Windows Vista 5384 is great, but still definitely a beta

As mentioned in my last post, Windows Vista 5384 is great. I can distinctly remember my first experience with the O/S some time ago, and at the time was unable to get it to even finish booting properly without crashing. It just didn’t like my ATi Radeon 9800 Pro. As soon as the drivers were installed, it’d never boot again.

The 5384 build of Windows Vista was fantastic. The Aero interface was simply stunning with it’s etched glass effects, and the Window+Tab way of switching between programs was exemplery. I also liked the live preview that the task bar would give you of a program if you hovered the mouse over the program tab. I first assumed that it was just a quick snapshot taken of the application and then displayed, but later I saw it showing the animations on a webpage after I had brought the preview up.

The new way of handling users documents and such should be great, however, I believe that that may be the cause of some of the issues I was having with certian other programs. Many of the apps that I use regularly would not save their settings. The program itself would run fine, but any modifications that I had made to tune it to my tastes would inevitibly be forgotten the next time the application was opened.

I also was unable to get my Phillips chipset TV tuner card to work with anything. Windows Media Center couldn’t find the device, InterVideo WinDVR would actually display things fine, but when you’d attempt to activate the program (the “activation” would come up as soon as it was started, unlike in XP where you had a month after the install to activate it) it would crash, so that was unusable. Since my TV tuner card is effectively my only television, I didn’t watch any for the couple weeks this was installed.

OpenGL programs also ran horribly. I realize that the apps that use it in a windowed environment would suffer because of Vista’s increased reliance on Direct3D especially now that the desktop is rendered as opposed to just bitmapped. But even full screen programs didn’t work well. I use the HyperSpace screensaver from Really Slick Screensavers and it’s framerate under Vista was abysmal. Keep in mind this is with the very latest Vista drivers for my nVidia GeForce 6800.

There was also the boot time issue. I am used to, and require, my computer to boot and run quickly. Any delays at all with pretty much anything drive me absolutely batty. The poor boot time could be attributed to bad drivers that didn’t completely function well. (Vista did flag my RealTec ALC850 sound card as an issue) but even after the machine was up and running some things just didn’t perform well. My hard drive was also hammered almost continuously. I’m willing to accept that while things are loading that the HD needs to be used, but I have over a gig of RAM, so there shouldn’t be an issue loading everything into memory. My pagefile usage was only ~470 meg when done booting. This is large, yes, but less than half of my available RAM.

So, while Vista will be great, the programmers for Microsoft have their work cut out for them.