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On January 30, Microsoft will release its next-generation operating system, Windows Vista. Microsoft’s previous OS, Windows XP, was released October 25, 2001, more than 5 years ago. Given this long development time and Microsoft’s massive amount of development dollars, what is the new OS like? More importantly, should you upgrade to Vista?

Multiple Editions

Unlike Windows XP which had “Home” and “Professional” editions at its launch (it has since acquired several extra editions along the years), Vista has three consumer editions, two business editions, and a “starter” edition. Besides having different levels of pricing for each, there are key functional differences to them. For end users, there is Windows Vista Ultimate, Home Premium, and Home Basic. For businesses there is Windows Vista Business and Enterprise. For details on each edition and its pricing, there’s a nice comparison chart on Wikipedia.

For the purposes of this review I am going to use Windows Vista Ultimate. This will allow me to check out the full range of Windows Vista features as it includes the features of Home Basic and Premium, as well as Vista Business. The retail price for the full version of Ultimate is $239 and $159 for the upgrade. For comparison purposes, Windows XP Professional retailed at $299 for the full version and $199 for the upgrade. Of course these prices varied by reseller.

System Requirements

In addition to having multiple editions, Vista has multiple system requirements as well. Microsoft has outlined two levels of system specifications for Vista systems. The low end requirements that define a “Vista Capable” system are an 800Mhz processor, 512MB RAM, a DirectX 9 capable video card, and a 20GB hard disk with 15GB of free space on it. The high end requirements that define a “Vista Premium Ready” system are 1Ghz CPU, 1GB RAM, a DirectX 9 capable hardware accelerator that supports 3D rendering in hardware, 128MB of video memory, a 40GB hard disk and a DVD-ROM drive.

I will be testing Vista on two different systems. The first system I will be testing Windows Vista Ultimate on is an Athlon 64 x2 3800+ CPU system with 2GB RAM, 200GB SATA hard disk, a GeForce 7800GT 256MB video card and has a DVD-/+RW installed. The second system will be my 2.16Ghz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro with 1GB RAM, 120GB hard disk, ATI Radeon X1600 128MB, and 6x dual-layer Super Drive. On the MacBook Pro I will be using Windows Vista Ultimate under the VMware Fusion Beta. The VM settings are 512MB RAM (796MB initially), 16GB hard disk, and access to both cores of the CPU.

These two different configurations will allow me to sample Vista without all the fancy eye-candy, and with all of it enabled and made it easier to include a variety of screen shots in this article.

Installation

Most people who use Windows have never dealt with installing it. For those who have, all Windows installations since Windows 95 have been slow, and pretty annoying. Instead of baby sitting your computer while Windows installs, you might prefer to start installing Windows and go away and do other stuff. If you’ve ever done this, you know that when you come back to your computer there’s a dialog box waiting for input. You click a few buttons or enter some text and the Windows install proceeds slowly again, so you go away only to come back for another dialog box and Windows still not being installed.

Windows Vista changes this and asks most of the questions up front. In fact the installer is much more intuitive than previous Windows installers, and looks more like a modern Linux distribution’s installation routine (albeit less questions on it than a typical distribution.) After copying the files Vista asks you to setup your user account and then the security settings for your installation. The following are some installation screen shots taken during the installation of Vista in VMware on my MacBook Pro.

First Impressions

The most obvious thing is the new look of Windows. It looks very, very cool. Open windows have transparent borders, the minimize, maximize, and close buttons on the upper right corner glow when you hover over them. There’s a nice, smooth, cool-looking animation when you minimize and maximize windows. Everything looks really slick.

After the installation completed and I had logged in, Windows Update started up automatically and installed 10 updates. I found it pretty amusing that the night before the OS is officially released there were 10 updates waiting to be installed.

After a short time playing around with Vista a window popped up telling me I had a problem with my computer, and it offered a solution. It turned out the driver for my sound card wasn’t compatible with Vista, which I found odd since it was the driver the OS itself installed. It offered to fix the problem, went out to the Internet, and came back telling me it found a solution, but couldn’t fix it itself. I wasn’t sure if this feature was cool or not. If it actually came back with a compatible driver I might have been more enthusiastic about it.

