Okay, so I installed the Windows Vista Beta 1 software last night, and all I can say is that I am thoroughly unimpressed. Allow me to tell you why. Remember a few years back when Microsoft was touting all of the amazing things that Longhorn would do, both visually and under the hood? Well, those day are now long gone. I mean, yeah, Microsoft has put in some visual bells and whistles - but nothing like they were touting a few years ago at WinHEC. Do we really need to wait until Blackcomb to ship in the 2011-2015 range before we can get an OS as visually-appealing and stable as OS X?

It took me forever to just get Vista to recognize that it was on a network and get it connected to the Internet. Also, after installing I needed to re-load a few DLL’s in order to get a few things running. Now, I realize that this is beta software, so take all of this with a grain of salt. I am sure this won’t be the case once the OS goes gold, I just really would have liked to have seen some of the stuff Microsoft was making a big deal about. I am talking about the WinFS, Avalon, Indigo powered behemoth that was supposed to usher in the next generation of computing. At this point, Vista really does just seem like a skinned up version of Windows XP with some new animations on a clunky GUI. Yeah, Aero is very unimpressive as well. I guess I will now digress.