I’ve finally received a copy of Windows Vista final (Business Edition) for testing purposes, so I’ll be spending some more time with it in the next couple of weeks. I didn’t have a very positive opinion of the Vista RC1 when I first tested it, and while the final version has improved as far as bug and software incompatibility goes, Vista still fails to impress me - at least in the visual sense.

The first thing you notice when you launch Vista (other than the pretty slow boot, slower than Windows XP on both my new and old computer) is, of course, the GUI - Aero. Well, on my testing laptop (Dell Latitude D820 - Intel Core 2 Duo T7200@2 GHz, 1 GB DDR RAM, nVidia Quadro NVS 120M, 15.4” display - not a bad machine by any means) Aero stutters. After half a day’s work, I had to turn the animations off, because every time I closed or opened a window CPU meter would go crazy and everything would freeze for half a second. I know that with a better video card this wouldn’t happen, but still - did it have to be that demanding? Even dragging the transparent windows around on the screen seemed slow.

Even without this issue, I’m generally underwhelmed by Aero. It does look nice, but it has the feel of a WindowBlinds skin over the old Windows XP GUI. The animations and the effects seem like bloat on top of the old interface. This is a subjective opinion, but I think that it illustrates one of Vista’s biggest problems. In the 6 years of development, so many applications that can customize and enhance Windows XP have appeared that much of what Windows Vista has to offer seems dated or even obsolete. If you take Aero as an example, all you have to remember is the smooth animations of OS X, or thousands of WindowBlinds (a program which customizes the standard Windows XP) themes, or dozens of alternative Windows shells (DesktopX, LiteStep, BB4Win and others), and you’ll understand that Aero simply didn’t bring enough to the table.

And this goes for many other features that Windows Vista has. Sure, advanced system monitoring that Vista’s Reliability and Performance Monitor offers is nice, but there are dozens of WinXP applications out there which do it just as good or better. Photo gallery? Cool, but I already have Picasa. It goes on and on. In other words, as Microsoft’s team was developing new Vista features, in the 6 year long process pretty much everything that Vista has to offer has been done - and done better - for Windows XP.

Now, going back to Aero, I’ll give you my personal reasons why I plan to turn it off and never look back. One of the reasons for this is that I’ve never liked the Luna Windows XP theme - I would always go back to standard Windows 2000 look. However, after a while I started experimenting with alternative Windows shells. These are programs that replace the standard Windows XP shell - explorer.exe (not the file browser, but the shell with the same name), which is responsible for pretty much everything you see on your desktop. After some experimentation I’ve settled for Blackbox for Windows - BB4Win. It’s way faster than explorer.exe, uses up less memory, has more options, it supports plugins, its themes are cross-platform (Blackbox was initially (it still is) a shell for Linux - the Windows version is a port of some sort). It only lacks one thing - the drag and drop desktop functionality. It’s not for everyone, but if you’re interested, the place to start would be here.

In Blackbox, you can change the entire look of the GUI with a simple text file called style. I’ve created quite a few of those back in the day. If you’re interested in how they all look, you can see all my Blackbox styles here.

This brings me to my initial point. After spending some time with Windows Aero, I still don’t want to exchange it for the current look (and speed) of my desktop GUI. Would you? Here’s a couple of screenshots of my desktop:

This is a very specific and personal example. However I think it shows that much of Vista’s bling might not be that exciting to seasoned Windows XP users. All this won’t change my overall opinion on Vista much, as I firmly believe that GUI and bundled applications aren’t all that important for an OS - what’s important is under the hood, and I’m going to thoroughly examine it in the next couple of weeks. Still, it definitely kills the excitement over something Windows users have been waiting for over 6 years.