Sunday March 19th, 2006.
Posted by Jason Lashua

Vista.

Well, I recently installed a copy of the Vista CTP (Aka Beta 2 build 5308) and must say this O/S is taking a bit of a departure from the typical microsoft method, Aside from the nice eye candy which does serve a purpose (the hardware accelerated desktop compositing makes for very fast and smooth graphics) the very basics seem to be much imrpoved, such as explorer, the start menu which no longer takes over your screen with overlapping endless sub-menus, and a slightly nicer filesystem layout.

I'm not going to write a review, because there are plenty of them going around, however, I do have a nice screenshot available, PNG format of course, to show off every pixel in perfection.

I decided to see if the old Win2k hack program "Glass2k" would still work even though Vista has removed the GDI layer, and sure 'nuff, whole-window transparency! Thankfully it is not as slow as it used to be in Win2k/XP since those systems rely on software rendering, however, there is a bit of a performance hit with huge windows on my lowly Radeon 9550 graphics card, nothing too unusable however.

Here's a link to the Screen Shot:
click here for link

Enjoy.
Edited on Sunday March 19th, 2006. by jlashua.

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