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I only have one screenshot from the installation process, and it’s the big blue one here. This is what happens if you try to install Windows Vista to a blank, unformatted, unpartitioned hard drive. The Windows Vista installer can’t yet properly partition and format hard drives. To work around this problem you will need to use something else, such as a Windows XP CD, to partition and format the drive. Once you have a hard drive with an NTFS-formatted partition already on it, Windows Vista installation will begin properly. Otherwise you will receive an error stating that “Setup could not locate a locally-attached hard drive suitable to hold the temporary Windows Setup files,” even though the hard drive partitioning looks fine.

The only things the installation asked me for were the product key, the desired computer name, and where to install Windows. This is quite streamlined from previous installations.

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On first boot you will go directly into Windows. You’ll also notice that anti-virus software might not be installed (gee, you think?) and you should click this balloon to fix the problem. I’ll get to that later. For now, why don’t you eject your DVD and then re-insert it, and watch what happens.

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When you insert the Windows Vista Beta 1 DVD, this screen will appear. You can choose to run the program on the DVD, or if the disc contains multimedia content, you’ll have options to view or work with the content. You can also browse the files directly. This is pretty similar to Windows XP, so no real surprises so far.

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Okay, we had better take a look at the Start menu. First off, notice I’m logged in as Administrator. (With no password, since I was never asked to set one. I told you, the install was really streamlined.) There was no special first-boot process asking to add users or set an administrator password. It’s presumed that MSDN subscribers are smart enough to do this, but you never know. We’ll fix that and add some users later.

Before going on, take a look at the Lock and Shut down buttons. Where’s “Log off”? To log off, or get other options, click the arrow next to the button. I’ll have more to say on this later as well.

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For now, I’m going to go to the Control Panel and do some initial setup and configuration of this fresh new machine. Notice that everything is broken into categories, with subcategories or more refined choices showing below each. Most of these don’t do anything special, just going straight to the main control panel in question, and I discovered a few that did not work at all, except in Classic View.

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Okay, time to deal with that anti-virus thing. I go into Security, and it looks much the same as in Windows XP. First, I turned on Automatic Updates, just in case. Then I turned off automatic anti-virus software monitoring. You probably don’t want to do this in real life. Go get an anti-virus program; you will need it. However, I don’t know if any existing anti-virus programs work with Windows Vista. I might be able to cover this in a later article.

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Next I’m going to see if I can get a printer set up. I clicked on Printers and Faxes, and then Add Printer. It was pretty convoluted to get Windows Vista to print to my HP printer connected to my Linux server. You have to select the printer manually, set it up as an Internet printer, and go into advanced options and change the printer to LPR, and enter in the queue name. Then you have to choose the driver. If I’d made screenshots of all this, this page would have been a lot larger. LPR, in case you were unaware, is the original Unix network printing standard. Microsoft has no support for CUPS, the new Unix network printing standard, though CUPS can be combined with Samba to make Unix printers look like Windows shared printers. Certain types of high-end network printers still use the old LPR standard, though.

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I was able to successfully print to the printer, and the Windows Test Page bears no branding. It neither says Longhorn nor Vista on it. It merely says Windows. No big deal, but I was hoping to show it off. Oh well, can’t win ‘em all.

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Take a moment to hit Start, then All Programs, then Turn UAP Settings On or Off. You’ll see this dialog. Off by default in this build, User Account Protection (formerly known as Least-privileged User Account) enables you to run with a limited account, and be prompted for the administrator password when you do anything that requires administrator privileges. Mac OS X introduced this years ago, and Linux has had it for some time as well. I’ll point this out later when it comes into play.

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Okay, now it’s time to start up this much-hyped Internet Explorer 7. First thing, it tries to connect to Windows Update, which doesn’t work at all, since Windows Update has no support yet for Windows Vista. At the present time all updates for Windows Vista will come down via Automatic Updates only.

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Quit and restart Internet Explorer, and it’ll act normally. Here’s the MSN homepage in Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista. Note well that the location of everything has changed drastically. I spent several minutes looking for the Refresh button, for instance. So let me give you the guided tour.

The top bar contains the Back and Forward buttons, then the Address bar where you type in Web addresses, a drop-down control, then the Refresh button. When Internet Explorer is loading a page, this changes to the Stop button. After that comes the Search bar, obviously copied from Firefox. This one does MSN search, though. I’m told it can be changed, but changes itself back to MSN search. I haven’t played with it much yet to confirm this. Perhaps later.

The next bar shows the title and icon of the site you’re visiting. It doesn’t seem to have much more use than this. Why did they bother moving it off the title bar?

Finally, the customary menu bar appears. Next to it are Home, Favorites, History, Feeds, and Print buttons. I’ll cover the Feeds button below.

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Let’s see what my own web site looks like in Internet Explorer 7. Hm, not too bad. Maybe I should get around to adding that P3P code to my site to get rid of that cookie warning.

By the way, the User-Agent string for Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista is:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0b; Windows NT 6.0; .NET CLR 2.0.50215; SL Commerce Client v1.0; Tablet PC 2.0)

If you install Avalon and Indigo, you get this User-Agent string instead:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0b; Windows NT 6.0; .NET CLR 2.0.50215; SL Commerce Client v1.0; Tablet PC 2.0; Avalon 6.0.4030; WinFX RunTime 1.0.50215)

Don’t ask me about the Tablet PC thing. I don’t know. I also don’t know about SL Commerce Client; if you do, leave a comment below.

