Greetings from Windows 6.0...

Post by **Kaylee** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 11:07 pm

the future's bright...
...the future looks disturbingly like OS-X

I like the use of filters on windows though, that's very useful. Just type in a few keywords and it narrows down everything in the window to just what you typed.

Annoyingly the screen redraw rate is god awful and the system tends to go off on 10 minute long 100% processor-useage junkets randomly... natch its an alpha version so its to be expected, still annoying though.

And I must confess to finding the 'Sidebar' utterly useless. It's like a taskbar in GNOME or KDE, but with about 57x less functionality. I'm guessing its going to be one of those features that everybody turns off instantly.

Photo realistic icons are nifty though.

Bootup and shutdown, as well as icon layout, look very Linux like.

Luckily none of the security/permissions nonsense is in place so it's half nice to play around. Unfortunately when Palladium comes in I don't suppose Longhorn will be half so innocent looking...

Dead Head · Post by **Dead Head** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 11:16 pm

Food for thought. I'm particularly interested in WSH (aka 'Monad'). Anything is better than cmd.exe or command.com.

Post by **Computron** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 11:34 pm

Where did you get a copy of that?

Impactor returns 2.0 · Post by **Impactor returns 2.0** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 11:40 pm

**** i was supposed to send u XP... im so sorry everythings gone haywire about here.

um that looks like an XP skin tho?

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Fri Feb 18, 2005 12:57 am

You actually got it to work? You must have one high spec PC there!

A friend of mine tried to upgrade to Longhorn on his work PC last week - it just kept crashing it! Upgrade, Crash, Rebuild, Upgrade, Crash, Rebuild, Ghost, Upgrade, Crash, Ghost, Give Up.

And his PC is pretty high spec.

Impactor returns 2.0 · Post by **Impactor returns 2.0** » Fri Feb 18, 2005 1:05 am

I thought Longhorn used a vector graphics system?
and
Was 64bit chip only?

as for speed are you not using a bit of software designed for a PC at least 1 year from now, and i wager closer to 2 years, considering were about to get XP64 in the summer, you can expect a min of 1 years worth of marketing etc..

i know it says Longhorn down the bottom, are you sure thats really longhorn?
Its looks more like XP with a skin?

Post by **Denyer** » Fri Feb 18, 2005 1:26 am

Microsoft already seem to have ripped most of the whizz-bang new features out of the development cycle...

Predabot · Post by **Predabot** » Fri Feb 18, 2005 7:25 am

Memory thief ahoy! {I could need that head-smacking emoticon right now..} I'm not entirely certain exactly what purpose the photo-realistic icons is supposed to serve, other than looking "good".

The sidebar does look naff, and why on earth would I want a BIG FRIGGIN CLOCK ON IT? It's 64 bit only..yippie.

I suppose that's useful for those that own the next gen processors, but I can't but help to think that Microsoft will lose quite a portion of users because of that. Not that I care, tis' lovely really.

And now we come down to the most important question: is everything, every tinsy little portion of graphics in it vector-based?

If so, how much does the scaling down of just about everything free processor-power? And dare I {gasp! } ask how much Ram this monstrosity devours in a virtual feast??

Impactor returns 2.0 · Post by **Impactor returns 2.0** » Fri Feb 18, 2005 10:45 am

the thing is, ive got XP skins that looks pretty much identicle to that. I could even make one.

Im skepticle to say the least that MS would use the similar start bar set up. which co-incidently is one of the hardest things to change when skinning....

Legion · Post by **Legion** » Fri Feb 18, 2005 11:42 am

am i the only one left on the planet that likes the old windows 3.11 interface?

although i have to admit, i have been spoilt by being able to right click on things...

Predabot · Post by **Predabot** » Fri Feb 18, 2005 4:37 pm

Legion wrote:am i the only one left on the planet that likes the old windows 3.11 interface?

Yes, you are. Bloody anoying windows that. Altough I have to give it that it wasn't a resource-thief.

Win 95 was r0xxors.

Move along.

Post by **Kaylee** » Fri Feb 18, 2005 8:32 pm

I thought Longhorn used a vector graphics system?

I have no idea whether Avalon is active in this implementation or not- if it is it would explain the ridiculously high processor overheads.

and
Was 64bit chip only?

