Microsoft Windows Vista Beta 2 Initial Review

Following up on my post announcing Vista’s availablity from yesterday, I want to elaborate on my experience running Windows Vista Beta 2.

Although the latest Beta 2 detected all of my hardware except my smartcard reader, I’m not impressed with a few major areas. 802.1x authentication does not work which is quite a large hindrance especially for corporate customers running secure wireless networks. Mainly, it does not work in my WPA2-Enterprise (WPA2 + AES + RADIUS) wireless network running at my home. Vista would send the proper authentication information and the Microsoft IAS RADIUS server (running on a 120-Trial version of Win2k3) would grant access (confirmed via logs) but Vista would not grab an IP address. Statically setting an IP also failed to provide network access. I had to pull out an old WEP access point and finally Vista worked wirelessly. Due to WEP’s insecurity, I have resorted to having to use the built in gigabit ethernet. Albeit that most of the public doesn’t have as elaborate of a wireless set up at home, but I’m surprised that this functionality is broken in Beta 2.

USB2 is horribly slow. I connected a USB2 memory stick to copy some files off the system when wireless wasn’t working. The new Vista file copy progress dialog displays transfer rate. The fastest it ever got was a molasses slow 300KB/s! Can you imagine waiting almost 10 minutes to transfer 150 megs locally? I almost went nuts. Again, I acknowledge this is beta software, but is it that hard to get USB Mass Storage drivers to work properly?

The Aero Glass interface isn’t very responsive. Since Windows 95, the mouse pointer in Windows has never been afflicted by pauses when moving the pointer. I’m sure all of us remember these hiccupy pointer movements in X Windows in Linux distributions a few years ago, but the Linux community largely solved these problems. I was very surprised when I saw this behavior in Vista Beta 2. It did not help that I was running the latest Vista nVidia drivers. I also noticed the screen compositing process pegging the CPU usage to about 30-40% sometimes leading to completely pausing the system’s video output for a few seconds before updating the desktop and its windows. I was under the impression that moving the desktop towards using the video card’s GPU would result in a performance increase. As a comparison I tried Linux’s XGL 3D compositing system on this same computer and never dealt with any of the problems I experienced in Vista. Maybe my Direct X 9-enabled, 128 meg nVidia Quadro FX Go video card is too old and Vista’s beta status exasperated this issue, but I’m surprised the performance was so lackluster. Can Microsoft streamline and optimize this in time for a release? I hope so otherwise I’ll be running the Aero Basic interface if I ever upgrade.

Vista Beta 2 is a resource hog. A full install with Office 2007 Beta 2 took nearly 14 gigs of hard drive space. After boot up, Windows commit charge was averaging nearly 750-800megs of RAM on my laptop equipped with 2gigs of RAM. Opening up Firefox with a few tabs, MSN messenger, and playing a DivX AVI in Windows Media Player 11 pushed up the usage to nearly 1.3gigs of RAM. I know any unused RAM is wasted RAM but when a basic Windows install hogs that much, it shows that power users will easily have to push 4gigs of RAM if they intend to run Photoshop or a few instances of Office applications.

The other annoyance is the new non-admin user model. It is completely broken and illogical. Inevitably, those people that get Vista Beta 2 working on their hardware will complain about constantly being bothered to elevate privileges to do the most simple of things. For example, deleting a shortcut off the desktop took up to 7 clicks due to Windows trying to protect me from myself. The end result will either be the general public disabling the new protection scheme or learning to click without reading–both scenarios are disastrous and will render this protection useless.

The first change is the Administrator/superuser account needs a password set during installation so superuser escalation will require a password to be typed in instead of simply clicking OK or Continue. Subsequently, the password must be typed in whenever this level of access is required. As it stands, Microsoft needs to revamp the rest of the model. I want a Control Panel applet that will let me choose the level of invasiveness. Here is my proposal:

  1. Off - If I’m logged in as an Administrator, then it will work as current Windows machines.
  2. Default - The current default settings as shipped in Vista Beta 2. The user would be hand held even while in his/her profile (aka home) directory. Deleting, editing and installing any files would all require the annoying pop-up dialog confirming action.
  3. Limited Power User - Following the Linux model as shown in Red Hat of yesteryear, Ubuntu and others with a modification or two. All system files, installation of software available to the system, and any modification outside of the user’s profile directory would require superuser escalation. However, the user’s “%Profile%/Application Data” and “%Profile%/Local Settings/Application Data” directories would be protected. Any modification taking place would require escalation to superuser. In this scenario, I could attempt to wipe my profile, but things like my Outlook PST file and other settings would not be destroyed.
  4. Power User - Same as Limited Power User, but the two Application Data directories would not be protected. In other words, I could wipe my user directory without ill effects on the rest of the system. I could create a new user and not experience any problems. This mode would also give me an option of maintaining superuser access for a set amount of time. When this is active, a tiny icon would show up in the systray with a user-configurable timeout to return back to “limited” access to the rest of the system files.

This is what I’ve come up so far in initial testing. I hope Microsoft goes back to the drawing board for the limit user account system being used. I think the current release schedule is a bit optimistic because there are a lot of little things that need a lot of work before the general public will be able to use Vista efficiently.

June 8, 2006 | Filed Under Tech/Gadgets 

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