Vista 5308 Screenshots and thoughts...

Sunday, February 26, 2006 11:21:00 AM

A bunch of screenshots can be found here.

My comments…

So I decided to install the latest Vista CTP (5308) on my laptop. It’s going quite well so far, in fact I’m writing to you from it right now. For some reason the glass theme/UI isn’t working but I’m sure that’s either my video card doesn’t support it or I haven’t dug into the right setting.

Many big changes have happened in this release. The start menu is much more useable. The sidebar is back, even though you have to go hunting for it to turn it on.

Every so often when browsing around in the Control Panel it just stops working. None of the items are selectable anymore. Just close the window completely and go back in. At times even Explorer itself has some issues, no BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) though. Windows handles it quite nicely.

This was my second chance and using IE7. I wasn’t much impressed with it the first time, and the second time it seems to be a bit better, maybe I have just started to adapt. One thing I like with my tabbed browser is that it always forces you to stay in that browser, no “new windows” which pop-up and out of the browser itself. I believe FireFox handles it the same as IE7. Control-N for a new window, Control-T for a new tab in the current window. I think I could get used to this. Even though I prefer one single window at all times for my browsing there might be some advantages to having the ability to jump out of that single window. Time will tell.

The big thing I dislike about it is that you can’t actually close that last window. In my opinion Control-F4 or hitting the X on the tab itself, if it’s the last tab should close the current content and bring up about:blank. Its important for me sometime to completely get rid of all content on in that browser. To me it just feels cleaner and that task/duty is done and out of my face. I finally figured this one out. Simply click the new tab button and then close all others. The new blank page sits there all alone.

Also, it appears that clicking on the “Research” Add-in in the toolbar completely kills IE7. Avoid that one! In fact now that I have selected it, it tries to keep it open for each new instance, which means I have killed IE. Maybe if I just let it sit there for a while it will go a way and do what it needs to do on its own. No luck. So I killed the process. I noticed that if you right-click the IE shortcut you can actually start IE without the Add-in’s. Doesn’t help at all, other than locking up IE. So next I tried to open up the control panel, Network and Internet, Internet Options. In the Programs Tab, there is “Manage Add-ons” at the bottom. You cant actually delete the Research Add-on, but you can disable it. Of course this doesn’t help, so when all else fails reboot! I actually just logged off and back on again and it appears to be working. When IE first loaded it actually had the research bar come up. Must be a bug with the Add-ins, I guess.

Another big thing I noticed with all of Vista and IE7 is that it seems they want to get you away from the classic menu’s. The “File”, “Edit”, etc. menu system. You usually have to go hunting for them and turn them on.

The SideBar was something I was really looking forward to using. Back in the day when http://www.start.com initially gave developer geeks like me the ability to create our own gadgets I was probably the first non-MSFT to actually create a few gadgets. One was a google search gadget, and another a Flickr gadget. Well I haven’t actually kept them up to date and they have fallen off of the face of the earth so I cant test them, but I did manage to test some of the others at http://www.microsoftgadgets.com. The word on the street is that you can (will) be able to simply drag the gadget off of the IE7 browser window and onto the SideBar. I tried with no luck at all.

The really sucky thing now, is that once I got the SideBar going and logged off, when I log back in it complains about its setting file being read-only and it basically just falls down around me. I have no idea what’s going on with that. I went on a hunt for the settings file. Found it along with the actual SideBar application. “C:\Program Files\Windows Sidebar”. So I force ownership, make sure its not read-only and make sure my user has full rights to that file. Nothing works. It still complains. Time to move on.

I can’t seem to get the Search working for the local computer, not to mention the old Control-F pops up a window which just closes right away. Sort of strange. I feel I killed some setting in some obscure place which I cant recall at this moment.

Security really seems to be a big thing with the OS now. Every executable has to be authorized to run (where is the “I authorize this program always” checkbox?). The SideBar settings file issue I described above is simply the file, wherever it is, is locked up, has a different owner, or something. Some of the things I have placed on my desktop have faced the same fate. I also noticed that I cant installed drivers for my sound card, which is pretty annoying because now for sound events it uses the PC speaker, and the PC speaker on my laptop is a pretty annoying BEEP. I have turned off ALL sound events in the control panel, but that doesn’t change much.

I really like what they did with the Network Center. In my opinion it really clears up any confusion around the XP style of wireless and wired network connections. Gaining access, viewing your current setup etc, all has a really nice UI wrapped around it with the ability to get to the same level of detail as what was previously there.

I’ve installed Office 2003 Pro with no problems. I actually have pointed Outlook to pull my PST from my Windows XP partition, I can share the same folders between installations. Pretty handy if you ask me. The only issue I have is with the darn filters and how it forces it for the “other machine”. I think I might have to edit each filter and remove that constraint. Pretty annoying.

Gaim also works quite nicely, with the GTK support of course. I use Flickr.com as my online photo store, and its free upload tool works right out of the box, which means .NET must be installed on this machine. It appears that both v1.0.3705 and v2.0.50727 are installed with the OS.

More to come, when and if I have the time.

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