Okay, Vista isn’t a time-travelling ravenous dingo, but it sure feels that way. As many of you know by now, Vista RC1 (the first Release Candidate, a build Microsoft feels might be good enough to release) has been released to the general public. I have downloaded it, but I haven’t installed it yet, and I might not install it at all.
Why not? Because I can’t sync my Windows Mobile 5 Pocket PC Phone with it.
Beta 2 of Vista came with a utility called the Windows Mobile Device Center, or WMDC. On the surface, the WMDC looks like Activesync with a facelift, but it’s really quite a bit more. In addition to syncing Windows Mobile phones and Pocket PCs with Vista, it also created partnerships for cameras, media players, pretty much any mobile device you’d want to sync with Windows. Very slick, even though it didn’t aways work reliably in Beta 2. But hey, it’s a beta, right?
Well the WMDC is nowhere to be found at all in RC1, although there is a nice new Autorun capability for syncing a Windows Mobile device with Media Player or offloading photos. But syncing with Outlook? Not possible.
A source from Microsoft says WMDC was decoupled from Vista to be released as a stand alone product. That’s all fine and good, but until they release it Vista is just about useless to me. I’m sticking with XP for now, and actually enjoying how fast and smooth a minimalist XP system runs. And for what it’s worth, Activesync 4.2 works flawlessly.
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Why not simply partition your HD and install RC1 parallel to Beta 2? I have my system arranged in this fashion, with B2, RC1, and XP each having a slice of storage pie.
In any case, you aren’t missing much. Vista is a huge disappointment, offering very little “new” technology. The UI is awful. With overlapping windows on your desktop it becomes downright unusable. I’d label it a bad clone of OSX, but it was done so poorly it hardly deserves such credit. From a user standpoint, there is nothing Vista delivers that hasn’t already been done. A shiny glass interface…vector based composition engine…window animation effects; I’ve been using such features for more than five years now…it’s called OSX.
I held such high hopes, right up until Microsoft axed WinFS. The underlying security framework is a dramatic improvement over XP, but beyond that there is really very little reason to upgrade. Vista 64bit is a joke, with virtually no industry support to back it. I am stunned that we are now in the eleventh hour of Vista’s debut, and the hardware market hasn’t even caught up with native Vista driver support yet…let alone 64bit Vista drivers.
My experience so far…
1. Soundblaster Audigy doesn’t support Vista yet.
2. Vista won’t play DVDs well at all (video is choppy, showing dropped frames.
3. Media Center is dreadfully slow, to the point of futility.
4. Windows Mail is junk, being largely a prettied up Outlook Express.
5. Vista’s UI is wretchedly inconsistent, with different UI schemes scattered hither and yonder. Office 2007 looks even worse. If you want to see the epitome of bad software interface design, feast your eyes on Outlook 2007 (warning: you may want to swallow a couple Tylenol first).
6. Far too much system resources are being consumed by Vista even while sitting idle with few or no applications running in the background. At one time I noticed 56% RAM usage…and I have two bloody GIGS of RAM.
7. Performance is not good overall. The OS “feels” sluggish compared to XP. Even performing a basic task like opening a folder window just seems to cause the OS to crunch away, as if it performing some serious task.
All this on a self-built AMD Athlon 64×2 4200 (2.2 GHZ) with 2GB RAM, Asus A8Ni Premium mobo, with Nvidia GeForce 7800 GT video card, and a big honkin 350GB hard drive. If Vista performs with such mediocrity on my relatively state of the art system, what can we expect on lesser configs?
I’m sticking with XP for now. The only interest I have at all in moving to Vista is gaming. DirectX 10 could be the only component within the OS that truly lives up to the hype. But even that will take time before game studios begin tapping x10 attributes.
Hiya, Kent.
My experience has been very different. Vista Pre-RC1 and RC1 itself are both lightning fast on my system (AMD 3500+ single core Athlon 64, 1.5GB RAM, SATA drives and ATI x700+ video with 256MB DDR3). The UI is beautiful with a little tweaking (try the Frosted preset scheme) and I love Office 2007 and use it on XP. Yes, it uses more memory, but that’s expected. If I load up XP with Object Desktop to simulate Vista’s UI, XP edges into the same resource usage.
I’d be using RC1 as my primary desktop OS if they released WMDC. But until then, I’m happy with XP too.
FYI: The pre-define UI schemes and tweaking interface have changed dramatically in RC1. I find the “Graphite” theme to look most attractive because of its sleek yet neutral palette. It’s darker and has a slightly OSX-like brushed metal look, kinda like iTunes.
Oddly the default scheme is a hideous duck egg blue theme. I have no clue why MS chose that of all color schemes as the default, because it completely clashes with the rest of the UI, like the taskbar and start menu.
My biggest gripe with the UI is that too much transparency is used throughout the UI. As the saying goes..”To a guy with a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. That seems to be the approach Microsoft’s UI team had when designing the interface. Beyond that, it’s really not much different than XP, save for the fact that Windows navigation elements have been thoughtfully redesigned. The other aspect that troubles me is that non-native Vista apps look flat out putrid. Their window borders are transparent, but the application framework itself is an ugly blue that resembles a really BAD XP theme. Take a look at say, Firefox and you will see what I mean. Now, granted that will change over time as more apps become updated for Vista. But until then a lot of apps you use will linger on for some time in this ugly transitional state.
Here’s some news that should brighten your day:
If you use RegEdit to add a key called “WHOS” under the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft key in the registry, connect your Windows Mobile 5.0 device and go to Windows Update, a new 7.0MB update will be available that enables Windows Mobile Device Center.
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[...] Samsung Q1: I got to see Microsoft Windows Vista (look, I did all three trademarks!) on it. My first encounter with Vista. Wow, it looks nice (happy, Jeff Kirvin?). The always-ready HWR strip that zips out from the side is just a wonderful touch — and even though I was being real pissant and just play handwriting (not taking it seriously), it recognized every damned thing I wrote! Whoa! It was also fast. JK on the Run has had several articles about putting Vista on a Q1: see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 3.5, and a bonus post. Still, my question remains: Since the Q1 lacks an optical drive, how can an XPed one be upgraded to Vista by an average customer (that would be me!)? [...]
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