OS NEWS: Windows Vista Release Candidate 1 Review
SuperSite for Windows has Windows Vista RC1 features, review, and screenshot gallery. Microsoft has made dramatic changes to Windows Vista since the May 2006 release of Beta 2. Many of these changes come under the hood. For example, RC1 is noticeably more stable and offers dramatically better performance than does Beta 2. Games, suddenly, work just fine. Microsoft tells me that it expects Windows Vista to run most video games as fast as does XP, and that's one performance metric I'll be measuring in the near future. Certainly, modern games like "Half-Life 2" suddenly work fine in Vista. These games were utterly unplayable in Beta 2.
Internet Explorer 7 has been augmented by a new toolbar sensing feature that will ensure that users don't install or use IE 6 browser toolbars that are incompatible with IE 7. Previously, these incompatible toolbars would install just fine, but would crash IE regularly. A new ActiveX installer service allows standard users (i.e. non-admins) to install approved (known good) ActiveX controls without admin approval.
User Account Control (UAC) has been substantially upgraded to be easier to use. You may recall my previous rants about UAC. Well, Microsoft has answered all of my concerns and then some. Now, UAC prompts the user far less frequently and is then much less annoying when it does throw up a prompt. Some changes include the ability to delete shortcuts from the hidden public desktop without being prompted, the ability of non-admin users to install critical updates, and a lack of prompts for common actions like opening the Scanners and Cameras and Firewall control panels. Most important, many UAC prompts no longer steals the focus. You can put off UAC approvals as long as you'd like while you work with other tasks, assuming the app you're working with isn't the one that triggered the prompt. In those cases, annoyingly, UAC is still modal.
As mentioned previously, Windows Vista now works with many more devices out of the box (so to speak). Microsoft wouldn't provide me with an exact number, but I was told that RC1 includes "thousands more" device drivers than did Beta 2, and there are many, many more available via Windows Update, which, of course, runs automatically when you first boot into Vista. Some of the biggest driver improvements involve wireless hardware, printers, SATA controllers, and Media Center TV tuners, Microsoft says. To give you an early idea of how well this works, on the first two PCs (one desktop, one notebook) to which I installed RC1, Vista fully configured every single hardware device, except for the audio drivers, by the first boot. And the audio drivers were automatically downloaded and installed within minutes. Sweet.
