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Vista's care in the community

Posted on 24 Apr 2006 at 10:51

Jon Honeyball kicks off his look at Microsoft's next operating system with a renamed beta

In the meantime, let's also hope that Microsoft takes its head out of the sand and recognises that the current home settings are wholly unacceptable. Unless, of course, it has some sort of perverse, revenue-driven belief that keeping things as they are is a fine way to drive users to the Microsoft Live services (including antivirus and antispyware on rolling subscriptions). It wouldn't be that cynical, would it?

Control Panel

Go to Control Panel in Vista and be amazed at the near-doubling of the number of icons to look at. New entries include Default Programs, which allows you to centrally manage file type associations and change the Autoplay options for CDs and media players. Parental Controls allows you to enforce controls on children, and you get a pretty comprehensive set of tools, including time management and application lockdown. And there are very good reporting tools in there too, allowing you to see what's been going on. This is a big step forward from the miserable experience of XP - all it needs is proper account lockdown to help make it work well.

My eye was drawn to Performance Rating and Tools, given my boy-racer tendencies when it comes to hardware. I was therefore a little gutted to find my machine was given an overall performance rating of just 3. By category, my processor got a rating of 4.2, and that's for a Pentium 4 at 3.06GHz. Memory was rated at 3.9, and that's for 1GB of quite fast Corsair memory. The primary hard disk got a 4.3 rating, and the nVidia GeForce 6800 GT graphics card got a rating of 5.9 for graphics and 5 for 3D gaming graphics. Obviously, these numbers are meaningless in isolation, other than allowing you to see what hardware changes achieve on your machine, but it will be interesting to see whether this rating scale gains traction across the industry, and whether it will prove to be robust and worthwhile. I suspect the hard-core game player will stick to established benchmarks, but I look forward to trying this across a roomful of laptops, for example.

I'm impressed, however, with the new Windows Performance Diagnostic Console, which brings together a whole raft of useful information in one place. It shows, both by listing and by graphics, when applications were installed or uninstalled, application failures, driver failures, hardware failures and Windows failures. This will be an absolute boon for anyone trying to sort out a wobbly machine in the future, by being able to apply a calendar view to the information. This will make it much easier to identify when a period of instability started, and hopefully to pinpoint exactly what it was that started the problems. It might be, for example, a report of the hard disk starting to exhibit read errors, which then manifests itself as random application failures. Bringing this information together is long overdue and most welcome.