A beautiful Vista with a word of caution

Windows Vista, Microsoft’s new operating system, has finally launched.

So, as Microsoft’s ads promise, does “the Wow start now”? Or is it a cow?

Microsoft certainly pulled one out of the hat here. Last June, when it released Vista Beta 2, it looked as if Vista was going to be a disaster. And even when Microsoft shipped Vista to businesses at the end of last November, the new OS was still a bit dodgy.

But it’s been two months since. My release copy of Vista has been feverishly downloading and installing fixes, patches and new drivers and I have to say the resulting OS is quite impressive.

Vista is certainly a stable and well-designed operating system that features a gorgeous new interface called Aero. So there is a fair bit of wow there.

The new security features, however, are some cow, some wow. This OS looks as if it will be the most secure operating system Microsoft has shipped. We can only hope. Windows XP, of course, was certainly the least secure OS ever shipped by Microsoft. Microsoft Canada bellyached at me through their PR flack when I said that on my weekly segment on the Stafford Show on AM 640 in Toronto. Still, if you measure it by the million plus spyware variants and hundreds of thousands of viruses that plagued XP, that statement is true.

To be fair, though, Microsoft argues XP was very popular and so it was a big target for malware writers. Pundits argue its security was poorly designed and sloppy. The truth lies somewhere in the middle, as it usually does. In reality XP arrived just as the broadband Internet hit the mass market. It brought with it digital infections that blasted through XP’s meagre defenses. The OS was engineered for usability, not security.

Bitten hard by its critics, Microsoft made security in Vista a priority. The results are promising. The rock-star security feature is the new user account control (geeks called it UAC) which dims the screen and launches an “Are you sure?” dialog box every time you want to change a system setting or install software system-wide. If you initiate a change, when the UAC kicks in, you simple click Continue. If malware tries to make a change, you’ll see an uninitiated UAC warning and you click “Cancel” to stop it.

You can be sure that the bad guys are already examining Vista to find its vulnerabilities, but there’s enough engineering in Vista to shut out most of the nasties. Vista’s big threat will be social engineering. Malware writers will surely take advantage of users who are fed up with the constant UAC dialog boxes, finding ways to trick people into installing malware.

Beyond security, perhaps the hottest feature in Vista is the new instant search feature that makes it extremely easy to find files, e-mails and even Windows applets and tools. You no longer need to click into six levels of menus to find a file or to start an applet. Now, you simply type in the name of what you want into search boxes on any window or on the Start menu.

Vista filters what it finds on the fly, showing results as you type. If you’re an Apple user, you saw this type of functionality in Mac OS X two years ago. Still, it’s a feature that Windows needed. And it works really well. I would argue it is one of the most compelling reasons besides improved security to upgrade from XP. Certainly search is a wow.

Still, there is one big downside in Vista that is going to be a big mooing side of beef for Microsoft. Programs written for Windows XP (or earlier) do not always play nice with Vista. Software installers tangle with Vista’s new security features and usually lose. And while some XP drivers will work on Vista, you’re better off to use Vista-specific drivers. The problem is they are not widely available yet.

I recently looked for a Vista driver for my X-Fi Creative sound card, but to no avail. It’s still not working on my Vista machine. And I had the same problem with two web cams, one each from Creative and Logitech. Worse, my anti-spam plug-in for Outlook from a company called Cloudmark doesn’t work, either. Then there’s Nero. It needed a special Vista update. And the list goes on.

Then there’s the issue of hardware. To run Vista, Microsoft suggests two hardware specifications.

For people new to computers, specifications are the numerical descriptors that are used to understand the performance of a machine. Just like these numbers used as Bobcat loader specs – a machine used in construction, except as it related to computers.

So here is the Vista specs:

“Vista-Capable” machines should have 800 MHz processors or better with 512 MB of RAM. Microsoft says “Vista-Premium” rated machines should have 1 GHz processor or better, plus 1 GB of RAM and a graphics card with 128 MB of video RAM. Don’t believe that, though. If you want a good Vista experience, you’ll need a multi-core processor (Pentium D or Core 2 Duo) with at least a 1 GB of RAM and a video adapter with 256 MB VRAM. Single-core processor laptops will struggle.

The bottom line: Vista could be a big fat cow for so many reasons, but there is enough wow in it that I think this operating system will – in the end – be a hit with the consumer. Just do you yourself a favor. Buy a brand new Vista-compliant machine with lots of horsepower. Because if you stick with your old computer, your mantra on the day you install Vista will be: “The Cow starts now.”

Andy Walker is the author of Microsoft Windows Vista Help Desk.