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For me, a hardware based GUI is hardly a modern operating system feature.I rather thought a fine scheduler or effective multitasking are those what count really.

I freezed RC2 every 2 hours... i hope RTM is much better.

And the new explorer is really terrible.. for the life of me I cannot understand how removing all action bars buttons except a stupid "burn" button that I never use is a good thing...

Just a minor correction. Every Windows since NT4 SP X have had "Instant Desktop Search". It's just turned off by default and is everything but user friendly.

But you _can_ use the Indexing Service to get instant results. You just have to enter parameterized queries in the free search textbox in Windows standard Search. And off we go, though it's somewhat rough.

I don't know why they aren't utilizing it much more, bur perhaps bad management is the key?

About Windows N versions, Paul Thurrott doesn't know what he's talking about. Calling them unpopular is wrong, since nobody except a few geeks know about the existence. And ordinary users don't care about the mostly ideological issues for geeks wanting the possibility to uninstall WMP and related services. Nor do they care about companies wanting to get rid of WMP on their servers.
Apart from that Thurrott should stay away from politics in a review of Vista. Offensive terms like "Created to satisfy power-hungry antitrust regulators in the EU" just makes him look like a cheap street whore. If I should ever decide to buy Vista, it would be Vista Business N.

He is right about a few things like the "watering down the uniqueness of the Vista platform" due to the backports to XP and Win2K3 (and hooray for those backports). And of course the fact that "many of Windows Vista's best features have been jettisoned". I actually liked the old Side Bar with integrated task bar and systray over the newer heavily crippled Side Bar.

A replacement of the aged start bar|quick panel|taskbar|systray thingy would have been great.

EDITED: Fixed a typo in Thurrott's surname, and a few other typos.

Edited 2006-11-09 21:36

Though I use and respect Mac OS X, virtually every version Apple has shipped since 2001 has been a minor update, akin to a Windows 98 SE or Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2). Meanwhile, Microsoft has pushed an amazing variety of Windows versions out the door since 2001. Some highlights include Windows XP Embedded, Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE), Windows XP MCE 2004, Windows XP MCE 2005, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition (TPC), Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005, and Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.

I'm curious, how much different are all the different versions of XP he's listing? I mean, I'm fairly sure Embedded and 64bit are rather different from regular XP, but does anyone know how much changed between XP MCE, XP MCE 2004 and XP MCE 2005, for example? I guess I always assumed not that much.

All in all, this article seems to be a well-written exhaustive rundown of Windows Vista's history and comparison of differences between the versions (or seems like it will be once he publishes the rest of it).

EDIT: Punctuation

Edited 2006-11-09 21:38

It's Thurrott, and not Thurrot.

Where's the review?

Windows Ultimate Extras of course that isn't included in home basic,doesn't that sound logical?

What about SMP ?

> "[...] many of Vista's best features appeared first on Mac OS X, sometimes years ago."
You mean those features that appeared 10 years ago in BeOS, AmigaOS, and others ?
I despise software patents, still I wish Be, Inc. would have patented those things long ago, they would still be in business and would get millions of royalties from MS and Apple.

This is only the first (and second) part of an eight part review. The first part is only intended as an introduction the the following seven parts. So, it isn't much of a review. There is a link to the second part at the bottom of the page. I guess that the other six parts haven't been completed yet. For those expecting a complete review (like me), we'll have to practice some patience.

Re: the first part. I was quite surprised by his implications/claims that Microsoft was the only OS supplier that did anything truly significant over the past few years. I was more surprised by some of the things he claimed to be significant. It was even more difficult to believe after seeing the comparisons he was making whether directly or indirectly.

Re: the second part. I have not seen any decent table of features comparing the different versions prior to this. Granted, I haven't really looked, but it is much easier to see what differences exist between versions with this kind of format as opposed to a rant about how terribly inadequate Vista Basic will be.

In short, much of the "introduction" was quite unrealistic about Windows in comparison to alternative systems, and the second part was nicely informative about Vista's different offerings. If I didn't know any better I'd say that Thurrott lived in a Microsoft box seeing the world through Microsoft-colored glasses.

I love the spin they've put on what is essentially a 3 year development overrun. Trying to make it sound like a vintage .

But really, Microsoft have been playing catchup. A MS Exec admitted that they only announced Longhorn becuase Apple had released Tiger. No-one in Microsoft really expected Longhorn/Vista to come out before now, they just had to string the Businesses along for long enough for them to build something that could rival the main features of Tiger.

What was graphics acceleration before? It's the same thing with a different set of drawing primitives.

Ok so they release Vista, big deal. We all have to upgrade to it at some point as MS is the defacto standard. Everyone uses it because everyone uses it.

Is MS changing their development cycles to stop this from happening again? Or are they going to just repeat this and make a Vista Longhorn 2 that will also never fully be released.

No matter how you slice it, Vista had some very major cutbacks from what they were promising. Maybe they should to have done what Apple has done and just slowly release features in a new version every year. Mr Thurott has put Apple in a bad light for only releasing minor upgrades to their OS instead of delivering a revolution like Vista was SUPPOSED to be. Instead we get an upgrade equal to 2-3 years of updates instead of a revolution.

Personally I think that MS was overreaching with their aspirations. They need to release minor updates all the time rather then one huge updates, like the frog in water, it's better to slowly heat the frog rather then throw it in boiling water.

For many people, vista may just be too much of a change I mean why not jump to another (linux/mac) platform if moving to vista will be such a large change?

I remember reading here that NT ran on PowerPC, MIPS, Alpha, and x86 in released versions.

Apparently the i860 and SPARC versions never were released.

I saw a 64-bit version of Windows 2000 advanced server running 64-bit sql server at pc expo at the javits center in 1999. It never got released either.

I think Win2K was the first 64 bit windows based on what I saw.

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here is a bit of history on the subject

http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/08/23/compaq_alpha_cuts_pull_rug/

Vista supports more than 128GB of RAM in business & above versions - but only a maximum of 2 processors .

So Vista is not for 2+ processor workstations which might actually have up to that amount of RAM ?

Do all 2+ processor systems use Windows server ?

Check yourself if you don't believe me. Literally, and seriously, the summary:

"Ummm.", "Yer olde pops here!", "Here is a picture of my childern", followed by a soup of about a thousand permutations of words "Vista, Windows, XP, Longhorn, long wait, totally worth it"

Was the author drunk while writing the article?