So a few days ago, I posted my first impressions of the new Vista July CTP, and now that I've been using it as my main desktop for the last while, I'd like to talk about my experience.
On the whole, it's still been a good one. However, I've run into a handful of bugs which only daily usage can display. And they are rather annoying.
The first bug that I noticed was that accessing my firewire drive was dog slow. It'd take over a full minute to access the drive after it had spun down. After it was warmed back up, speed wasn't an issue. But having to wait that long with the explorer window not responding is a poor user experience. But whatever, I reported it and moved on.
Then I started noticing that after the OS has been running for a while, it seems to stall. There's really no other way to describe it. The mouse continues to move on the screen, but any operations I do (typing, clicking, etc) all seem to queue up and do nothing. If I wait long enough (well over a few minutes), then it all goes back to normal (rapid-firing my queued input events). However, if I Ctl+Alt+Del and open up the task manager, that usually fixes the issue immediately. And this isn't a spun-down-state issue; it happens in the middle of using the OS for just about anything. Very, very annoying. Also reported, and again moved on.
So then I started using Windows Media Player a bit. I wanted to watch a funny mpg that I had snagged online (akin to my latest favorite: Charlie the Unicorn :: grins ::). That locked the entire machine up because my graphics driver CRASHED. The monitor shut itself off, but the machine wasn't powered down or in the process of rebooting. It's just that it couldn't display squat. After a hard power down and reboot, I tried the same video again, with the same results. Reported.
Now, another issue I've been noticing is that I'm having refresh issues. The desktop doesn't always refresh when new files are placed on it (such as when I download bug reports to work on them). I have to hit F5 to manually refresh the desktop to make the icons appear. What's even worse, is some apps (Thunderbird and Firefox) have taken to not refreshing either. A view for the app will go entirely black, and not draw anything. For instance, in Firefox, the content would go black, but I could still see the tab bar and toolbar. Or in Thunderbird, the message preview pane would go black, but the mailboxes and message view would be fine. Closing the app and re-launching was the only way to solve the issue. So yet another report fired off.
So while I think this CTP is a very large step in the right direction, there is still a ways to go before it loses these little quirks.
That being said, this is still beta software. It's beta for a reason: it's not ready to ship. So I expected to run into these issues, and I expect they'll be resolved before Vista ships. I'm not going to start worrying about quality issues until it gets into final candidate. The number of bug reports I've filed has dropped a lot, and I'm testing much more heavily than ever before. So I think Microsoft should keep up the great work; Vista is going to be a real pleasure to use once it's been finalized.
Pssst. Theres this great, new OS that is just fantastic, give it a try, you can order it at http://www.apple.com/
I think it is called OSX.
I knew there was a reason I always wait for 6months after an OS ships before I consider upgrading :P
@Scott -- which is generally true, cept this OS isn't shipping either. ;-)
Ahhhh... we never seem to pass up on opportunity to bash Aaron. :)
And yet people wonder why I dislike the Mac elitist community? ;-)
You have a typo there Aaron. I'm sure you mean "elite" and not "elitist" :)
Speaking of betas, I got booted out of the RB beta program and off the list so, I'm now out of the loop.
No typo. ;-)
And you should be able to just reapply for the betas, I'd think. I've not heard of any changes with the program, so I'm not certain why you'd get punted.
No current license.
Well, if you haven't already, try using the Linux version of RB. I was able to join the Beta program because I had a Linux Standard license....unless they've changed the criteria since then.
So I found another bug which I just reported -- not all files from a zip archive created on OS X are unzipped correctly. Took me a while to figure that one out; the r4a1 release wouldn't run on my machine until I unzipped the file with WinRAR.
That's one heck of a large bug report (40+ MB) they got.
Aaron just delayed Vista by a week. :)
What's even more goofy is that XP's shell extension handles the file just fine, and the majority of the files unzip fine in Vista as well. It's just the executable. Very strange, indeed.