Windows Vista Beta 2 public release

[Vincent]

Waccoon wrote:
How does folder navigation compare to older versions of Windows?  Can you add classic or custom buttons?

Unfortunately you can't really do anything with the toolbars in the explorer shell.  Which is a bit of a c***, I liked having  things like folder options on the toolbar.  You can add the normal file menus though (as I mentioned earlier) and they do appear the same as the menus in 2k and XP.

You still have the back, forward, address bar and search bar, but there's no "up" like before.  But that's not really missing as they've improved the address bar.

The address bar now looks like:

> Computer > Local Disk (C:) > Windows >

The arrows are clickable and give you relative folders to what the arrow is for.

Example:  if you click the arrow to the right of Computer you'll get a drop down menu with all your drives.  If you click the one to the right of (C:) you'll get a list of all the folders on C:.  To go up one level, just click on the name of the above folder, eg clicking Computer will take you to Computer.  Funny how it's not My Computer anymore, I wonder why ;-)

It's actually a very handy improvement.  You have more control over where you want to go, and it's a lot easier to go back to previous locations without having to hit back a few times or delete part of the path in the address bar.

Below the address bar you have another toolbar that changes depending what type of folder you're in.  A normal folder (eg Windows) has Organize, Views, Share, Burn, Previous versions and Add to Index...

Organize > New Folder, Cut, Copy, Paste, Undo, Redo, Select all, Layout, Folder Options (I wish I knew about this much earlier), Delete, Rename, Remove properties, Properties, Close

Views > Extra Large Icons (big thumbnails), Large Icons (medium thumbnails), Medium Icons (small thumbnails), Small Icons, Details, Tiles (small thumbnails with name, type and size).

You still have the info pane on the left, but you have a Folders button at the bottom that shows or hides the folders pane.

I find it awkward not having buttons like "Stop" and "Home" in the web browser (Safari on the Mac drives me crazy)

IE7 has Back, Forward, Address Bar, Refresh, Stop and a search bar in the main toolbar.  Below that you have the normal IE6 menus (if you've enabled them).

Below them you have your tabs bar which has Favourites, Add to Favourites, open tabs, new tab, Home, RSS, Print, Page and Tools.

Home, RSS, Print, Page and Tools all have their own drop down arrows:

Home > (homepage), Change Homepage, Remove

RSS > gives a list of the feeds for the page you're on

Print > Print, Print Preview, Page Setup

Page > New Window, Cut, Copy, Paste, Save As, Send this page, edit, Zoom, Text Size, View Source, Security Report, Web Page Privacy Policy

Tools > Delete Browsing History, Diagnose Connection Problems, Blockup Popper, Phishing Filter, Manage Addons, Work Off line, Give Beta Feedback, Windows Update, Fullscreen, Toolbars, Internet Options

So, without having the menus avaliable, everything is still easily accessible.

One thing about the "classic menu"s (in both IE7 and the explorer shell), they appear below the main toolbar.  But once you start using them you don't really notice the change.

Navigation and hotkey shortcuts are very important to me.  The Mac is geared too much to people who don't do serious work, and Apple has intentionally cut out the "useless" buttons.  I'm worried that Windows is going in the same direction.

I'm not sure about shortcuts, I haven't really tried many except the usual copy (Ctr C), paste (Ctr v), Task Manager (Ctr Shft Esc), Start Menu (Ctr Esc), normal menus (Alt), program switching (Alt Tab).  What shortcuts do you use a lot and I'll check if they're still working.

[Olecranon]

A 2600Ghz CPU, 1Gb ram and it's slow ?!

It's maybe worth $200 - $300ish.  I have a couple 1Ghz PC in my basement that I can't hardly give away.

[Argo]

I have a couple 1Ghz PC in my basement that I can't hardly give away.

Install AROS or Linux or BSD. Home file server! Put MythTV on the other.

[Vincent]

Wow, just found something quite nifty.