I have read nothing from Microsoft supporting this.

as for speed are you not using a bit of software designed for a PC at least 1 year from now, and i wager closer to 2 years, considering were about to get XP64 in the summer, you can expect a min of 1 years worth of marketing etc..

That's why I said "natch its an alpha version so its to be expected"

i know it says Longhorn down the bottom, are you sure thats really longhorn?
Its looks more like XP with a skin?the thing is, ive got XP skins that looks pretty much identicle to that. I could even make one.

Im skepticle to say the least that MS would use the similar start bar set up. which co-incidently is one of the hardest things to change when skinning....

You really don't think much of me do you, Mark?

Would this settle matters that it is not a skin (other than the my knowing the difference between an OS feature and a customiseable skin feature):

Any other screenshots people might like to see I'll let you know. The alpha is half XP half experimental code- some bits are new, others aren't. Files now have utterly independant permissions on them as to what can be done to them by whom for example.

You actually got it to work? You must have one high spec PC there!

A friend of mine tried to upgrade to Longhorn on his work PC last week - it just kept crashing it! Upgrade, Crash, Rebuild, Upgrade, Crash, Rebuild, Ghost, Upgrade, Crash, Ghost, Give Up.

And his PC is pretty high spec.

Nothing special, Rebsy, 1GHz 256MB, 20GB and 64MB graphics card.

No sign of any new command prompt, not that that means much this release is from May last year.

Impactor returns 2.0 · Post by **Impactor returns 2.0** » Fri Feb 18, 2005 8:37 pm

sorry mate, im in 'skeptic' mood this week as you might imagine.

I think it looks quite groovy tho I belive the trend for Longhorn desktop backgrounds is to use a slightly zoomed in image of the standard XP green field hill...

Post by **Kaylee** » Fri Feb 18, 2005 8:49 pm

{hug}

Assuming one day it all runs at a sensible speed I can see it as being a nice interface to use- its by and large XP mk 2. I like the filter idea for windows, I like the new browsing method (when you open a window and go to maybe c:\my documents\test\test2 it will appear in the title as a series of hyperlinks like My Documents >> Test >> Test2).

I like the preview feature for folders (it steals whatever is the first image and shows it just peeping out of the folder icon).

All in all it seems like a grand interface if you've got the system to support whatever it is.

Only problem I know I'm going to have with it will be the issues created around Palladium and Digital Media Rights. I don't like the idea of my OS telling me what files I can and cannot open and what programs I can and cannot install...

I've turned off the sidebar and am looking for a way to stop the processor usage jumping randomly.

Only annoyance is this alpha is built using IE Version 6.05 with no popup blocker! bah!

I assume 6.0 will ship with IE 7... I know it's meant to have Media Player 11. Assuming either are done by the release date. I've heard noises from Microsoft implying that 6.0 will be ready before Palladium is (as it's heavily hardware dependant and they're waiting on Intel for that).

Irritatingly there doesn't seem to be any way to access effectively what hardware is on your system. Device manager has been replaced by a sort of grouped-by icon set showing what's in your system, and it only shows the bare basics (graphics card, network card, sound card) with no access to things which you might have cancelled the driver installation to and are looking to now manually install.

It essentially looks to my mind like XP meets Macintosh. Problem's going to be whether or not you can get past its security systems when they're implemented... normally such things are cracked before they even hit the shelves, but I wonder whether it will be possible to neuter Palladium and still keep 6.0 functional.

Predabot · Post by **Predabot** » Fri Feb 18, 2005 9:47 pm

*looks at Karly-boo's screenshot*

It does

look like win XP in bizarre OS/X mode.

Impactor returns 2.0 · Post by **Impactor returns 2.0** » Fri Feb 18, 2005 10:05 pm

I hear that IE.7 will be released before Longhorn is.

Also as this version your using is over a year old, we could fairly assume thats its gonna be CPU retarded and has more memory leaks then we commonly expect from a MS product (oh im very skepticle today) - so when do i get the groovy cyber-space interface from 'minority-report' ?

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Fri Feb 18, 2005 10:10 pm

Then again, when Win95 came out, everybody (who was in the know, anyway) noticed the similarity between this new Microsoft OS and OSes that had been around the block for about a decade: Mac OS, Amiga Workbench, Atari GEM, etc.

