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By William Van Winkle |
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Reasons to Love Vista The hype surrounding Vista is predictably epic, and we're sure that sales of the new OS will be brisk even if it lacks all of the value implied by a quick glance. For example, we have a hard time basing a value assessment on updates like Internet Explorer 7. IE7 is a free download that works fine under XP, and we still haven't decided if we like it more or less than IE6. (Our browser windows still crash, only now they take out half a dozen tabs rather than one window.) Ditto that for Windows Media Player 11, which now pumps Microsoft's own URGE music service well before any partners. Turning the Xbox 360 into the industry's only visible Media Center extender may be a step backwards, especially for the channel. Vista's speech recognition engine will only be used by a relative handful of people. And even much-lauded features like Windows Search come off as an overdue imitation of competing software, such as Google Desktop Search. Yes, there's a convenience factor in only having one piece of software to update rather than a couple dozen, but it's still too hard to make a convincing sales pitch to buyers based on points to which they can reply, "But I already do that now." So what is there about Vista that is of real, fundamental value? To some extent, answers are in the eyes of the beholders. We really like that Windows Movie Maker now supports editing and output in HD resolutions, but few people seem to take WMM seriously, which is unfortunate. Vista has a DVD authoring and burning app, not to mention native MPEG-2 decoding (finally!), twin dual-tuner card support, and the CableCARD support necessary to let Windows machines take over for digital set-top boxes. Windows Calendar is an excellent app for the sharing and subscribing of calendars, and the Snipping Tool for screen grabbing makes ALT + Prnt Scrn look downright Neolithic. There's even an integrated benchmarking utility (Windows System Assessment Tool, or WinSAT) to measure basic desktop performance levels of major system components. (In fact, the WinSAT score is what Vista uses to determine whether or not the Aero UI will be used. Registry hacks can override these values.) But these are great little features that will appeal to a minority of users. Here are five key points that should appeal to very broad audiences. DirectX 10 DirectX is Microsoft's collection of APIs for handling multimedia tasks. As you probably know, the current DX revision is 9.0c, which updated the technology to include Pixel Shader Model 3. DirectX 9 took a big leap in realism by making instructions more programmable, but there still remained several shortcomings, one of the biggest being CPU limitations. When an application needs to render an object, it calls the appropriate API, which in turn calls the driver. These steps get processed by the CPU, and even with the power of modern chips, there is still a limit of about 500 objects that can be rendered in any frame. So if you want to render a crowd of people, you have to program the scene with a maximum of about 500 people, all of whom would look fairly similar. By having DirectX 10 (and its attendant Shader Model 4 technology) shift much of the processing load to the GPU, this bottleneck is removed. "DirectX 10 is going to unlock a lot of features we've been wanting for the graphics market," says NVIDIA's Andrew Fear. "We just launched our first DirectX 10 graphics processor, the GeForce 8800, and DirectX 10 is only going to be made available on Windows Vista. You cannot run DirectX 10 on Windows XP. So as DX10 titles start to come out, you're going to see realism in games like never before. Imagine you want to draw a landscape under DirectX 9 in World of Warcraft. In that game, you have to go through and build the world yourself. Imagine a virtual world the size of the United States. You literally have to go through and place every tree, every mountain, and place them correctly to get something that looks like a map of the United States. With DirectX 10, you can render in realtime and create new environments. So you don't need to sit there and spent nine months of development mapping out how a landscape is going to look. You can use the graphics processor to calculate how that's going to appear and map it out in realtime. So as a game developer, you can be a lot more creative. Your game can go on to infinity if you want. It's all about programmability, not having to hard code everything." DirectX 10 is a major break from its predecessors. The geometry, pixel, and vertex units of the past all collapse under DX10 into a single processing stage. The appropriate term for this is unified architecture, and it's much of what will free up GPUs to perform a wider array of computation tasks than we've seen before. The upshot is a huge surge of both realism and performance provided you've got display hardware that is DX10-compatible. As Fear indicates, NVIDIA just came out with its first compliant part. ATI's R600 core is expected to follow suit in Q1. However, this means that for the next three months, only hard-core enthusiasts willing to drop $400 to $650 on a video card (or two) will have access to this functionality. The counterpoint is that it's going to take several months for the industry to churn out a compelling bed of DX10-compatible software titles. Also note that NVIDIA is expected to release a DX10-capable IGP early in 2007, and there is no word on when competing chipset vendors will catch up.