I've just tried installing Sygate Personal Firewall without any problems.  But after restarting it doesn't appear.  Smc.exe is running, but there's nothing in the taskbar.

A window (with Sygate as the title so I'm assuming it's a Sygate warning message) pops up saying that the service has been started but it is unable to show the user interface.  the only option is to click OK.

Then another window pops up titled "Interactive services dialog detection":


Check device or program request

A device or program has requested attention but can't display it's own dialog box on your desktop.  The device or program may need information or permission to complete a task.  Windows can help you check the request, then return to your desktop when you are done.


You have two choices, Check request... or Cancel.

Clicking Cancel does exactly that and it leaves the process hanging in limbo.

But upon clicking Check request the screen goes black for a few seconds then a window pops up at the top:


The device or program will display it's own window below if it still needs attention.

When you are donw, or if you need to return to your Windows desktop for information that the device or program needs, click My desktop.


And the smc window does appear in the middle of the screen.  It's saying that Sygate has a missing component and needs to be reinstalled.

Now, you can have two options.

One is to click My desktop on the Windows message.  That takes you back to your desktop where the first message window (blah blah needs you attention but can't display the message) is still showing.  You can just click that again to return to the black screen with the error message.

Or you can follow the instructions on the device or program error message (for me it was just to click ok which made Sygate terminate itself).  Once the error has been resolved (or cancelled, whichever) the Interactive services window changes:


The device or program is no longer requiring attention.

The message may have been one that required no action, such as a quick status notification.  Windows will notify you if it reappears.


All you can do at this point is click My desktop.  You return to the desktop and carry on as normal.  If the device is still causing a problem then this process will repeat itself, if not then there's nothing to do.

I was quite surprised that Sygate couldn't show that simple message, maybe the Vista GUI is heavily changed from XP.  But then everything else has worked fine.

All the programs I've installed (no problems unless stated):

DivX Player 6.2
Google Earth (Using software rendering, but that's due to not having the official nvidia drivers, works fine anyway)
ICQ 5.1
Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.4
MSN Messenger build 7.5.0324
Quicktime Player 7.1
RealPlayer 10.5 (Vista warned that there was a problem with updating RealPlayer, but I haven't been able to check yet)
Winamp 5.23
XChat 2.6.5
Steam (Half Life and Blue Shift only so far, working fine)
Opera 8.54
UltimateZip 3.0.3 (works fine until you try to quit, you have to end process)
Sygate Personal Firewall (unknown version, but possibly not 5.x) (see the above problem - reinstalling doesn't work)

All in all not too shabby :-)

--edit--

Oh, and DirectX 10 is installed with Vista.

[Unit21]

My question is simply;

What are all those fancy 3D things for?
Do they serve a purpose beyond being eyecandy?
Does Vista bring us anything new that is useful. Of course, a new way of setting this and that around the Desktop might make it easier to use, but is there Anything New that is really USEFUL?

I have a P4 2,4Ghz and an Nvidia 6800. Will this do the trick if I choose to try it out?

And where can I find it anyway?? :-)

I gotta tell you, I struggled alot with choosing a new laptop and I am glad that I landed on an Apple-machine. If you ask me OS X is the best Desktop OS out there... And no, I don´t use my Puter to play games...
(I have a Gizmondo for that...)  :-P

[Vincent]

Your PC should be powerfull enough for a look.

I still haven't turned off all the eye candy and this AMD 1.6GHz is still managing to cope.  And I'm using a 7 year old 30Gb HD that's probably a bit on the slow side ;-)

To get the Beta 2 Public Release just click here.  There's links to an "Upgrade Advisor" that (once installed) asks you what you want to do with Vista (and no, shoving it up Bill's ass is not an option :-P ) then scans your system to see what needs to be upgraded, if anything.

The scan told me that I'd need a bigger HD:

Additional hard drive storage
15GB free space required (Your computer currently has 9.45 GB)

But I just ignored that as I wasn't going to be installing it to that HD anyway.

