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I ended my testing of Vista Beta 2 just one day after I installed it. On the whole it was a miserable experience.

Note: I am a microprocessor design engineer. However, I use my computers at home on a mostly casual level. Treat this review as something from an average Joe instead of a "computing elite".

Disclaimer:
I knew beforehand that-

However, the slowness of my laptop was not all that was bothering me. What really bothered me was the interface. Somehow, it did not make accessing things more convenient. The GUI was cumbersome. The only feature that I liked was the new arrangement where the file address area near the top of every window is organized according to directory structure instead of the old-styled DOS directory path. With this new display, each subdirectory level can turn into a drop down menu. See the following screen capture from my laptop. It shows the window that pops up post-install.

It displays the current address as
> Control Panel > System and Maintainence > Welcome Center

Each of the ">" arrows, when clicked on, accesses a drop-down menu.

That was, as far as I'm concerned, the only bright spot in the new scheme. The rest of the new arrangement is well, miserable, I'm sorry to report. The standard menu (i.e. File, Edit, View, et cetera) is now hidden, which is rather incomprehensible considering that the menu has to be accessed in order to map a network drive! I first gave it the benefit of the doubt and actually searched around the various menus for an alternate way to map a drive (like a direct menu item off of the networking section or something) but finally gave up and enabled the hidden menu, which MS now calls "old styled menu". It is absurd that I'd have to go dig through the Windows help system to find this out.

Needless to say that this was one of the things that I complained to Microsoft about in my feedbacks. I forgot what else I complained about, but they were just about as annoying- I don't want to spend time right now just recalling those unpleasant things... It's probably better that I forgot.

Again, I know this is beta product. However, much of the arrangement in general shows lack of thought in my opinion. You would think that for the amount of time that was spent on development, usability testing would have been proceeding in parallel? If usability goes down in a new OS, who in the world would want it? (besides people who are going to be blessed with an OEM copy in a brand spanking new machine) Yes, I admit that perhaps part of the counterintuitiveness might be due to the fact of the transition between XP and Vista that I was making, but that argument doesn't fly considering there could be alternate interfaces that are completely different yet do not lose out on usability and accessibility.

My case in point:

This is after I installed LiteStep in the aftermath of my XP reinstallation. As one can see, the interface is different from that of XP (particularly if explorer is left unused) but is still intuive and accessible- Not to mention it uses up a whole lot less precious system resources than something like Vista. I don't really have to completely give up on the eye candy if I don't want to. A question would be "Why should I go through Vista again, if I am going to be annoyed by its intractibility again?" Yes, I know about other improvements like th new file system as well as security measures, but going through the bloated and poorly designed interface again just isn't my cup of tea. What should Microsoft do to compete better (i.e. get more people to buy Vista) amid the inevitable backlash that it's going to get regarding its new system?

I tihnk Vista should have alternate shell modes other than simply scaling back to "classic mode" or something like that. I've seen some complaints about how ugly Vista looks without Aero, and even if that gets fixed it's only a small part of the problem that I see. It's not just about looks.

Vista should have "reduced shell modes" that include scaling back to something inbetween an all-out Aeroglass interface and a baretread classic mode. It should offer modes that emulate something like LiteStep and other derivatives such as LDE(X) and Blackbox derivatives such as BB4Win. Look, if MS wants to "lift" ideas from Apple it might as well do so from everybody else under the sun- why not go all the way and "lift" from LiteStep the way Litestep "lifted" from Linux distros? Just make it different, put some other fancy name on it (like "View Other Vistas" or whatever). I know Vista already has something like this, but it is very limited as I have said.

That way, certain "Vistas" would take less resources and manage to look just as good as Aero (or even better) simply because they would be loading up less junk. Hey, I would be more compelled to buy Vista then.

As an aside: I didn't test Vista long enough to feel the pain that many people have been having with Vista's cumbersome UAC. I don't get why MS couldn't just put in place something like a time-limited admin access like certain Linux distros where the access expires after a set amount of time. Since UAC isn't anything new (XP had UAC of sorts- it's just that it's not set up by users as default) and is inside of XP in the form of the runas command, any code that could compromise that sort of command can compromise UAC. Why not just set up a system tray "button" to turn UAC on and off, and have some really big screen cues (e.g. plastering the words "ADMIN MODE" on the four corners of the screen) to remind the admin user to turn UAC back on after being done with installing something? Can't they implement something that simple?