If a user adopts Vista but doesn't have a DX10-compatible adapter, Microsoft's new DirectX 9.0L (for Legacy) will fill the gap. This version rolls up all previous DX versions and adds some additional functionality that lets a system emulate many of DX10's functions through software. Obviously, this will take a toll on resources and performance, but anticipate seeing some titles, such as the coming game Crysis, require DX9.0L or DX10. DirectX 9.0L is the Band-Aid that aims to sooth everyone who just paid over $300 for a X1900- or GeForce 7900-generation adapter and will never see DirectX 10 run on it. And we'll reiterate: You cannot run DirectX 10 or 9.0L on Windows XP. There may be technical reasons for this, or perhaps it's simply a way to sell more Vista licenses (especially in the case of 9.0L). But it is what it is, and the bottom line is that DirectX 10 is going to fundamentally advance the 3D capabilities of computers, and the only place to get DX10 is Windows Vista. Security This is the big one, right? We've been hearing for over four years about how Longhorn/Vista would solve the rampant security issues that plagued XP and its major applications. Windows XP SP2 remedied some problems, but Vista goes much further. Sadly, security is not terribly sexy, which is partly why so many people ignore it. Security is an intangible that only shows its worth under very bad circumstances, which makes it a tougher selling point to consumer and SOHO buyers. Nevertheless, practically everyone has experienced a security breach of some sort, be it from viruses, trojans, worms, phishing, or any other type of malware, and anyone who has been stung should appreciate the security upgrades that now come built into Vista. Any full discussion of Vista's security would fill a book, but we can hit a handful of highlights. First and foremost, there's User Account Control, which allows users to make settings changes within Vista without admin privileges. If a change is attempted that does require admin rights, then the user is prompted for approval. This has been something of a sore point for Microsoft, because while Microsoft wants an airtight UAC to prevent malicious code from taking over system functions, users get annoyed at Vista's nagging for approvals. To date, the verdict still isn't in on how Microsoft will balance this in the future. Windows Defender, the anti-spyware utility that has been a betaware download seemingly forever, is now built into Vista. Defender monitors several areas within Windows and can pick out suspicious software, and users can query Microsoft via the SpyNet network to find out if this or that application is safe. The integrated Windows firewall now includes outbound packet filtering as well as the ability to restrict applications, such as IM or peer-to-peer clients. Tied to this, Vista now incorporates a new set of parental control tools enabling everything from browsing time limits to content category blocking. Windows Service Hardening limits OS services from performing abnormal functions within critical system files or other Windows areas that can act as breeding grounds for malware. Internet Explorer now runs in a low-privilege, protected mode so that malicious browser code can't attack the host system. Network Access Protection can block connections from outside computers if those systems fail to meet health requirements set by the administrator, such as current security patches and virus signatures.
One of our favorite security enhancements is BitLocker Drive Encryption, available in Vista's Enterprise and Ultimate versions. BitLocker safeguards the C: drive with 128-bit AES encryption. The encryption key is usually stored in a Trusted Platform Module on the motherboard. The TPM is an increasingly common board feature in business lines; all Intel brand Q965-based motherboards have one, for example. The cool thing about BitLocker is its flexibility. You can also store the encryption key on a USB flash drive, implement a combination flash drive with TPM authentication, and even throw a PIN number into the mix. Because BitLocker encrypts the entire volume, users don't have to worry about their drives being stolen and set up in another PC, and there's no more need to wipe drives before selling or retiring them. There may be a BitLocker weakness in the form of someone implementing a dual-boot configuration to access data inside the locked volume, but we'll see how that shakes out. In any case, BitLocker is a huge step forward for anyone wanting to make sure their private data stays private. Windows Meeting Space Maybe this is being selfish, but we at RAM can't wait to get our hands on this. Windows Meeting Space is Vista's extreme overhaul of NetMeeting. Working in a peer-to-peer architecture, Meeting Space lets up to 10 Vista users share their file, application, or entire desktop over the LAN or Internet. The host creates a meeting session, invites attendees, shares the application or desktop, and sends "handout" files for group collaboration. Control of the session can be passed between attendees, and text "notes" can be passed between participants—a cheaper solution, no doubt, than under-the-table Blackberry messaging. To illustrate, it's not uncommon for the PDF versions of stories to pass between three or four of our offices, getting evaluated and marked up along the way, repeating the trip through successive drafts. If we were able to use Acrobat within Meeting Space and perform this editing process as a group, it would probably knock our editing and text layout time down by several hours. For mobile workers who may not always have the comforts of their own desktop and applications on hand, Meeting Space might just turn out to be a life saver. ReadyBoost We deliberated a long time before deciding to endorse this feature. In short, ReadyBoost is a feature in Vista that detects the presence of a USB 2.0 flash device (greater than 256MB) and harnesses it as virtual memory. More specifically, Vista incorporates a feature called SuperFetch (improved from XP's PreFetch) that preloads data into system memory from the hard disk-based virtual memory page file. Prefetching is nothing new; everything from CPUs to Web browsers can do it. SuperFetch simply has more efficient algorithms than PreFetch.