But instead of doing that you could just click on the System Requirements to see what you need.

To get Vista itself you need to have a Hotmail account (even if you never need it for anything else, it's a good idea anyway if you want to test out Office 2007 aswell or any further public beta releases).  Once you've registered you'll be given the link to download it along with the product key.

A word of warning though, when I tried the servers were getting too many requests.  And it is 3.2Gb.  You'll need a DVD burner aswell.  Or if you've got a DVD drive you could just order a DVD of Vista from m$ themselves.  All you do is pay the postage.

You can download it using any download manager you want, or you could use one provided by m$.  I used GetRight myself and didn't have a problem.  And I regularly maxing my connection speed (4Mbps) and if you have a faster connection I'm sure you'll still max it out.

As for bringing something new besides eye candy?  Wasn't that what they said about XP? ;-)

[orange]

It sucks

that reminds me of old 'joke':

"The first time you'll get a Microsoft product that doesn't suck will be on the day they start producing vacuum cleaners."

 :-)

[DonnyEMU]

Some tips for people using Vista for the first time.

1) If you are in IE 7 or media player and you cannot find a menu item that you are used to finding try hitting the "ALT" key. You will find those classic menus that you remember and know inside the application.

2) If you are having problems with x64 and getting your drivers installed hit F8 as you boot to disable the driver signing security measure (or use the BCDEdit tool). This won't be available on the final release as signed drivers will be required from what they are saying.

3) look for the words "FOLDERS" in the GUI if you wanna see the old tree view for folders..

4) USB thumb drives have a new caching option, be sure you are doing the "safe removal" procedure if you have that caching option enabled..

5) if you miss the run command on the star menu don't forget the short cut it's still there (WinKey + R)

6) if you miss seeing "my computer" and various icons on the desktop, you can still put them there, just find them on the start menu and right click on them and on the pop up menu select "show on desktop".

7) the backup and restore center now lets you create a burnable disk image  (CompletePC) backup of your entire hard drive (like ghost or driveImage) take advantage of this to make a good back up of your hard disk.

Windows media player now includes built-in networking, so you can thru Universal plug n play to share your songs directly in media player with every other PC on your network in the house by streaming it. This really rocks because your big computer can become a jukebox for every other PC (a media server).

9) Windows Calendar is compatible with iCal so you can share your calendars with your mac friends..

10) Make sure internet protected mode check box is turned on in all "ZONES" unless you totally know for sure you can trust everything you mark as a "trusted" site.. In internet options.

11) Don't use bitlocker if you have multiple partitions and you want to be able to see all partitions..

12) Use the performance and rating tools, they'll identify slow loading problems and driver issues.

13) check out performance and rating tools as they will tell you how to improve your performance.

14) In control panel/Advanced tools/Open windows diagnostic console there is are two options a performance monitor AND a RELIABILITY monitor. This tool rocks, it will tell you how stable your system is and what's having problems..  It charts software and driver installs, Application Failures, Hardware Failures, Windows Failures and even Miscellaneous failures.

If you want to learn why your system is having problems or what's causing the problem and how to fix it, going there will tell you a lot about your system and chart when things started going downhill, giving you a clue about how to fix things or at least back yourself out of problems..

15) The CLIPPING TOOL is sweet! it lets you snapshot the screen or any area of it and either copy as graphics and text or a Jpeg or PNG. If you take something out of a web page it also notes the URL and appropriate references and paste into any app..

Please note this is the first version of Windows and integrates specialized graphics processors aka GPUs..The desktop is fully integrated with DirectX and if you have an older machine please be sure that you have a machine that really supports its features.

The desktop has something called "Flip3D" which lets you shuffle windows like cards and supports resolutions and pixels DPIs higher than 96 DPI.. The entire desktop has been redesigned around vector graphics support to support the coming higher resolution displays. In a couple of years we will start seeing like 300 pixel per inch dense monitors and windows already supports this. So if you are wondering why all of the non stoneage graphics, this is why.

