This may or may not have been written be me.
“I know its beta and all, but it freaking sucks! All it is, is XP with a new interface! And all XP is, is 2000 with a new interface, so all in all, it sucks.
On that note, it starts off with a much nicer log in screen. It has a very liquid look and feel, this is the first thing that I actually liked (namely because its the first thing I saw). The task bar on my system is simply Graphite in color, and besides a slightly different shaped start button, its all the same from there. Then the actual start menu looks all the same, except they added their desktop search feild at the bottom, which reminds my very much of Spotlight, but what would a new Windows release be without an OSX rip off. One thing you may notice when you open up the start menu is that there is no ‘My Computer’ or ‘My Documents’. But instead, we have ‘Computer’ and ‘Documents’. Is that what we are paying for when we purchase a new version of windows? I mean shit, they actually cut out part of the OS, instead of adding to it! That said, I like it, I always thought ‘My Computer’ sounded odd, maybe its because I do Tech Support for a living, I don’t know (you try telling an american to Right Click on My Computer… they usually tell you they are currently using Their Computer). Instead of an ‘All Programs’ submenu, when you click ‘All Programs’, the left side of the Start Menu, which usually holds your most used programs, changes over to give you the normal list of installed Apps. You can then expand the folders by clicking on them, and the list is shuffled down to display the contants of that folder. Nice feature. Thats all for the start menu. Luckily we still have the option of reverting back to the old school menu that so many of us like.
They redesigned Explorer completely. While the redesign is overall good, I hate the dynamic menus. When you switch to certain folders, the whole toolbar and side bar can change. and on older systems it causes a bit of annoying lag. Vista is not going to run on P3s and lower, thats for sure! I also miss my File menu, as it is completely gone, and so far I have yet to get it back! It seems that they are trying to get away from the standard file system. Instead of seeing ‘C:Program FilesApp1′ in the address bar, you now see ‘Computer>Local Disk (C:) > Programs > App1 >’, and each arrow is clickable to see the folders in that specific directory. I like that feature. Other then that, Explorer is much more streamlined in terms of tool bars, and I actually kind of like it. Sure its not Finder, but it works.
As many of you may know, Luna is completely gone. Classic is still hanging around, but now we have Aero. This new theme will actually vary depending on your systems specifications. Because I am running mine in a Virtual machine for the time being, I get to see the most basic Aero flavour. But on newer DX9 video cards we are suppose to be treated with some glass effects and a lot of neat animations. The old msstyle system of Bitmap rendering is completely gone, and Aero is apparently much smoother. Again, I have yet to see this.
Microsoft also fixed the Category View of the Control Panel. Instead of having a few categories that you must click on, they have the sub-sections set up below the categories. Should make for easier navigation. Also, almost all of the system icons have been updated with a shaded, smoother set that actually looks quite nice. They have yet to update a few icons deeper in the system, but at first glance, everything looks shiny and new.
Security wise, I am sure they did some kind of enhancements, but I have yet to see them! The only thing I found was UAP (User Access Protection), and that was not even disabled for my Administrator account. What that does is restrict users from being able to install pretty much anything. When you attempt to install a program, a message comes up and requires you to enter an Admin password. This means that we can run Limited accounts every day, and simply enter your password when ever you want to install something. OSX has been doing this for a few years now…
So far, I’m not too impressed. All it seems like is another interface enhancement. While the interface is nice (Not OSX nice, but MS nice), it’s not worth the update IMO. But we will see, its still beta.”