Really nice page design work by Long Zheng to show Windows Vista’s four different interface options (Aero with Glass, Vista Standard, Vista Basic, Windows Classic). Click the screen snippet below to go to Long’s page, then hover your mouse over the buttons below each screen to see the alternate views.
Thanks to Scott Hanselman for pointing out that Sun has released Beta 2 of the Java SE Runtime Environment (JRE) 6. You’ll want this update if you’re running Windows Vista RC1; otherwise you’ll find that using any Java applet turns off the fancy Aero Glass interface.
By the way, the Windows Vista section of the release notes for this version are encouraging about Vista’s effects on security: “On Windows Vista, there is a more restrictive sandbox for signed applets. A user has fewer privileges than if they were running on another Windows OS.”
So, a third-party developer is actually taking advantage of Vista’s more secure environment to improve the security model of its own software? Good.
The 32- bit and 64-bit versions of Windows Vista Release Candidate 1 are now available for download by anyone from this Microsoft-sponsored page, using Akamai’s Download Manager. If you have a product key from the Vista Beta 2 Customer Preview Program, it will work on this release. If you didn’t sign up for the CPP, you’ll have to wait a while longer to get your own product key.
But even if you don’t have a product ID, you can still install and use Vista. I’ll have more information in a major article that will be available on ZDNet tomorrow morning. I’ll post the link when it’s ready.
Details here: 10 essential tweaks for Windows Vista RC1.
Over at ZDNet, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes has put together a really great, in-depth look at the Windows Experience Index, which is the score that the Windows Vista System Assessment Tool produces. Excellent work.
Adrian’s post is a good companion to the first post in my new ZDNet series, Vista Mythbusters #1: It’s not a hardware hog. Be sure to read the comments in the Talkback section, too. A lot of people look at a computer I spent $825 on two and a half years ago and consider it some sort of super-system. Amazing what folks will settle for in the name of trying to save a tiny amount of money.
Long Zheng came up with this improvement to Vista’s User Account Control:
Great idea!
By the way, if you follow Microsoft, you really should keep an eye on Long’s blog, istartedsomething. His observations are consistently sharp, informative, and entertaining.
OK, Amazon has pre-order prices and a ship date – January 30, 2007 – for Windows Vista. Details over at Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report on ZDNet.
But I think this price list, courtesy of a Slashdot commenter, might be more accurate:
I just want to know whether my soul has to be activated first.
Looks like someone at Microsoft Canada screwed up and inadvertently posted retail prices for Windows Vista on a publicly accessible website. The list is no longer available, but I managed to look up the prices of all Vista versions – full and upgrade – before it disappeared.
You’ll probably fall off your chair when you see the prices. (I’m guessing that a full version of Windows Vista Ultimate will cost $349 and an upgrade will run $199.) Just remember, these are undiscounted retail prices. Since 90% of all Windows copies are sold preinstalled on new computers, the actual price tag will be much smaller. In fact, some people will pay less, based on this list. Windows Vista Business Edition is slated to cost less than XP Professional, for example.
Details over at ZDNet: Vista prices revealed!
PS: I notice some folks discussing this over at Neowin and Bink.nu are making a common mistake and simply converting the Canadian prices into U.S. dollars at current exchange rates. The two markets don’t work that way. You’ll get a much more accurate picture of current prices by doing what I’ve done, which is to compare the relative prices of the new Vista versions to current XP versions and then make similar adjustments to the U.S. price list.
[Update 28-Aug 8:30AM PDT: Well, the countdown ended four hours early and the new Windows Marketplace page is now live.]
I’ve been working with the latest build of Windows Vista for the past few days, and in the course of exploring a few features I stumbled across this countdown banner at Microsoft’s Windows Marketplace site:
By my calculations, this site should be open for business at noon, Pacific Daylight Time, on Monday, August 28. It’s a curiously soft launch. No one from Microsoft has pitched this story to me, and the only mention I’ve seen online is this short blurb at LiveSide.
Now, the really curious part is how I reached this site. As part of the setup process, Windows Vista runs a program called Winsat.exe – the Windows System Assessment Tool. This in turn produces a numeric rating for each component of your PC, which in turn gets rolled up into a Windows Experience Index. Here’s how my two-year-old Dell 8300 rates:
See that link at the bottom? The one that reads View software for my base score online? That leads to the Windows Marketplace page, and the URL contains the individual ratings for each of the components in the box shown above, passed as a parameter:
CPU=4.3&MEM=4.8&HDD=5.2&DWM=3.5&D3D=3.4
In theory, this should mean I’ll be offered software that matches my system’s capabilities, including upgrades to more capable (and more expensive) versions of Windows Vista as part of the Windows Anytime Upgrade program.
I’ll take another look at this on Monday and see if anything interesting shows up.
Joe Wilcox doesn’t understand the fuss over the Windows Vista startup sound:
I’m baffled by all the significant chatter over something as seemingly insignificant as the Windows Vista startup sound. For anyone that missed it, Microsoft plans to have Windows Vista emit a distinctive chime when the system is booted up and ready for login or use.
Microsoft’s Steve Ball gave Robert Scoble some reasons for the startup sound, which as of current planning cannot be turned off: 1) “A spiritual side of the branding experience. A short, brief, positive confirmation that your machine is now concious and ready to react”; 2) “The startup sound is designed to help you calibrate or fix something that got out of wack when you startup your machine.”
First, let’s be clear that we’re talking about the startup sound, the one that plays when your computer turns on, not the logon sound that plays when you enter your credentials to access your account. The problem is that the startup sound is not customizable. It’s hard-coded into a system DLL. OK fine, but a side effect of that is that the sound can’t be turned off. And that’s wrong, wrong, wrong. The user should always have the ability to turn this sound off. Here’s why:
Imagine you’re a reporter and you’ve just entered the briefing room for a major announcement from a politician. You open your notebook, and here comes the Windows startup sound, blasting away. You could get thrown out of the briefing room for that.
Or this scenario: You and your spouse are staying in a hotel and you have to get up early to do some work. You slip out of bed quietly, to avoid waking her up, turn on the computer and the sound comes blasting out. A bad way to start the day.
Or you’re a student and you sneak into class five minutes late. Do you really want your computer to announce your late arrival? For that matter, is the world a better place when that damn sound plays 20 times as 20 students turn on their computers at the start of class?
If Microsoft wants to create a mystical branding experience with Windows, fine. If a hardware maker wants to slap stickers all over a new computer, that’s fine too. Just give me the right to remove or change that sound, in the same way that I can remove those stickers.
Jon Gordon interviewed me for American Public Media’s Future Tense program. You can listen here, but alas, the clip is in Real format only. Try the podcast feed instead, which delivers the content in standard MP3 format.
Ed Bott 