Windows Vista Beta 2: Overview and Impressions

After our first attempt to install Windows Vista we understood the requirement of having 15GB of free space on the hard drive. The OS took as much as 11.5GB on the HDD with a total of over 50,000 files. Moreover, the OS refused to install from a Lite-On LDW-411S attached to a Serial ATA port via an ABIT Serillel 2 converter. We had to use an ordinary Parallel ATA connector and everything went smoothly then. The installation process itself takes about twice the amount of time it does with Windows XP, which is normal considering the total size of Windows Vista files. There are rather few dialogs during the installation, but this makes the process simpler for inexperienced users. After all, you can set everything up the way you want after the new OS is installed.

The new user interface Aero is of course the most conspicuous innovation in Windows Vista. One glance is enough to realize that Vista is completely different visually from Windows XP.

The borders of windows in Aero are transparent so you can see all the windows underneath. The Minimize, Maximize and Close buttons are highlighted when you approach them with your mouse pointer. The system font Segoe UI has been increased from 8 to 9 points and uses antialiasing by default. Subjectively, the system works smoothly, without sudden performance fluctuations, yet we got an impression that all processes worked more slowly in Windows Vista than in Windows XP as if the new OS reacted to user actions with a delay, although not a very long one. What’s interesting, the system reaction speed didn’t change much after we disabled Aero and switched to the Vista Basic and then to the Windows Standard/Classic interface (on our testbed with 1GB of system RAM). The latter interfaces require less of system RAM, though.

Here are a few numbers: if you use Aero, then right after the OS is booted, the memory usage indicator in the Side Bar shows about 65% and the Task Manager reports that about 1.2GB of memory is occupied by the OS. The processes explorer.exe and DWM.exe take up 62 and 137MB of RAM, respectively. If you switch to the Windows Standard theme, the memory usage indicator shows 50-55%, the Task Manager reports that about 960MB of memory is in use, and the processes explorer.exe and DWM.exe take up 16 and 36.5MB of memory, respectively. So, you have to sacrifice some system memory to be able to run the 3D Aero interface. Note that the numbers are only true for Windows Vista Beta 2 and may be different in the final version of the OS.

A curious fact, the CPU usage was 20-25% when the system was idle until we installed the beta version of ATI Catalyst. This indicates that the generic driver included into the OS is deficient in some way or another. Perhaps, it doesn’t fully support WDDM or cannot verify the correctness of commands sent to the graphics subsystem on the graphics card (we used a Sapphire Toxic Radeon X1900 XTX) and does that on the CPU instead.