Also when you play with the new windows movie maker and it's GPU assisted rendering of transitions and FX you will be glad it's there. The DVD maker program is pretty cool too..

If you want to check out what people are already using vista's updated graphics for check out:

http://www.seewindowsvista.com

If you want to see a 200DPI LCD monitor that supports these kinds of graphics check out extreme tech's review here.. The resolution's only around 9 million pixels (or 3840x2400 pixels)

ExtremeTech's 200 DPI monitor review (only 8G)

[Waccoon]

ptek:  A 2600Ghz CPU, 1Gb ram and it's slow ?!

Beta builds usually are, as they have debugging enabled.  I remember when Win2K public builds came out, they were very slow, and people were complaining left and right.  Then, Win2K final came out, and...  WOW, was it fast.

Now, OS X... that's a serious performance pig.  It was completely unhappy running on my mini until I put in 1GB of memory, and it's still slow.

Vincent:  Unfortunately you can't really do anything with the toolbars in the explorer shell. Which is a bit of a c***, I liked having things like folder options on the toolbar. You can add the normal file menus though (as I mentioned earlier) and they do appear the same as the menus in 2k and XP.

You still have the back, forward, address bar and search bar, but there's no "up" like before. But that's not really missing as they've improved the address bar.

I suppose that's OK.  I never use the folder options button, and I use the Back/Forward buttons on my keyboard to navigate,  Stop to close windows and Backspace to go up.  I have so many media keys for everything.  It actually ticks me off that there still aren't dedicated copy/paste/undo/redo buttons on PC keyboards.

That's actually one thing that really annoyed me about XP.  By "simplifying" the taskbar, combining all windows for an application as one button and not giving each window its own button, that made navigation a lot more difficult.

Vincent: if you click the arrow to the right of Computer you'll get a drop down menu with all your drives. If you click the one to the right of (C:) you'll get a list of all the folders on C:. To go up one level, just click on the name of the above folder, eg clicking Computer will take you to Computer. Funny how it's not My Computer anymore, I wonder why

They're getting rid of spaces in folder names, thank God, presumably to make things easier now that Windows will be getting a proper shell.  "Documents and Settings", for example, will now be "Home", which is what it should've been in the first place!  Less clicking, more typing.  That makes me happy.

I sure hope Vista has more action control, though.  One thing I love about Windows is that DirectX allows you to remap any control to any other control -- a brilliant design principle that still eludes the Mac and even game consoles.  My Microsoft keyboard allows me to remap the media keys to certain buttons on windows, so I can close/resize/move windows by pushing a button.  This requires a special driver, though.  I hope Vista will have this support built-in.

What would really make my life easier is to assign certain actions to any DirectInput control.  It would be nice if I could draw in Photoshop with my tablet, while using a media trackball with my left hand to zoom.  That would be very sweet.  There are some devices like that, but they are extremely application-specific.  Being able to remap this stuff on the fly would open up a lot of options, including the ability for me to build my own controller from scratch using parts from a USB joystick.  I've been wanting to do that for years, but I don't know how to make my own DirectInput driver.

OS X is pathetic in this respect.  Everything is done Apple's way, and everything is hard-coded the way they want you to use it.  Expose is a good idea, but, it's useless with the extremely limited remap options Apple gives you.  Doesn't anybody understand interface design at all?

Hyperion, please take notes.  Don't underestimate how profitable these touches can be, given how easy it is to implement them.  Given the choice between decent, expensive 3D support and cheap, fully remappable controls, I choose the controls.  Spend months writing 3D drivers, and you'll still always be behind the PC industry.  Spend a week or two rethinking the interface controls, and that alone will be a major selling point to power users.  It's really not that hard or time-consuming to implement useful features.

Thanks for all the info, Vincent.  I'll probably update to XP (so I can actually get drivers) and stick with that.

