Windows Vista has been on the minds of many for quite some
time now. Every week we receive new bits of information on the operating system
including delays, feature reductions,
new builds, the
massive amount of
dollars being thrown behind its launch and how it will serve as a
communications hub for a host of Windows Live services.
Microsoft has even gone so far as to establish a design
guide for new PCs to incorporate chic designs to complement the next
generation operating system. But for all the talk, is the operating system
really ready for prime time? Can Microsoft hit its January target which Bill Gates is 80%
positive that they can achieve? Windows guru Paul Thurrott takes a look at
the current state of Windows Vista development and gives his opinion on what is
right and what is wrong with Vista.
In our own testing, the latest builds of Vista have been
relatively stable platforms although driver support could be a little better.
Vista Beta 2’s reliability, however, was questionable as seen in a reliability
report posted in June. Thurrott points to a number of niggling issues
that compound to make even the latest builds of Vista a burden to live with
on a daily basis:
I'm navigating around
in Explorer and suddenly realize I need to access a file on a network share. In
XP, this is easy as My Network Places is also available from the Task Pane. In
Windows Vista, there's no Task Pane, and there's no link to Network in the new
Favorite Links pane (though you can, admittedly, add one if you want, or add
links to any network shortcuts). So you open Network from the Start Menu and
wait ... and wait... and wait... while the damn thing finds all your networked
PCs and servers. In XP, this process is instantaneous.
There are other outstanding issues including the usual
suspects like application compatibility, problems with ActiveX in Internet
Explorer 7.0, problems with the new Aero Glass user interface, and various
minor bugs here and there. In the end, Thurrott acknowledges that Microsoft
will likely hit its late October release for business customers, but it may come
at a price:
Do I think that
Microsoft will finalize Windows Vista by the end of October 25? Yes, but I also
believe they will release a massive series of patches between October 2006 and
January 2007 if they do arbitrarily hit their latest release promise because of
issues that crop up after Vista gets shipped out to all those businesses that
won't be installing it anyway. (Which brings me to a side issue: Why ship Vista
to enterprises with volume license agreements before shipping it to consumers?
Businesses are not going to install Vista anyway. Why waste the effort?)
Microsoft still has a lot of work to do and it is counting
heavily on its own internal testing and external beta testers to find and
report issues that are still outstanding. While it’s not likely that all of
them will be addressed before the operating system is released to customers in
January, we’re still hopeful that consumers will get a quality product at
launch.