• January 7, 2006 •
Windows Vista December 2005 CTP Review (Page 1)
Last September, at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC), the company announced it would be supplying its testers with monthly builds of Windows Vista through a new program called Community Technical Preview (CTP).
In October, Microsoft delivered a CTP build (5231), but no build was delivered in November. Two days before the end of the month, Microsoft announced it was not going to deliver a CTP build for that month, but that it should be delivering a CTP build before the Christmas holiday. According to Microsoft a change was made to the program which would see Windows Vista almost feature-complete for the December CTP build. A completed feature-complete is expected in January, so the February CTP build that testers will get should be feature-complete.
On Monday 19 December Microsoft released Build 5270 as the December 2005 CTP build. I proceeded to install this build on both a laptop & desktop computer, here follow my first impressions.
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Installation The setup routine of Windows Vista has been improved a great deal compared with the previous CTP build (5231). It still starts with the new simplified experience: first you are prompted for your product key, next you are presented with the End User License Agreement (EULA), after accepting the EULA you choose the installation type (Custom only for now, as upgrade is not yet supported), and you can choose the drive/partition on which to install, and the computer name. After completing these steps, Windows Vista installs, rebooting only one time before completing. After Windows restart, you'll see the improvements made to this build; setup will prompt you to enter some additional information: Your location (Country), the username you want to use, including a password (Figure). You can also pick a desktop picture (Figure), and are prompted for your time zone. When you've entered the data, Windows Vista declares: You're ready to start (Figure). With this build, Microsoft is also offering what it calls a "staged build", which utilizes the quick install functionality that was promised years ago. The staged build installed in about 30 minutes, roughly half the time the "normal" build would take on the same hardware. If you haven't looked at my review of Build 5231, I suggest you start there, as I won't go into detailed changes between Windows XP and Windows Vista that I have discussed in the previous review. |
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