XP in a Tuxedo
I loaded Vista Beta 2 yesterday and installed it on my mom’s computer during the Brazil match. After fifteen years with Windows—good stretches and bad ones—I figured I could give the thing a fair shot. But it’s not a revolution. It’s just XP in a better suit.
Nothing’s actually different. The boot screen looks exactly as slow, minus the XP logo. The login screen got prettier, marginally, and you wait for the desktop to load only to think: okay, and then what? The taskbar is black. That’s the big change they’re selling us. The Start button got remodeled to look like the Vista logo. The user picture sits there, ready to be changed. Neither of those things is revolutionary. The Windows Explorer is bloated now. Open any program—even Microsoft’s own stuff—and the screen goes black asking if you’re really sure you want to open this. Yes. And it asks again. It doesn’t remember the first time.
Hardware detection is a complete disaster. It grabbed my mom’s programs and settings from XP with no problem, which is nice, but then it couldn’t find the sound card. Couldn’t find the network card either. I scraped together drivers and tried to force them in, and Vista just refused. It wouldn’t even try. It sat there and said no.
What gets me is thinking about the millions of Windows users who are about to deal with this thing. All the clicking, all the confirmation dialogs asking the same thing over and over, all the drivers that won’t install. It’s coming for them. And I’ll be home with my Mac, watching it play out. There’s a woman in the official Vista ads who’s laughing in every shot. She probably knows something.