Usability Enhancements

With five years of experience since Windows XP, and over 10 since Windows 95 debuted, it’s pertinent to ask what sorts of usability enhancements Microsoft has added to Windows Vista.

The Start Menu is very similar to the default one in XP. It looks a lot cooler, like the rest of Windows, and functions almost the same. However a major difference is that instead of menus that pop-out it overlays within the menu itself. This makes having a ton of programs installed easier to browse to on your Start Menu because using the Start Menu wont fill up your entire screen.

In addition to the aesthetic changes on the Start Menu, it includes a search box built right into the bottom of the menu. It functions equivalently (so far as I could tell) to Mac OS X’s Spotlight.

The Windows Explorer interface is different as well. There’s an integrated search box in every Explorer window (exactly like Mac OS X’s Finder) which will make finding folders and files easier. My Computer also looks nicer, as you would expect, but functionally is similar to Windows XP. As you can see in the Explorer screen shot of the Windows folder, there’s still a lot of random clutter in C:\Windows.

The Windows Sidebar is also functionally equivalent to Mac OS X’s Dashboard application. You can install widgets to it that do various things. By default it comes with a clock, an RSS feed reader, and a widget that displays a slide show of some images pre-installed on Vista.

In addition, there is speech recognition built into the OS and a parental controls feature, neither of which I tried.

An application called Windows Defender is included by default that scans your computer for malware. A similar application has been available from Microsoft as a download addition to Windows XP.

The Control Panel application looks nearly unchanged from the Windows XP version, other than the standard visual enhancements. The standard view, and classic view look nearly identical to Windows XP.

Applications

Windows Vista Ultimate comes with a variety of applications for productivity and multimedia. Internet Explorer 7 is installed and looks nicer as well. Its appearance has become much more similar to Firefox and Safari than the old Internet Explorer.

A calendar application, Windows Calendar (screen shot), is included and is similar to Mac OS X’s iCal program. The included email client, simply named Windows Mail, is a visual improvement over the crappy Outlook Express that was included with XP. It has anti-phishing and anti-spam features, finally. I set it up with my work email account and it worked fine both receiving over SSL encrypted IMAP and sending via TLS authenticated SMTP.

Windows Meeting Space, a replacement to NetMeeting, is an online collaboration tool where users can share their desktop or single applications with other users on the network.

On the multimedia side of things, Vista comes with Windows Media Player 11, which looks much improved from the one that came with XP in 2001. It includes an online store, similar to iTunes, where users can purchase content.

In addition Microsoft has included Windows Movie Maker and Windows DVD Maker, and Windows Media Center. Movie Maker is similar to OS X’s iMovie and DVD Maker is similar to OS X’s iDVD. Windows Media Center is the same deal as what is included with XP Media Center that provides a full screen interface for content stored on the computer to be displayed, as well as the playing of DVDs and TV if your computer has a TV tuner card installed. Like Movie Maker and DVD Maker both being similar to their pre-existing OS X applications, Windows Media Center is almost functionally the same as OS X’s Front Row. Front Row doesn’t support TV tuners as far as I know, however. Finally there’s Windows Photo Gallery, Microsoft’s answer to OS X’s iPhoto.

I didn’t take the time to use any of these applications for more than a couple of minutes, so I can’t speak to their functionality, but it is nice that Microsoft is finally including standard features that have been standard in Mac OS X for some time already.

Stability

I haven’t used Vista for long enough to get a good sense of its stability. I did have Control Panel freeze up on me and I couldn’t kill the window until I restarted Vista. I didn’t try playing any DRM content since I don’t have any HD media or displays to test the stability of all the DRM that is included.

On my MacBook Pro, after the Windows Updates installed, Vista didn’t boot after 15 minutes at the post-BIOS loading screen. After shutting down the virtual machine and restarting it, Vista booted fine.

