The “Break it Down” Blog

Well when it was first announced it was only available to XXX, but now Build 5728 of Windows Vista has been released to the public (Vista blog announcement), although from the download page it just looks like the 32-bit version. I was happy to see this given all my problems with the RC1 release. While this is available as an upgrade for folks running RC1, I wouldn’t encourage it unless you couldn’t wipe your system. I’m downloading it now and will let you know how it goes.

Neosmart has some details on this particular release and you can have a look at APC Magazine’s coverage of the themes included in this install of Vista as well. If you have tried Vista or already seen articles covering the Aero Glass and non-Aero interfaces, then there isn’t much to see there.

I personally think that if Vista was due out November of next year, it would be an excellent release given all the work and iterative design Microsoft is doing. Unfortunately Vista is suppose to RTM (release to manufacturers) in November and then consumer release in January. Not sure how that’s going to go over. The reason I say this is because each incremental release of Vista so far has been signifigantly changed enough that reviewers have consistently discussed the new features in each iteration, suggesting that the actual product is far from being done just yet. If the iterations were tiny and incremental, I would say “Ok looks good and ready for a release”, but still quite a bit is changing under the covers. Hopefully for the better.

Update #1: Ok I’m writing this on Windows Vista Build 5728 and I have to say this is going much better than it did with RC1. The experience so far has been “as advertised” and what I remember from Beta 2, just faster. Some of the ugly icons are still here… I really don’t understand why Microsoft didn’t hire a professional design studio 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 years ago when they started on Vista to create an entirely new icon set consisting of 100s of icons. Unfortunately you have this mix of old and new. Something else is that backward compatability had to be maintained for all previous versions of Windows UIs. That means nicer XP style panels (like the System Panel) all the way down to old school Windows 98/2K style widgets that you find popping up in some of the older/buried system administration utilities. All the most-often used top level menus and screens have been revamped, but every once in a while it’s so ghetto to see an old fashion scroll bar, button or tab hanging around with this slick new interface. I suppose any OS is going to suffer from this.

Update #2: The logging off/shutting down/logging in is a very polished process. For example, I don’t know if this logic applies because there is only one user on the machine, or because I was the last person on the machine, but at the login screen my name is already selected and the password field has focus so I can just sit down and start typing my password to login… very nice.

Update #3: I have had a few utilities crash on me and Media Player cannot play video anymore for some reason and luckily Microsoft has implemented a system/bug-information collection routine to collect system information when something goes wrong and sends it off to Microsoft. It asks you before it does it. So far I’ve sent everything off to them so hopefully there are some patterns or key information in there for them.

Update #4: There is a new directory layout to your Home dir that I actually prefer. Everything is under C:\Users\, and then under that you have a directory for every possible thing you would want to do instead of having it all buried under My Documents. This layout is more on par with my custom directory layout which I like.