Vista RC1 Review #1– Screenshots & Review

First off, my congratulations to Jeff for schooling me and blogging about the build first!

I am going to be posting 2 reviews. This first review will be my general impressions of Vista RC1 client on my Dell laptop and will be about general use. My next review will be of Vista RC1 on my Media Center PC, and as x64! I know, I’m a bit insane but I am going to try to run x64 Media Center Vista. It should be an interesting experience and I’ll let everyone know how feasible it is at this point.

First off, this build isn’t vastly different, at least not that I have noticed so far from build 5536, except that it seems a little more resource intensive than 5536. I’ve posted a couple of screenshots as per this observation. Below are the specs of the laptop I am running on;

Dell Inspiron 9300

Intel Pentium M 2ghz

1G Ram

80G 7200 RPM HD

Nvidia GeForce 6800 Go w/256MB RAM

I should note also that my 2G Cruzer thumb drive is being fully used for ReadyBoost. I am not sure if it because of this, but even with the RAM consumption as high as it was, the system was still very responsive with minimal lag time. I had to have the thumb drive re-tested a few times before readyboost would work. Just a suggestion Microsoft that perhaps Readyboost should test a few times before it decides a thumb drive isn’t fast enough. That way more people will use readyboost.

The vista boot screen is still blank, but it does have the green progress bar just like in 5536. The installation took about an hour for a clean install on the laptop started from 5536 (not from CD boot.) One great thing that I noticed was that for the first time with Vista, is that the domain group policy assigned software actually installed on boot up. (At least Office Communicator did.) Also my files sync with the standard folder re-direction settings.

Another suggestion I might throw out would be about the Flip3D & alt+tab features. In XP when you did alt+tab the window focus would be correct. (For example in notepad the cursor focus would be back in the app.) In Vista this is not the case, you have to click the window. I would really like the focus to return to the window like in XP.

The sidebar still has very few standard gadgets, and still no WMP gadget… I am really, really hoping that gets thrown in before RTM as a little surprise…..

Bluetooth stack seems to work better with my Windows Mobile phone now, but I was still not quite able to get it to sync or connect properly. I have a feeling this might be due to my Tmobile MDA phone as there is a new ROM upgrade posted, so I am going to install that first and then give you an update on WM compatibility in the media center review.

The final seemingly new feature of RC1 is the vector based aero graphics and icons. This means (correct me if I am wrong) the icon files contain the mathematical formulas to increase any graphic to any size and tell the rendered how to properly increase the size and add the new pixels. This makes for beautiful and nice sized icons at even really high resolutions. (My Dell runs at 1920x1200 resolution.)

In conclusion RC1 is a fantastic build and is about the difference from 5536 that you would expect in a week. It still has some bugs and issues that we beta testers will address with Microsoft and I think that by RTM Vista is going to be a great release product.