Well, in the past few days, I have been beta testing some new software. Windows Vista, Office 2007, and Google Spreadsheets have been 3 such pieces. Here, I have included some screenshots of each piece of software as well as some personal notes on use.
[Note: This, like the software I have tested, is in beta. Actually, it's in alpha. Well, more like pre-alpha. I'll keep updating it as I go...]
Windows Vista
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/preview.mspx
Well, I think I should first say that I am extremely happy that Microsoft is allowing regular users (i.e. non-MSDN subscribers) to beta test their software. In fact, I think it’s totally 1337 of Microsoft to do that because the only other way to obtain a beta would be by getting a leaked version (>.>).
Having said that, I had a spare hard drive that only had some random stuff on it, so I thought I would install Vista on that so that I wouldn’t mess up my current hard drives because the beta supposedly has some problems with dual booting because of a new boot manager. It’s a 40gB Maxtor drive, but has a copy of Windows XP installed on it already. I didn’t want to erase it, so I created a 20gB partition in the drive and gave it to Vista and imagined that I would manually use a partition manager to change the active drive since the copy of Windows XP that was already on there goes to a different computer. Okay, so that’s good; got a hard drive. I tried booting from the installation DVD after having burned it and it took FOREVER to load. I knew something had to be wrong there. And sure enough, there was something wrong. After a while, it bluescreened on me. After another try, it told me that it needed drivers for the DVD drive, which is absolutely stupid because it’s running from the DVD drive… So then, I tried an alternate method. I installed Windows XP on that drive. Then, I ran the DVD from Windows XP and selected a custom option that would move all the old files over to a different location called "Windows.old" (and then I would just delete the old files). Installation seemed to proceed nicely (unfortunately, I had to leave it before the installation ended). When I got back, it was ready to be set up with some very basic options. I set these options up and everything worked perfectly fine. My computer specs are as follows:
- AMD Athlon XP 3000+ processor 1.3gHZ (Note: the processor should run at 2gHZ, but the motherboard is clocked incorrectly at 133mHZ FSB, so that reduces the processor speed. It was too late after I found this out, so I couldn’t return it. The sad part too is that the company who makes this PC is a major retailer).
- 1gB RAM
- 40gB hard drive (normally 2x 160gB drives)
- DVD+/-RW drive
- CD-ROM drive.
- nVidia GeForce 2 MX AGP card
- Matrox PCI card
- (built in GeForce 4 MX chip that overheats and shuts my computer down when playing games)
For such specs, Vista actually doesn’t run all that slowly upon first boot. One of the things that I don’t like is how it takes up over 550mB of RAM. Seriously, that’s a huge amount for an operating system with nothing else installed yet. I just really can’t imagine what on earth Vista is doing that takes up so much RAM. My computer has an overall rating of 1, which kind of ticks me off. I suppose that after I put it on a real hard drive and install a new graphics card (will talk about that later), I can push it to a 2 or a 3. 1 is kind of harsh though. The most annoying part though is that if I ever want to upgrade my RAM to 2 gigs, I will have to remove both 512mB modules and install 2 1gB module.
Concerning the graphics cards. The integrated GeForce 4 MX chip on my computer kept overheating and shutting my computer off when playing games. It also randomly bluescreened when playing games as well. So, I had to rip out an nVidia GeForce 2 MX 32mB card from another computer in order to play any games at all. Yes, I have been playing the Halo Demo and Unreal Tournament on such a graphics card. Halo is unbelievably slow even on the lowest settings. Windows Vista will have support for computers with graphics cards having pixel shader support, something that almost all gaming cards have these days. The other generic Matrox card that I have there has 4mB of video RAM and is used for my second monitor. I have been looking at buying a new card for a while. I am probably going to buy a BIOSTAR GeForce 6800XT card with 512mB of RAM and a 256-bit memory interface. With the exception of the memory being GDDR2, it is a really high quality product for the price (around $150 at NewEgg). This card is fully supported by Windows Vista, so I won’t have a problem. I will also be able to play games at an FPS higher than 15… XD
The current screenshots have been taken with my GeForce 2 MX card of course because there’s no transparency nor much else there. You should be able to get a copy from the link above if you’re not too late. Because of the huge demand, it occasionally gives you an error message when clicking on the download link. If you have a good download manager (I used DownThemAll for Firefox), it should be a fairly easy download if you don’t click on the "Download with Akamai Download Manager" link.