[seer]

ptek: A 2600Ghz CPU, 1Gb ram and it's slow ?!

Beta builds usually are, as they have debugging enabled. I remember when Win2K public builds came out, they were very slow, and people were complaining left and right. Then, Win2K final came out, and... WOW, was it fast.

Previous builds do seem faster then this public release tho. There are also some programs that no longer run (like NOD32) and that now cripple the OS (try Guildwars ans say hello to Vista dying, well it did here). IMHO, this build should have stayed internal, not a public release.. Or they should have released 5365 or even 5342 to the public.

But now that this build has been running for a whole night and having defragged the HD it feels a bit faster. I might get rid of the sidebar tho, seems rather useless now, and likes to take a bit to much CPU time.. (using the monitoring gadget that comes with it..)


I personally prefer how the explorer of vista works over the one used in 2000/XP.

[Vincent]

Waccoon wrote:
That's actually one thing that really annoyed me about XP.  By "simplifying" the taskbar, combining all windows for an application as one button and not giving each window its own button, that made navigation a lot more difficult.

You can turn off that "feature" in Vista the same way as in XP (right click the taskbar, Properties, uncheck Group similar items).  I've always hated that and I've always had it switched off.

I might switch it back on the next time I boot Vista though, I want to see how the preview works with grouped items.

They're getting rid of spaces in folder names, thank God, presumably to make things easier now that Windows will be getting a proper shell.  "Documents and Settings", for example, will now be "Home", which is what it should've been in the first place!  Less clicking, more typing.  That makes me happy.

Maybe they are, but there are still plenty of folders with spaces in at the moment (like Local Settings, Temporary Files etc).

Thanks for all the info, Vincent.  I'll probably update to XP (so I can actually get drivers) and stick with that.

No probs.  I knew people here would be interested in Vista and seen as no one had posted on it yet I though I'd make a start.

It's probably not going to be an important upgrade for a lot of users until 2008 anyway, and by then most people will have upgraded, SP1 would be released for it and it'll be working a lot smoother.  But it's still an interesting upgrade.

I'm going to try out stuff with the User Access Control (I think that's what it's called) activated.  I was getting so annoyed at not being able to do anything I switched it off, but now that I'm a little used to Vista I'll switch it back on again and see how it limits things.

That's probably the most important security feature that's being introduced.  Itll stop anything making changes on a system level unless you allow it.  And you can't do anything in Vista until you either allow or deny the request so there's no risk of losing the requester or the action being carried out without you being notified.

[Vincent]

DonnyEMU wrote:
5) if you miss the run command on the star menu don't forget the short cut it's still there (WinKey + R)

Thank you, I couldn't find it and thought they'd disabled it so I had to run tasks through the Task Manager.

This is a great tip :-)

[motorollin]

Vincent wrote:
Wow, just found something quite nifty.

\


Sounds extremely irritating. Why do you have to click through all those dialogues and make all those decisions just to see an error from the app? Why can't it just appear, like every other decent OS on the planet?

--
moto

[Vincent]

I'm not sure, but I'm thinking that it could be that Vista is now using vector graphics.

That window has only happened with Sygate.  Absolutely nothing else so it's maybe the way that Sygate draws it's windows on the screen that's the problem.

[motorollin]

Waccoon wrote:
I find it awkward not having buttons like "Stop" and "Home" in the web browser (Safari on the Mac drives me crazy)

Errr...



--
moto

[motorollin]

Vincent wrote:
I'm not sure, but I'm thinking that it could be that Vista is now using vector graphics.

That window has only happened with Sygate.  Absolutely nothing else so it's maybe the way that Sygate draws it's windows on the screen that's the problem.

So you're saying Vista is only capable of drawing vector windows? I can't believe that - what about when you open an image file, that's not a vector isn't it. I'm sure if they really tried hard, Microsoft could allow Vista to render a bitmap object in its vector environment.

--
moto