Microsoft Beta Tester

I subscribe to a lot of technical email newsletters and I got a lot of emails saying that Microsoft has released the beta versions of its latest operating system, Windows Vista and the latest productivity suite, Microsoft Office 2007. Having read a lot of reviews and opinion about both Windows Vista and Office 2007, I couldn't wait to get my hands on the copies of the software and see for myself how the software looked like and behaved.

My first problem was to download Windows Vista. At first it gave me a message that the website is receiving too many requests and cannot process mine. I was disheartened. But I kept trying. I got another email, this time from Microsoft Technet, which essentially announced the beta release, I again rushed to Microsoft site to download it. This time it worked. I got the links. Next was the size of the download. The download ISO file is greater than 3GB and people had mentioned that it would take forever to download. I started the download and went out for a couple of hours. The download completed in less than two hours for me for both Windows Vista (3.2GB) and Office 2007 (445 MB). I use a Comcast High Speed Cable Internet which gives me about 6Mbps download pipe.

After I burnt a DVD and started the installation it gave me an error message that some of my programs won't work and for some I will have to get updated drivers. Specifically Vista refuses to work with Nero products and Nero Image Drive. It also gave a warning that drivers for my 1394 firewire port need to be updated and also for the Checkpoint VPN client network interface. A search on the internet told me that Vista gives the error for Nero but in the end works well. For me it was not letting me go ahead, so for the sake of beta testing, I removed Nero and started installation again.

This time it went through and as predicted by so many people took forever. The best part about the installation is that the installation has two distinct phases: Information Collection and Installation. It collects all the information that is required to install in the first phase and after that it goes about its own business with no user interaction. I started the installation at around 1 am in the night supplied all information and went to bed. It restarted the computer multiple times and it was all done in the morning without any intervention. But it was very slow. As noted by many columnists and bloggers, one should take the minimum memory requirement of 512 GB very seriously. In fact from my experience I suggest not even thinking about Vista unless one has in excess of 1GB of RAM.

Microsoft will have to work very hard between now and the release of RC1 if Vista is to succeed and not flop like Windows Me. Some important points:

1. Windows Vista does not work with Check point VPN and that was an absolute disaster for me as I need that to establish VPN connection to work from home.
2. Windows Vista comes bundled with Windows Defender, the Microsoft Anti-spyware software. Whether it is because of that or because of the code changes remains to be seen, but other Anti-spyware software, notably Webroot Spy Sweeper stopped working and it is a problem without solution. Not everyone would like to work with Windows Defender and it would be good if Microsoft corrects this issue before RC1 other I see another anti-trust suite being filed.
3. For some reason, both my CD drive and DVD writer stopped working. It was installing the driver correctly but was failing to initialise with an error code 19. A search on the internet showed that the registry was misbehaving and after removing the UpperFilters and LowerFilters from HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}, everything was fine. But why did the CD drives stopped working all of a sudden?
4. The most lethal blow (as far as I am concerned) was dealt when none of my son's (age: 21 months) games worked, especially the Reader Rabbit ones. And after two days of waiting for it to work he protested so loud that I had to revert back to Windows XP.
5. User Access Control: It is a good and long overdue thing that Windows now prevents any administrator access (Surprisingly even to users who are administrators. I wonder then how we do tasks that require admin priveleges. I haven't found anything yet), but it is annoying. It is good to ask the user whether he / she wants to run the program once, but after that I guess Windows should remember the user's preference. I am a lazy person, so I put a lot of stuff in my startup, Outlook, MS Excel, ticketing tool etc and if Windows is going ask me everytime whether I am sure that this needs to run, then I am going to be upset. I understand that the purpose of this to prevent unauthorised use of software without user's consent, but then Windows should learn from the heuristics as well.

These are some points I found out in the two days I used Vista. There were also some unjust comments on Microsoft that it has introduced changes for the sake of changes. I disagree. One of the first things that users will notice is that the Properties menu that used to appear on right clicking on Desktop has been replaced by Personalize. That opens another window which contains a bunch of supposedly unrelated tasks. But for me it made sense. Essentially by changing some of the settings we are personalising the computer as per our tastes and needs, from Desktop Wallpaper, screen saver to Windows sound scheme and mouse pointers. It is good that it is now contained at one single place so that people don't have to look for things. Looking at some individual tasks like changing the desktop background, the number of click may have increased (considered a bad thing), but I guess overall in the bigger context of things, the user will spend less time looking for stuff and clicking at different groups / icons.

Next: A review of Microsoft Office 2007 Beta 2