a “cool” factor. When the window was maximized, however, the title bar turned an opaque black. It’s not clear to us why Microsoft would bother with this, but we found it slightly odd.
There’s also the activated-by-default Sidebar gadget bar on the right. It is not "Always on top" unless you select that option, individual gadgets or the entire Sidebar can be disabled easily (unlike Mac OSX's "Dashboard"), and while the default gadgets were largely uninspiring, the Sidebar was generally unobtrusive.
I installed Xchat and it asked me to confirm the installation - the screen went black and then popped up with a "Allow” or “Cancel" dialog box. This dialog box comes up every time I want to install a program, and since I'm installing programs one at a time (instead of all at once), I have to cancel or allow the programs individually. This gets tedious quickly. And this is just the beginning. Merely running the programs that you, yourself, the user, installed will often require you to allow or cancel the operation every time you want to run the program – not just the first time. If this could conceivably dramatically improve security concerns, then being constantly annoyed with the security pop-ups might be worth it. However, the cancel or allow screen does not require you to enter a password.
We don’t claim to be experts in computer security, but what I can tell you is that a system that requires you to enter a password only you know is a much harder system to crack than one which may just require you to click on something or hit a quick standard keystroke. If a malicious program makes its way onto your system, activating a quick keystroke or even taking control of your mouse in order to select the “Allow” option is certainly theoretically possible.
A good OS tends not to get in the way. Windows Vista seems to fail that prerequisite - pop-ups for Windows Firewall are already noticed by those who use Windows XP SP2, and the new security measures are even more intrusive.
Yes, Linux and Mac will both ask you for your system password when doing certain tasks that require administrative/root access. The difference is that Linux and Mac require this access much less frequently than Vista does. This is partially because of Vista's supposed backwards compatibility. Apparently the folks at Microsoft were concerned with granting previous versions of Windows administrative access, so to be on the safe side, it seems any non-native-Vista program needs permission to run at any time. Really, in our opinion, this creates a “Boy Who Cried Wolf” syndrome for the user. The first few times the security pop-up presents itself, the user says, “What’s this?” and reads it. After about 30 pop-ups, the user stops caring and just wants their damn program to run.
The file system's big features are an additional "home" directory - like Mac and Linux - and a "games" menu just for your games. One of the big improvements is that Microsoft has designed this operating system so that you spend as little time as possible - theoretically - rooting through folders for the files you want. Using IE7 will put all your downloaded files in the "Download" folder. Gadgets go in the Gadgets folder. Still don't know where it is? Use the Search function in the Start menu, which we found to work exceedingly well.
The UI worked well until I started to do some real work with the computer. I wanted to root through the directories and Windows made it somewhat more difficult to access them. It’s one thing to make an OS simpler; it is another to dumb it down. In short, these new features will generally make it much easier for computer novices to do the work they need to do. But Microsoft has made it harder for power users - the group of readers most likely to read this article - to do the more complex work that they need to do.