However, the process of pulling that predicted data off the hard drive necessitates the relatively lengthy process of spinning the platters and searching for the right bits. This access point is the bottleneck. So ReadyBoost redirects this SuperFetch data from storing to the hard drive to storing to attached flash memory, which has much faster access times. You plug in a flash drive, AutoPlay offers an option to speed up the system, and you select it. Does ReadyBoost deliver? We'll see. Late beta benchmarks (www.msblog.org/2006/06/01/vista-readyboost-or-snailboost, for example) aren't exactly painting a night and day picture, although some forum posts show users reporting application improvements of up to 20 percent. Moreover, there are restrictions on ReadyBoost. Flash drives must be greater than 256MB but only to a limit of 4GB, and the drives must meet a certain set of speed criteria. (We have yet to find an approved list from Microsoft, but an independent, non-official site is at www.grantgibson.co.uk/misc/readyboost.) The takeaway seems to be that ReadyBoost—especially on a drive formatted with NTFS rather than FAT32—can noticeably aid small, quick processes, such as switching between files or views, and fares less well for longer, sustained processes. This is par for the course with just about any prefetching technology. Why were we against ReadyBoost? Because we kept visualizing someone spending $3,000 on a new Vista PC, then coming back a week later, fists on hips, saying, "I just spent a small fortune for this cutting-edge machine, and you're telling me I need to use a flash drive to get the most out of it?" But the real answer is that the more RAM a system has, the less ReadyBoost will be needed. A top-end Vista box may show little to any gain from ReadyBoost. This is primarily a play for mainstream or especially budget buyers that might reasonably be putting most of their available dollars into graphics rather than RAM. These people will see the most benefit. Besides, flash drives do well as point-of-sale impulse buys, and unlike adding RAM inside the PC, flash drives can be pulled out and used elsewhere as needed. Sidebar and Photo Gallery OK, yes, we know that these things can be readily had through third-party sources. Vista's Sidebar and its clutch of Gadgets is a me-too swipe at Yahoo!'s Widgets, formerly Konfabulator. And there's no shortage of consumer photo management titles out there, including Adobe's Photoshop Album, now rolled into the surprisingly impressive and affordable Photoshop Elements. The point is that many users still don't use these extras, and we've never seen them included in Windows before. While Vista's Search may be cool, it's not eye-popping. No one is going to look at it and see how it could improve his or her life. Alternatively, the Aero interface may look stunning to the uninitiated (although not to those accustomed to Mac OS X or the XGL environment), but only prolonged experience will reveal how the eye candy can convert into productivity. Sidebar and Photo Galllery are different. I defy any PC-using consumer not to find immediate, time-saving utility in these enhancements.
The Sidebar is a translucent strip anchored to the edge of the desktop in which the user can enable and run Gadgets. A Gadget is a little XML/.NET applet that performs a certain task. Thirteen Gadgets come included with Vista, including a system monitor and an egg timer. If Vista's Gadget gallery follows Yahoo!'s Widgets, then expect hundreds to thousands of these things to come available very soon, many of them free and some for a small price. As a point of reference, the top 25 list of Widgets as of this writing include a Christmas countdown applet, an iPod skin for controlling iTunes, traffic cams, RSS feed readers, a public domain photo of the day, mortgage rate info, and an adopt-a-pet browser. Most are useless, but the handful any given user will latch onto could make a world of daily difference. Also consider that the more a user falls in love with Gadgets, the more he's going to need a bigger display—or two. Photo Gallery is like My Computer's Tiles view meets Windows Media Player 11. In an age when practically everyone with a PC also has a digital camera, the hundreds to thousands of images we amass quickly outstrip most efforts to organize by folder and filename. Photo Gallery makes it easy to rate and add other metadata to images and videos. (Finding the time to tag photos is a different problem. Remembering to set the camera's date after each battery swap is another concern when sorting by Date Taken.) Photo Gallery also includes a basic editor capable of quick fix tasks, such as cropping, red eye removal, and automatic color/contrast optimization. ...more |
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Copyright © 2007 RAM Magazine. All rights reserved.
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