The wider Vista

Microsoft is still planning to release Vista by November this year, according to the latest report on CRN. But does anyone really care?

The Vista Beta 2 is now available to play with, so of course Rabid decided to take a perfectly good PC and wreck it.

The Vista install looks somewhat nicer than previous efforts and does a fair job of automating everything.

For the first time there actually seems to be some point in telling the first screen where you live, as it uses that data to fill in a bunch of other boxes for you.

This is a welcome change from XP (and earlier versions of Windows) which asks where you live several times, completely ignores you and sets up your PC for the USA.

However, easy installs don’t make for a compelling upgrade. Rabid’s PC had 1GB of memory, but Vista demanded more. With 2GB installed the performance improved to be at least as good as Windows 95.

Think turtles trudging through treacle to get some idea of the blistering performance. Next item on the agenda was a fresh beta of Office 2007.

There’s another bag of code nobody is desperate to install. The new interface is claimed to be much easier than the old interface, but that must only apply to people who have never used a PC before.

Rabid couldn’t find the basic things in the new menus and had to resort to Help just to figure out how to load a macro. Yes folks, you have to load the “developer” tab to get at the macro menus.

Developer? I just like being able to hit one key to change from upper case to lower case. This makes me a developer? Righto then, better up the hourly rate somewhat.

So with Vista running, or at least walking briskly, and Office making the simple things confusing, time to load some of the other software we need on a daily basis. Whoops. Can’t load and run Quickbooks. Same with Filemaker Pro. Photoshop almost works.

And Vista is ready for release in four months? Don’t plan to spend your massive Christmas upgrade profits just yet. There might not be any.