Did War get banned or something? Anyway, I tried the beta as well. My thoughts:
- Its most definitely a resource hog, which is to be expected I suppose. I hope they do a hell of a lot of optimization though as it certainly needs to be WAYYY more efficient.
- Program compatibility is good for the most part for applications. My antivirus program, "Panda", doesn't work with it though so I had to use the one they suggested. Games older than say 5 or 6 years old have serious issues even with the compatibility boxes "checked".
Can't really speak for modern games because the thing is a resource hog and my system (while compatible with Vista specs) ain't what it used to be.
- Default desktop has "large icons" which are annoying to select a bunch of clumped together if they're surrounded by other icons. I'm sure this can be changed, but annoying none-the-less. Personal pet peeve, nothing more.
- The desktop properties is now "Personalization" which, again, mainstreams everything, but is also annoying because you have to dig deeper or go into an entirely different control panel to make changes. A change for the better for most users.
- It looks nice and somewhat copies the Mac OS look, but instead of chrome you have tinted glass.
- System had problems playing a DVD under the new Windows Media Player in Vista. Tried the beta in XP and it worked fine. Lots of pausing every minute or 45 seconds for a few seconds or so. Really annoying.
- Preview pop-ups are nice when your mouse pointer hovers over a tab, seems to have stream-lined and made pathing through the start menu less round about and the same with logging off/shutting down/sleeping etc. Can't get to the task manager as easily now which is annoying considering that something will inevitably go FUBAR during any given session early on in Vista's life cycle. Default for administrators is *double checking* every sort of deletion you want to do unless you click a check box. Really annoying for mass deletions or whatever. I had to sneak into the User Accounts menu and disable that crap. Then it had the audacity to tell me that my security might be compromised due to that. Yeah, whatever.
- Screensavers are nice and so are the default desktop backgrounds. I really liked the Aurora Borealis screensaver even if it wasn't terribly "effects laden".
- Is Windows Media Center part of Vista now or just this beta? Nice feature anyway, to turn your computer into a media center at will in your living room.
Basically, it feels like a small step up really. It looks nicer, somewhat more streamlined in many areas, but nothing revolutionary (as was expected). I now know I can hold off for a while.
Edited for clarity/spelling error...
This comment was edited on Jun 30, 20:13.