Windows Vista: The Evolution is a Boring Beauty

Microsoft's latest operating system, Windows Vista, out quietly since November last year, hit the retail shelves yesterday. It hasn't exactly taken the world by storm. Read on to find out what makes this product so unexciting and overpriced, and why Vista's appeal may change even if it stays the same.

After five years of development, Microsoft finally released its latest operating system in late November, 2006. But does a million man hours a jewel make?

While in the lab, Windows Vista was known as Longhorn, a codename that, over years of broken promises and variously broken release candidates, became both hated and loved by the ever-vigilant community of geeks. Even now, on the retail shelves, Vista is a lot like the lovable and pitiful Wizard of Oz-all bells and whistles, but with an old man wheezing behind the luster.

Other reviewers have rightfully pointed out that the most compelling reason to upgrade to Vista right now is eye candy. Microsoft kept at least one promise, and named its operating system after it! The new visual interface, named Aero, sporting a stained glass theme and subtle transition effects, makes Windows XP look positively medieval.

Compared to OSX, the visuals look a little garish, but still next-gen. Bravo to the graphics team at Microsoft for giving users something pretty to look at while the old juggernaut crunches their hardware to dust indexing, shadow-copying, smart RAM-caching, windows-defending, network autosensing, and generally doing everything except what the user needs done most urgently.

To no-one's surprise, the system requirements for Vista are also next-gen. Although you can get away with a 1Ghz+ processor and 512RAM, running Vista on such specs defeats its name. Even if you have a relatively fast computer, those short of a video card with at least 64MB dedicated video RAM won't be able to enjoy Aero.

If you have failed Microsoft's online Vista compatibility test (which is overly harsh), don't bother upgrading your computer. Chances are, you will need to buy a new PC very soon. And, chances are, you will be sold Vista with it and still get a good deal. As of January, 2007, upgrading your current system to run Vista will likely be more frustrating than frugal, due to lack of proper drivers for some essential existing hardware.

The driver situation may or may not change. Microsoft knows well enough now that the way to make money off of an operating system is to bundle it with new PC's. If you're out shopping for one, there are two stickers to watch out for: 'Windows Vista Ready' and 'Windows Vista Premium Ready.' If you want to run Vista Home Premium or Ultimate Edition (the two that come with Windows Media Center), you will need the latter sticker.

Apple aficionados may be pleased to discover that, despite claims of increased security, Vista is fully backward-compatible with a wealth of viruses, Trojans, and delectable adware. This is no doubt due to its continued reliance on the Windows registry-now officially the longest-running blunder in the history of software development.

By increased security, Microsoft means an increased number of dialog windows aimed at nursing healthy paranoia in end users, who will then click on balloons and be sent to buy some Microsoft-endorsed, overpriced, and only marginally functional form of internet protection.

The only danger Vista neutralizes efficiently out of the box is the one posed by its user. Yes, User Account Control doesn't merely alert you when your actions can potentially harm the system, it seems to block almost every move you and your programs try to make outside of your designated directories. As far as I could tell, there is no way to tone it down. Turning it off was the first thing I did.

One thing that works great in Vista is the MS Orb (former Start Menu) Search box which, incidentally, works just as great for finding files on your local machine and running command line programs. It can also search the internet, as long as you opt to keep Internet Explorer 7 as your default browser. Which I would not recommend. Though safer, neater, and smoother than any of its horrendous predecessors, IE7 is far from being safe, neat, or smooth.

But not all is genetically dire in Windows Vista. Media Player 11, despite a few rough edges in its multiplicity of features, is a capable and visually appealing media organizer. If you opt to buy Vista Home Premium or Ultimate edition, the new Windows Media Center alone is well worth the purchase (but triple-check hardware compatibility!). It is highly intuitive and fun to play with-so much so that it hijacked all my male guests during a recent party. They thought it was some sort of an absurd pseudo-futuristic jukebox lifted from an old sci-fi movie. But, judging from the looks on their faces, its absurdity was highly addictive.