Performance seemed to be very good on my desktop. The 3D effects did not slow the computer down at all. I didn’t keep close watch on the memory usage of the OS and its applications, but that could be an article for the future. Naturally the performance under VMware on my MacBook Pro was horrible, but I’m not going to comment on that.

Based on my prior experience with different versions of Windows (and almost everything else), the initial release always has annoying bugs and crashes that always get fixed over time. Certainly Vista is no exception and there will be more problems that I discover as I use it more. Microsoft has acknowledged that Service Pack 1 for Vista will be out by the end of 2007, so the stability will no doubt improve. I’ve heard that there have been some reports that games running on Vista have encountered some problems, but I did not try to play any games on it. I anticipate writing more about this topic in a future article on Vista.

Security

One of the key improvements to Vista is supposed to be increased security. Of course, since it was just released, we have yet to see just how much the improved security of Vista will make a difference. Something users will notice right away will be the confirmation dialogs for doing almost anything of substance in Vista. Installing programs and drivers results in a dialog popping up asking for the user to click continue if they accept whatever changes are about to be made. If your user account doesn’t have administrative privileges you will have to supply the administrator login and password.

Internet Explorer 7 has its own security enhancements which should help reduce the amount of security problems Windows users face while browsing. It contains anti-phishing functionality and runs with lower privileges than the user to help isolate it from the rest of the system thereby reducing the potential to exploit problems in IE. IE7 also runs with certain features, such as ActiveX controls, disabled by default.

Vista’s firewall is also improved over XP allowing users greater control over the filtering rules. I didn’t play around with any of the advanced firewall features. The firewall, as in XP Service Pack 2, is also enabled by default.

As mentioned earlier, Windows Defender is Microsoft’s anti-spyware tool.

If all these features are implemented properly and stand up to the tests they are sure to face over the coming years, hopefully there will be a huge reduction in the amount of computers involved in botnets. Of course it will be many years before a significant portion of PCs are using Vista so these problems are here to stay for the foreseeable future.

Conclusions and Verdict

After playing around for a little over a day with Windows Vista Ultimate, I can say without a doubt that it is an improvement over Windows XP if for nothing else than a cooler look, a nicer Start Menu, and a better suite of included applications.

However despite these improvements, I could not help but feel that Vista was an overall disappointment. After five years and many promises, this was the best Microsoft could do? During that time Mac OS X and Linux have come much farther than Windows Vista from XP. While using Vista there really were no differences over XP in terms of the general use of Windows. Clearly, if Microsoft had switched things up much more there would be more problems in terms of users getting used to the new interface. The general architecture and design of the OS itself hasn’t changed much at all from XP. From my short time using Vista there doesn’t seem to be anything that it can do that Windows XP, or even Windows 2000 can’t do. People who need the functionality provided by the new applications that come with Vista (Ultimate) already use applications that do what they need to do right now under XP and 2000.

I can’t really say that Vista is much more than a nicer user interface to XP, and indeed Windows 2000. There isn’t anything revolutionary at all in Vista compared to XP, and other operating systems in general. A lot of what Vista can now do has been done in Mac OS X for years. The latest KDE is still, in my opinion, functionally better than the latest Microsoft has to offer.

So, should you upgrade to Windows Vista? Unless you’re planning on buying a new PC, I’d say no. Right now Vista doesn’t really offer much to users other than a very fancy and cool looking GUI. If you really want to take advantage of the new GUI you’re going to need a higher end system than your run of the mill desktop PC. By waiting until at least Service Pack 1 for Vista is released, you’ll be able to buy a much more powerful PC with an OS that has had some bug fixes applied. Even so, there’s no rush. Windows XP will be supported for a long time to come.

Businesses have even less reason to upgrade to Vista. Many businesses have only recently finished migrating to XP from 2000, and XP is most likely more stable than Vista is at this point. Not only that, but Vista’s hardware requirements are much greater than XP’s so many businesses will have to factor in hardware costs as well. Since Vista doesn’t really offer any killer features, businesses should definitely wait awhile before considering an upgrade to Windows Vista.

In the future I will write more about Vista as I use it more and discover different things about it.