Visions of Vista

And here's the Vista Beta 1 Fact Sheet for those that are interested.

These two points are interesting, IMHO:

• Quick startup. Login scripts and startup applications and services process in the background while users perform their desired tasks.
• Sleep state. The new Sleep state in Windows Vista combines the speed of Standby mode with data protection features and low-power consumption of Hibernate. The Sleep state also allows users to change or remove a battery with little risk to open applications and data, since memory is safely written to the hard disk. Startup from the Sleep state requires just seconds, meaning fewer shutdowns and restarts are necessary, which helps improve power management.

It's been said a lot of times that PC's should be as easy (and, most important: Fast!) to turn on/off as a television, radio, vacuum cleaner or any other device. This is a step in the right direction.

This one, OTOH, sounds like it's gonna be a drag, but we'll see about that:

• Searching and finding information. Windows Vista will introduce a new organization concept called a Virtual Folder, which is a saved search that is automatically and instantly run when a user opens the folder. In addition, every new Explorer in the operating system, including Internet Explorer, includes a new Quick Search box that enables customers to quickly search through large amounts of content being viewed or to initiate wider content searches across the PC.

...yeah, click on a folder and wait for search to proceed. Windows search is notoriously slow already, so I don't expect I will use that function much.

Oh, but there's a start menu search box so that you can find the items you know you should have in your start menu somewhere. That's a good one, imho.

In this news.com interview with Microsoft's Jim Allchin (group vice president) he states that:

Most of the stuff that we would expect that tech enthusiasts and consumers will be interested in will happen at Beta 2. Beta 1 is not what I would call deeply interesting unless you are a real bithead.

There are more goodies in the interview (print version) eg. that they're working on something called LUA (Least User Access) so that you don't run everything as admin per default. Also this tidbit that says that they're not really trying to make the boot time faster:

What's coming in Beta 2 is we are going to encourage people to conceptually leave their machines on more

This screenshot in PC Magazine is funny.

I generally recommend people get at least 512MB RAM with machines now to run XP and all the other stuff alright, just from the screenshots I'm guessing you'll want a good bit more to run "Vista" (really, what a wank name). A gig of RAM just to run Windows and various AV/Firewall stuff that's always on in the background, lovely.....