Running Vista on the Sentia 223

I am successfully running Windows Vista Ultimate Edition (February CTP) on my Sentia 223, and with the Aero glass turned on!!!

It runs nicely and fairly quickly; only a touch slower than XP in some areas and faster in most others. I did this as a "extreme" test, and boy is my little alien a champ.

This also should completely debunk all the nonsense about Vista needing extreme hardware to run, as my Sentia is using Intel Extreme Graphics 2 (and its whopping 64MB of shared video ram).

Hi,

I'll get some pics up in a bit; I was out the past couple of days. I am a MSDN member, and this the February CTP.

As to Vista and how it's different, there's a good bit of difference:

1) File management works differently, using metadata tags on files to enable a far more pervasive type of file search than previously possible (kind of like Spotlight on OS X). In essence, you can keep everything you use in one big folder, and save searches that can be run with a click to pull files up.

2) Different base security model that is more granular and addresses the long standing problem of the "root" user. Now when you want to do something requiring full rights, you authorize it on the spot with a dialog box that will not accept programmatic entries. That alone will pull the rug out from under most worms and viruses.

3) IE7 is a complete rebuild, with full RSS support, tabbed browsing and also runs in a security lockbox area, similar to sandboxes used by antivirus software. Once again this removes a lot of the ability of viruses and worms to take over your machine or run malicious code on it.

4) The calendar tool is now full functional

5) Sleep mode works a LOT better than ever before

There is a lot more, but suffice it to say this is a pretty significant release.

I am one of the testers, through MSDN. It is an MSDN subscribers download.

I'm not sure what you are talking about. My Vista install does not look like the Mac OS at all. I also have no idea what "mystery meat" navigation is supposed to mean.

Not legally. I have it because I am a MSDN Professional member.

To each their own. I really don't think Vista resembles OS X and I have used both. Also, OS X actually copied spotlight off of an MS proposed technology for inclusion in Vista, so in that case it is the other way around.

A lot of the "exciting" stuff in Vista is not in the visuals but the guts. The new security I touched on, far shorter boot times, overall speed and even things like enabling Antivirus and Spykiller software to be built and run as low level services, which if properly implemented by people like Symantec will put an end to the "ccApp" silliness we sometimes get in XP.

Actually no it does not. All it means is that a lot of the instances where AV software (Norton is notorious for this) "grabs" your system and sludges everything down are eliminated. The new security setup prevents what you are fearing by requiring a manual input of the root password for any install operation, with the system specifically configured not to accept automatic logons or code generated text. Therefore, to get such a virus would require the operator to knowingly manually input their root password.

This, together with the improvements to the built in firewall and the changes to IE7 (namely that it runs in a sandbox all the time) drastically reduce the vulnerability of Vista to attack.