Windows Vista In Review by Thomas Ward
Hello gamers, friends, and fellow developers, As many of you are no doubt aware over the weekend I took my desktop PC apart, did some hardware upgrades, and ended the weekend with a from scratch install of Windows Vista Home Premium. In this email article I have decided to take a very independent review of the operating system neither condemning or praising Vista, and let the facts I present speak for themselves. All of us have no doubt already heard absolute horror stories about Vista. Same is true there are some articles out there stating Vista is the greatest os since sliced bread. I think both views are biased, and are not looking at both angles of this issue. Therefore, I am going to attempt to take a neutral roll here, and just state what I both liked and disliked about my Vista experience so far. Installation I've been installing operating systems alone or aided by a sighted reader for on 15 years, and the Vista Home Premium install was extremely simple and strait forward compared to earlier installations of Windows. In this regard I found Vista's installation scored high points with me as far as ease of installation for a new user. Basically, I began my install by placing the Vista dvd in my dvd drive, and rebooted the system which landed me in the Vista setup wizard. The first screen had several options such as keyboard type, language for the install, and other general stuff which for me was fine since it was all ready setup for a standard American PC user. One other button available here was a utility that would scan your system for Vista compatibility. I find this nice as it will trouble shoot hardware and software issues you may have if you proceed with the install. As I had already tested this with Microsoft's Vista Adviser tool earlier I knew I would pass this check, and skipped it. However, as a technical adviser for many home users I like knowing Vista has the ability to check this stuff out before totally blowing an install not aware of what to expect. On the next major screen I was prompted for my registration name and my company. Again a no brainer here. On the following screen I was prompted for the installation product key which my wife read to me off the back of the product case. Once entered it was time to move on. As I recall the following screen asked me how I would like to do on line product activation. I checked run automatically the first time I logged on to the Internet. No big deal here. Following that screen we get an option to select our installation type. My version gave two options upgrade or custom. Upgrade will update your Windows 2000 or XP system to Vista not overwriting your data, settings, etc like a usual upgrade would do. Custom allows the power user to clean the hard drive all operating system files, data, etc and do a from scratch install. I chose the custom advanced installation since I am just that kind of guy. For those running an upgrade the custom screens I will see next don't apply. In short they involved selecting a drive partition, adding and deleting partitions, formatting and allocating space, etc... Once I finished with the custom screens the Vista install began extracting the operating system to the cleared hard drive. This took around 45 minutes give or take a few. Following the copy Portion of the install Vista configured my hardware, did a bunch of internal setups, and took us to the post install faze. After everything is configured the post installation faze had three or four screens that are very easy to answer. Basically, Vista asked for my primary user name, password, colors, background, and end user preferences. After I supplied all that Vista restarted one more time and install was complete. It came up with the new Vista desktop theme, and the new welcome center. Vista Accessibility Many of us have no doubt have heard about Vista's new graphical environment. Yes, that is true Vista's user interface has completely changed, and visually is totally a different experience for us. However, it was not he accessibility nightmare I thought it was going to be upon starting this upgrade/install. Before installing Vista I downloaded the new Window Eyes 6.1 beta for Vista at http://www.gwmicro.com/beta and burned it to a cd for handy installation. Since the Window Eyes beta was lacking a self-voicing install for some reason I had my wife read me the install screens, and then I rebooted Vista. Since I am already a pretty big fan of Window Eyes anyway I had no issues here jumping in and exploring the new Vista environment. I would classify the default graphical user environment more confusing than inaccessible. It was very accessible just confusing. One of the first areas I'd like to explore is the totally new start menu under Vista. This is one area that has been under going changes the past two versions of Windows and has really changed under Vista. When you click the Win Vista start menu the blind user is immediately confronted with a triple pained Window which is categorized in three ways. First, on your left most pained is your commonly used applications. This is a list view of all the programs you have recently used. At the bottom of this left pain is a button which opens your programs menu. The programs menu opens up more or less in a traditional tree view. Although, I noticed right and left arrow keys no longer open and close the branches like they did on XP and earlier versions. Instead you run a risk of having the screen reader jump to another pain. One final item on this left pain is the new Vista search bar. This feature is pretty slick. It has search completion which means Vista tries to guess at what you are searching for and as you narrow down the list options Vista will change the possible items it is looking for allowing you to interactively search for something in real time. Second, we have a center pain. This center pain is a tree view which once use to be My Documents, my computer, my network places, etc under XP. From this tree view you can use Explorer to browse your hard drive, documents, music, videos, disk drives, etc. It all depends on what branch of the tree you happen to be exploring at the time. Third, we reach the right and final pain of this Window. This right pain contains several buttons such as shutdown, logout, help, etc.. The only thing I complained about this third pain is there is no option for run as I thought there should be. Instead someone at Microsoft has decided to move run to accessories of all places. Can you believe that one? I didn't find navigating the new start menu system particularly hard, but I did at first spend lots of time getting lost. I have found this start menu is very easy to get lost in when browsing around. Especially, for the first few times. Fortunately, Microsoft has offered a classic start menu system for us. If you go to the task bar, do alt+enter, control+tab, to the appearance page you can set the start menus to classic. Once set things should return to a