Another thing that Vista is better at than any previous Windows release is letting users organize and manipulate media content easily. This applies not only to music, but also to photos and documents. Ease is achieved by adding a number of relatively simple features such as the ability to crop photos to standard sizes, edit mp3 tags directly in Explorer, or the option to merge two versions of a document together.

Vista boasts a score of other small improvements that come with years of user feedback, a small portion of which was taken to heart. Finally, the Windows installer can enable new drivers without rebooting. The integrated internet driver search and update now works, at least some of the time. Fireworks are in order.

Dual monitor detection and handling is also a lot smarter, and so is power management. On laptops, Vista automatically enables a hybrid suspend-first hibernate-later mode while desktops by default suspend like Apple Macs. Those features work well, although Vista is a much deeper sleeper than OSX. Depending on how cluttered your desktop was when it suspended, Vista can take over 3 minutes to awaken on slow machines. This is especially true if you have Aero, which achieves significantly better results that OSX's Aqua, but at quadruple the toll.

Alas, a review of Windows Vista that doesn't compare it to Macintosh OSX Tiger will be considered incomplete by many. So here it is, prefaced by the customary autobiographical note: I use both, but I am a much longer-standing Windows user.

The two systems are comparable graphically. Microsoft Cleartype has matured, and the system font is finally adequate enough to make Vista users unashamed to flip open their new Dell Inspiron next to an Apple PowerBook or MacBook Pro.

That said, the Microsoft team that designed the icons for default applications should be fired and given glasses by way of severance. The good news is Windows has always been more customizable visually than OSX and it's only a matter of time before someone releases a brilliant icon pack to remove these atrocities from our screens.

It's true, Vista has copied a lot from OSX-some of it quite well. The Windows Sidebar, counterpart to Apple's Dashboard app, takes desktop widgetry to the next visual level. The search toolbar works noticeably better and is more versatile than OSX's.

In other respects, imitation was not so successful. The Windows Switcher app, manipulating active windows in 3D like OSX's F9 key, sacrifices usability just to be different. It stacks the windows in a deck so the user can't see any changes occurring in them. This makes the app completely superfluous. The 2D window arrangements Cascade, Stack, Side by Side, and even the good old Alt+Tab, work much better. Because of them, window management remains a high point in Vista-productivity is expected to at least match that of XP.

Windows Vista comes in five flavors, tailored to different needs:

Vista Home Basic, at the 'rock bottom' price of $199 for full version, $99 for upgrade, is completely superseded by Home Premium which, at $40 to $60 more, will buy you a great foundation for a PC-based entertainment system. The future of home entertainment is now clearly XPC's and HTPC's running Media Center and sharing content, including live and recorded TV broadcasts, over a wireless network. The Xbox 360, for those who have it, can integrate easily as a Windows Media Extender, letting your PC content flow into the living room. It is no accident that Microsoft Zune supports wireless streaming. Even if you don't own either, a Windows Media Center PC will let you access your content easier. Microsoft is no Sony-it thrives on licensing hardware developers to build cheap compatible devices.

For small business owners, Windows Vista Business edition is an "all work and no play" workstation that should do the job. Considering that Vista uses the good old NTFS file system, and the same network security modules, it should integrate easily into existing office networks. For the same reason, it would offer little by way of improvement over Windows XP Pro. At this time, there is no compelling reason to upgrade at $199. However, new businesses or branches concerned with future software compatibility and speed issues may choose to spill $299 per machine (triple the price of the five-client Windows Small Business sever) as entry fee into the 64-bit age.

For larger businesses, Windows Vista Enterprise offers greater flexibility than Business in both the workstation and the office network aspect. Multiple copies of MS Vista Enterprise are licensed through a local key management server, unlike other editions, which must be licensed through Microsoft. If you are concerned about network security and own more than a room full of computers, Enterprise may be the way to go.

Finally, Windows Vista Ultimate is the whole nine yards, presently retailing for $399 (full install) and $259 (upgrade).

The figures speak for themselves, and what they say is: you will be much better off buying your next PC with Vista preinstalled than upgrading from Windows XP. The pretty and unremarkable Vista is the way of the future, yes, but you can definitely do without it for at least another year. Driver and software migration issues may be resolved by then, and the price is bound to drop.