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Longhorn M4 Build Review
Gsurface writes "I finally got my hands on the new Longhorn build, 4008, that was announced two days ago. After installing it and looking around through it, I decided to write a review expressing some thoughts on the new build. This new longhorn build, upon the prompt to "press any key to boot from cd..." jumps directly into a GUI that is unique. This build Microsoft decides to abandon the setup interface of XP and dress Longhorn on its own. "
apple
Let's give Apple some credit here - they have only changed their UI design once in the 20 year history of the Mac. In fact they were routinely getting hammered by the computer press for having an outdated UI.
Actually, WinXP is easier for the end-user. (Yeah, I know. Who woulda thought?)
;) (Clicking the little oblong button on the upper right thinking it would minimize the window, and instead turning the toolbars on and off repeatedly while laughing at myself comes to mind...)
My lesser-computer-inclined family folk love XP, and have finally started to be able to do things like make their printer work, remember where they saved their files, etc.
I think that the blue rounded-corners give the end-user the illusion they're playing with a toy, and puts them off their automatic defensive "I don't know how to DO ANYTHING! IT'S A COMPUTER FOR GOD'S SAKE! IT'S THE BRAIN-SURGERY OF 2003!" mode.
In addition, unless the user changes it, the default location to save things is *always* the user's home folder, and the user is logged out (Not logged off, if they re-click their icon at the login screen, they'll be returned to their applications just as they were. Although there seems to be an issue with another user being able to log in, re-run the application, and force the termination of that app under the other's user account.) after a short period of inactivity, which enforces users to log in as themselves instead of doing account sharing which was common under Win95-WinME. This forces users to save to their home folder most times, which drastically diminishes the number of "Oh my god, I lost my file that I just spent 10 weeks working on." incidents.
I don't seem to have any problem with overshooting rounded corners. But, I think I overcame that with Apple's Aqua interface, in which I was initially doing stupid things on a regular basis.
-Sara
I wrote my own review with a bit more detail and thoughts. It is availible on www.betaone.net as well as below. My review assumes you had seen the previous M3 leaked build so doesnt go into details about the sidebar etc:
.NET (which I was running previously). Even with the WinFS service disabled, the system runs painfuly slow.
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Well, I finally got around to installing Longhorn build 4008 on my laptop, and have decided to write a mini review. Rather than writing a full review of each possible screen, I will concentrate on changes from previous versions of windows.
Installation
Behind the scenes a lot of changes have happened to the setup program.
* Rather than having all files in one folder (i386) there is now a directory dtructure in 'boot' which resembles the structure of the system once installed.
* Rather than having a text-mode preinstall upon booting the cd which then spawns a graphical setup, the entire Longhorn M4 setup is graphical. This seems to be based on Windows XP PE (preinstall edition).
The changes look very promising, although the GUI is clearly unfinished and seemingly rushed;
* In many places the wording is quite unproffesional
* You are informed you will be informed when you can "just walk away" and "setup will complete on its own". While setup requires little user interaction, you are not informed when your input is no longer required.
* There is a nice treeview for selecting the installation partition, but your options are quite limited. In XP you can select Fat32/NTFS, FULL/QUICK format. In LH M4 the only option you have is a checkbox - "Format this partition (NTFS)".
* The layout will need more work. Currently everything is centered, giving a kind of pyramid look. The previous setup style with several 'panels' proving information looked more visually pleasing.
I am sure the little flaws will be ironed out sooner or later, but one thing is for sure, a lot of work has gone into improving the setup wizard which until now had remained largely unchanged ever since windows 2000.
Visual and Features
When longhorn M4 first starts, you are greeted with a much nicer screen than in Longhorn M3. In M3 there were a lot of visual imperfections and the plex theme looked worse than the luna theme on many windows. Now these imperfections have been ironed out and longhorn looks truly beuitiful as far as visuals are concerned.
The sidebar, in additional to being much nicer visually, now has a few essential features that were missing in M3. Namely, there is a tray icon tile, so you do not lose access to trayed programs when using the sidebar in place of the taskbar.
Glitches, Speed, Stability
I tested M4 on modest hardware - a laptop with a 600Mhz P3 and 128MB of RAM. Longhorn ran SIGNIFICANTLY slower than
After altering the screen resolution the sidebar seemed currupted. Hiding and then reenabling it made the sidebar completly invisible.
Stability is difficult to comment on because I have only been running LH for a short time so far. Till now I have not had a single crash or even error message.
Rant on WinFS's implementation
A lot of effort seems to be going into WinFS. The idea behind it seems brilliant - store files in an SQL like database so you can search for files, run queries, and receive results in a fraction of a second rather than having to wait for the computer to scan through each folder and take several minutes to search through the entire drive. Unfortunatly if the implementation in M4 is anything to go by, MS are going in completly the wrong direction. The new search panel prompts the user to enter a search string "Example: 'Pictures from John' or 'What is a firewall?'". It can search both the local files. This seems very newbie-oriented. Computers are usless at interpreting natural language queries. They should do what they are good at - fast indexing by filenames and keywords in the files contents. Also, searching a local filesystem for a jpeg and searching the internet are two entirely different activities. Combining them into a single search seems to make no sense and will just confuse advanced users.
The current search system in XP is good enough as far as the interface is concerned (at least after you kill the faqing dog - again classic newbie-oriented bloat). You can search by filename, modified/created date, and a files contents. It is layed out in a perfectly logical way, and you know exactly what you are asking the computer to do. If only this was based on SQL and queries lasted under a second it would be perfect. Why replace this clean, logical interface with a textbox claims to supposedly understand plain english questions and automatically decide for you if you are looking for an email message, file, internet document, or application. Pointless artificial intelligence which will be far from perfect. I think ill stick with 'grep' and 'ls -R' - they do everthing I need them to.