state we are use to, and might ease you in to Vista. Though, there will still be some changes such as My Computer is called Computer and My Documents is simply called Documents. Windows Vista has certainly become more web-centric out of the box, and if you aren't a good Internet Explorer user now you kind of need to be to get around some of the areas of the os at least until you turn off things here and there. One of these areas is the control panel. When you press enter on the control panel option it opens up in a Internet Explorer style window, and is itself a web page. If you are a web page fan you might like this new feature. You can use all your exiting I.E. commands to navigate around the panel to add and remove programs, configure security settings, sounds, etc.. If you hate it there is a button called classic view which allows you to have the typical control panel with the rows of icons we all remember from earlier versions of Windows. While this feature has been around in XP Vista has built upon this concept some with the web page background. If you are a huge Internet fand you can literally add google,yahoo, etc as your desktop and do web searches read web mail, etc directly from your desktop. Not something I need or want, but is kind of cool all the same. As for the highly publicized Windows Arrow experience I neither found it especially useful, or desirable to keep activated. My family thought it looked nice, and with the better icon animation, desktop background colors, etc Vista is visually more appealing. That however has nothing to do with accessibility. I chose to disable Windows Arrow as it took up nearly the double the processing power and memory to keep it running. Bottom line from an accessibility standpoint Vista steams all and all accessible with Window eyes, and even with NVDA which I played around with earlier. Although, Window Eyes clearly had the better access here with Vista out of the box and using default settings. If you wish to customize things Vista can be made even more accessible by enabling the classic start menus, Explorer browsing for files, classic control panel, etc... Vista Security One of the new areas Vista has both been praised for and slammed for is the new levels of security in Vista. Over all I think the security in place is for the better, but it might not fit the general public. One of the areas is better management of ownership, read, write, and execute access of every file and program on Vista. Operating systems like Linux have always had better management of this, and those users will be familiar with what Vista is doing now. If Joe write a file called notes.txt as Joe, and Bill logs on he won't be able to view or modify Joe's notes unless Joe sets the file management properties to give Bill read, write, execute access on that file, or adds it to the Vista's everyone group. For most home versions of Windows software file management and security was very basic, and as not as strict or as secure as what Vista now offers here. Many of Vista's detractors have named Vista the paranoid operating system. In many respects this is true, but I can kind of see where the paranoia comes from. Especially, when it comes to installations and approving running untrusted unsigned software for the first time. For example, with Vista's security enabled if you place a software cd in the drive, and try to load it Vista will intercept the installation, and then ask you to allow the setup to run. For me doing a full from scratch installation this was very tedious. However, I appreciate the fact were this a virus or other less desired program running for the first time I'd like to know about it, and tell Windows to never run it again. As far as the DRM, (digital rights management,) goes I haven't had a chance to put this to the test. I'm very interested in testing it, and finding out exactly what my limitations are and how much it effects system performance over all. System Proformence One of the things that has been widely discussed is Vista's system performance. Truly it is an os for a state of the art computer. I personally would not recommend less than 2 GHZ processor, and 1 GB of ram, to have reasonable performance out of Vista. I know the MS recommended is 800 MHZ and 512 MB, but from what I have seen it would be too slow to run with adaptive tech. My test system was a Pentium IV 2.4 GHZ processor and 1 GB of ram, and the system took a massive system performance hit after taking on Vista. It's hard to make specific comparitions, but I just noticed things are much much slower than before even with Arrow, and the other graphical stuff turned off.With it on the system was very slow compared to XP. Bottom line if you are running something in the 800 MHZ to 2.0 ?GHZ range stick with XP. Vista will make your system run like a hobbled horse. It will run, but your over all system performance will drop significantly. To the point it is very noticeable. Early Conclusions I think Windows Vista is a rather nicely designed operating system as far as graphics, accessibility, and multimedia is concerned. The new security is also an added bonus is this may turn out making Windows more secure, and this remains to be seen as Vista becomes more widely tested in the public sector. From my own early testing it seams fairly stable having less crashes than usual for a first Microsoft release. It also seamed to have a smooth setup and deployment. On the down side Vista is an extremely resource intensive operating system with most of those extra resources being used on stuff the average blind user doesn't need or want. Vista is not likely to run very well on systems more than a couple of years old. Even with the cutting edge systems you still may end up getting a larger hard drive, ram, or video upgrade just to run Vista. All of it adding up to extra cost. When it comes down to XP verses Vista there isn't much in Vista that you can't get with XP already. XP SP2 is fairly stable, reliable, less resource intensive, and many of the Vista toys like I.E. 7, .NET Framework 3, direct, etc are being back ported to XP. With the end result the differences for a blind user is very small. Especially, once we remove all the graphical goodies that make Vista visually appealing to our sighted counterparts. Am I sorry I upgraded? No, I felt I got a very good operating system for the money, but the upgrade or switch to Vista could have come a little later on. I generally enjoy testing new things, and I like to run with the bleeding edge software. However, I can not in truth say that everyone should make the switch, or make it soon. Vista is just to knew with too little gain to be cost effective for allot of people not buying a totally new computer. _______________________________________________ Gamers mailing list .. [email protected] To unsubscribe send E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can visit http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org to make any subscription changes via the web.