Legion · Post by **Legion** » Sat Feb 19, 2005 4:58 pm

bah, this is the way forward:

seriously tho, that does look very nice i have to admit, much nicer than XP looks. i'm gonna try and stick with 2k until this is released i think tho.

Leatherneck · Post by **Leatherneck** » Sat Feb 19, 2005 5:36 pm

Not a fan of the sidebar. Personally I run my start bar with three 'levels' I guess you could call them; 2 levels for application tabs and the third, on the bottom, for my quick launch. As such, I'd prefer the useable space instead of a sidebar.

Post by **Kaylee** » Sat Feb 19, 2005 8:07 pm

Problem with the sidebar, speaking from an HCI undergraduate perspective, is that it doesn't have enough out of the box features for most users (imo) to keep it open beyond 'ooh that looks pretty'. It strikes me as one of the first things people will turn off.

Thing with that is once users turn a feature off because they don't think they will want it, it is then quite hard psychologically speaking to persuade them to turn it back on.

The memory problems and CPU useage are entirely down to this being an alpha version. It isn't even a beta release. It's half finished, half coded and half mangled-XP code. I'm surprised it even runs as smoothly as it does tbh.

Impactor returns 2.0 · Post by **Impactor returns 2.0** » Sun Feb 20, 2005 2:05 am

it will be interesting to see how much different the final version looks in compariosn. I mean Alpha is like a super early build, as in "look its actually turned on!" - I mean if u take say video games, Beta builds of games, released for testing are still normally riddled with bugs.

Post by **Denyer** » Sun Feb 20, 2005 2:51 am

Legion wrote:i'm gonna try and stick with 2k until this is released i think tho.

I'm going to try to stick with Win2K for about the next five years... it's the first reasonably stable version of Windows and I don't think anything of value has been added since.

Impactor returns 2.0 · Post by **Impactor returns 2.0** » Sun Feb 20, 2005 11:49 am

I sed to blue screen 2k quite a bit, but have never Blued XP. so somthing works better.

its control panel options are gnerally faster aswell. actually it just feels faster. and I used 2k for about 3 years and then switched to XP after it had been out about a year.

Legion · Post by **Legion** » Sun Feb 20, 2005 12:18 pm

Impactor returns 2.0 wrote:I sed to blue screen 2k quite a bit, but have never Blued XP. so somthing works better.

The only time i think i've had a BSOD with win2k was when i had a bad memory stick installed.... other than that, i've been using it for 3 years and never had any problems...

that's a point, hey Karl, you managed to BSOD Longhorn?

Impactor returns 2.0 · Post by **Impactor returns 2.0** » Sun Feb 20, 2005 1:25 pm

I think all the jiggery pokery I have installed on my machine might make things different, Apart from high end sound editing cards, video ards, openGL cards, Graphics cards and it being a dual Xeon.

I couldnt run Hyper Threading on 2K very well for example, it took a while before various patchs from MS caught onto some flaws.

Also 3D apps have a habit of breaking things.

Post by **Kaylee** » Sun Feb 20, 2005 9:23 pm

I haven't tried BSOD'ing 6.0, its almost certainly not worth it.

Things will look far more set in stone when 6.0 goes into Beta testings (which I've signed up to test for them, as I did with XP). I would imagine that by and large what you see at the moment if the foundation of what it will look like at the end.

Post by **Denyer** » Sun Feb 20, 2005 9:49 pm

Impactor returns 2.0 wrote:I sed to blue screen 2k quite a bit, but have never Blued XP. so somthing works better.

You're running hardware designed for the latter, for starters. Drivers and physical faults are pretty much the only things that'll bluescreen NT5.

Impactor returns 2.0 wrote:it just feels faster.

How much do you configure Win2K? Some environment defaults are pre-tweaked in XP.

Impactor returns 2.0 · Post by **Impactor returns 2.0** » Sun Feb 20, 2005 11:29 pm

well I feel I had Win2k tweaked pretty well, i mean I was looking to use as lil amount of ram and cpu cycles as possible to speed up rendering.
but as it was a few years ago now, i cant say what it was setup like.

well if 2k works for you then cool, I always liked it alot, I had to change as software required me to do so, oh and games.....