The OS itself is very nice. I like the level of customization power that you are given. However, it seems a little bloated. I have yet to experiment with most of the features of the OS. However,looking at the basic OS itself, it looks quite nice. I tried a few gadgets. Nothing new… They’ve been around since like Mac OS 7 or so (anybody remember the eyes that follow the cursor?). I’ve used Kapsules on Windows before, and they look quite nice. These gadgets are nice because they are more integrated with the OS and the sidebar is partially transparent. Overall, I like what I see here, even though I have a gut feeling that Microsoft has a long way to go before this OS becomes commercial-grade. It feels really "betaesque" to me still, even for this late in the game.
Screenshots:
These screenshots have been taken on a virtual machine so that’s why the resolution is lower than 1280×1024, which I normally use. Click on them for a larger view.
Microsoft Office 2007
http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/default.mspx
After figuring out that they had kept releasing the same version of Office just under a new name, Microsoft realized that they needed to change things up a bit and actually try to make their software useful for a world that has progressed since 1990. Just kidding, but sort of not really.
Microsoft Office 2007 sports a new, clean look, an easier method of getting to the functions you need, built-in ClearType support, and a whole slew of other functions. I have tested a lot of the software included in Office 2007, but I think by describing the three main ones (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), you’ll get the idea.
Word 2007. I’ve used this software the most. While still a little buggy with things such as picture manipulation, the new version of Word is a pleasure to use. I can quickly the functions that I need to access easily. I like the idea of being able to select some text and automatically have a box fade in (very smoothly), displaying the most common formatting options. Speaking of fading in very smoothly, all the buttons are nice and have a glowing effect to them. This is common throughout the new version of Office. Everything looks quite nice. Word has a nice feature to save a file to PDF, but unfortunately, Adobe is pressuring Microsoft to cut it. Microsoft says that they will, but will offer a free "Save to PDF" plugin on their website. This new version of Office is actually quite an improvement from the previous one. Oh, and apparently, Word 2007 has support for blogging. I haven’t tried it yet though (am using Flock right now to post).
[Screenshots]
Excel 2007. I haven’t used this software that much yet. However, from whatever use I have had, I would say that it is quite nice. It’s very clean and feels less bloated than previous versions of Excel (even though it’s a bit slower on my machine). [Will add more later.]
[Screenshots]
PowerPoint 2007. I tried this out but gave up rather quickly since it is still incredibly buggy. Moving pictures is a pain, it’s generally quite slow, and keeps crashing very often. However, it does look promising. This version of PowerPoint has a lot of nice features. Text can be formatted in special ways that previous versions can’t do. Also, this version has better theming support, so your slides will be more effective. I haven’t had a chance to play around with this software much since it crashes pretty often. But very nice anyways.
[Screenshots]
Google Spreadsheets
http://spreadsheets.google.com/
Imagine Microsoft Excel, only online. That’s what Google Spreadsheets is. By using very complex ActiveX stuff, Google has created an incredibly powerful spreadsheet program that works right on your browser. I have tested it with Internet Explor(d)er 6 and 7 beta, as well as FireFox, but will test it with Safari later on. Although it doesn’t have a lot of features yet, the ones that it does have are pretty much bug free. The cool thing about it is that you can collaborate on a spreadsheet with other people. The software will automatically handle saving, etc. from multiple people. All the data is saved on Google’s servers, so if your computer crashes, your spreadsheet will be fine (so long as you saved, of course). This is a really nice piece of software. I can’t wait to see the full version.
