What a Vista

Posted by stephen on Friday, 09th June, 2006 @ 12:56

Out of curiosity (and so I could poke fun) I decided to throw in the towel and run Boot Camp on my iMac now I've got a nice full system backup in case anything goes wrong. As Microsoft recently released Vista Beta 2 as a public beta I downloaded the 3.5Gb ISO (how the hell can an OS be 3.5Gb?!). A flawless partition resize from Boot Camp rebooted me into the Windows installer.

Finally the installer is graphical from the beginning! It took a very long time, but finally completed leaving me with a non-bootable Windows install that I was expecting having read about someone else's attempt at the install on the iMac. Rebooting the install DVD and running a repair fixes the problem within a couple of minutes and viola, Vista boots.

Of course I'm totally biased against Windows, so don't expect any kind of fairness in my comments here. I will however say that it is a beta, so perhaps can be forgiven for a few things.

I was pleasantly unsurprised to find that Apple have nothing at all to worry about. Windows still massively lacks the attention to detail you'll find in OS X. At various stages of initial boot up and login there was zero feedback to indicate the computer was actually doing anything.

Windows now pops up a little authorisation dialogue whenever it wants to do something risky. But in doing so it blacks out everything and forces you to make your choice immediately, whatever you might have been in the middle of. Add to that the interesting little feature of the dialogue seeming to appear in completely random places with each request (at one point on the lower left corner of my second monitor where there wasn't even anything running).

The visuals are improved somewhat, but in my opinion they are rather garish and overstated compared to OS X. And the little Alt-Tab alternative (Windows-Space) that lets you cycle through windows by rotating them to 45 degrees and looking through them like a deck of cards seemed to have horrible jagged lines and very badly scaled window content. Come on Microsoft, sort it out!

And I'll leave with one last helpful tidbit. Whilst working out what hardware I've got and installing drivers, Vista failed to find the driver for a particular thing online so requests the driver CD. But the prompt rather unhelpfully doesn't tell you which device it is!