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One of the big things talked about in Internet Explorer 7 is its support for RSS feeds. Indeed, I found a couple already in the Favorites menu. So I decided to check out the IE Blog, and this is what I got. Obviously the RSS feed support still needs a lot of work, or at least a stylesheet. Hopefully this will develop further before release, or it will be pretty useless.

The Feeds button does light up and become active when the site you’re visiting has feeds available. Not all sites support this properly yet, unfortunately, even though Firefox has been doing it for years now and webmasters have had quite some time to get their sites up to date.

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Okay, time to create those user accounts. I’m going to create one administrator account for myself, and one limited user account for normal daily use. I go through the process of creating the administrator account first. I name it “error.” Much like every other account I’ve got out there.

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After that, I create the limited user account. For this purpose I named it “review.”

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Once the accounts are created, I’ll be sure and set the passwords on each of them, including the default Administrator account, which will be hidden from view as soon as I log out of it. If you have a lot of different people using your computer, turning on the Guest account might be a good idea.

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Remember the missing “Log off” option? Click on that arrow, and there it is. After a few times Windows will eventually remember that you prefer “Log off” over “Lock” and will switch the icons so that Log off shows instead. I’m going to log off now, and log back in with my new “review” account.

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The Log off dialog looks pretty normal. You can log off, or switch to another user account without logging off. I’m going to log off now, though.

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The Windows Vista login screen looks like this. To login, click the account name you want to use. Then type your password and press Enter (or click the arrow).

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And if you ever want to get into that hidden Administrator account, click on “Switch user” at the bottom, and you’ll get this complete dialog, which prompts for both username and password. You can then log on as Administrator, or any other hidden account which is enabled.

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Anyhow, I logged in as “review,” the limited user account, so I can poke around the system some more. Now if you go in the Control Panel and click on Appearance and Themes, you’ll see this. You have a lot of options, it seems, for configuring the appearance of the system and user interface functionality. It’s all here. Even Scanners and Cameras, which is rather puzzling.

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I’m not so sure I’m happy with this background, so I think I’m going to see about changing it. I click Display, and the User Account Protection comes up. Huh? Just what about changing the background requires administrator privileges? Anyway, so I put in my administrator password and the Display control panel opens.

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Unfortunately, it opens under the other window! Can you see it back there? Depending on where your windows happen to be at any given moment, you might not even be aware that anything happened! I don’t know if this is a bug, or a design decision, but it’s quite annoying. At one point I wound up with five Windows Firewall control panels open because of this. Hopefully Microsoft will fix this one.

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And now for a little interlude. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del and the Windows Security screen comes up. You can lock the computer, change your password, log off, or open the Task Manager. Wow, this is pretty. Press Esc or click Cancel to return to Windows. Did I mention it’s really pretty?

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Now it’s time to take a closer look at that Start menu. Notice Internet Explorer at the top, of course. Then Outlook Express and Windows Media Player. On the right, the usual items you expected from Windows XP, except that there’s a new one called Games. In Windows Vista, all games are expected to end up in this special area. If I get time later, I’ll go into it in more depth, but if you were looking for Freecell or Minesweeper, that’s where they are.

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Now for a big change: click on All Programs. The programs appear right here in the menu itself. You can click a folder to expand or collapse it, and a scroll bar will appear if the list becomes too long.

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I’ve expanded all the top-level folders to give an idea what this looks like with the folders expanded and the scroll bar showing. Against the darker right column the scroll bar isn’t that easy to see, so be on the lookout for it. Hopefully the theme will be tweaked a bit to make the scroll bar more clearly visible.

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Now for the most important thing you can do to a Windows computer, install Firefox. This actually turns out to be quite hairy and a royal pain, but Microsoft likes it that way, so don’t expect it to change.

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When you click on “Free Download,” first they warn you that files from the Internet could be potentially harmful, and default to Cancel. You have to click Run in order to start the download.

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Depending on your available bandwidth, the download could take a little while. If you’re on dialup, go have lunch. If you’re on broadband, go refill your coffee mug. And for Pete’s sake click that check box so that silly window doesn’t hang around after it’s done.

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Okay, now Internet Explorer is going to warn us again that files from the Internet are potentially harmful. If you click the More options button, you have the option of “Always trust software from Mozilla Foundation.” Anyway, click Run again, and you’ll soon be free of Internet Explorer. Yeah, right.

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I’m logged in to a limited user account, so I have to provide a valid administrator account and password in order to install the software. No big deal. In goes the password, and onto the computer goes Firefox. Finally!

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So after installing Firefox I start it up, and Windows Firewall decides it’s dangerous and blocks it! And there’s no Unblock button, apparently because I’m on a limited user account. So I try the “When should I unblock a program?” link, which does nothing. Apparently the Help and Support Center doesn’t work very well – or at all – in this beta.

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Another brief interlude to see what’s become of Windows Explorer. Here I’m browsing the hard drive to find where Firefox is installed, mistakenly thinking I can just right-click it to unblock it. Of course not. That would be too easy. And what’s with all the green?

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To unblock it, I had to go to Control Panel, Security, Windows Firewall, and then on the Exceptions tab, I can unblock Firefox. Hm, what is that Teredo thing and why is it there twice? Teredo, it turns out, is Microsoft’s proprietary IPv6 tunnelling protocol. Okay, fine, whatever.

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Finally! Firefox! Yes, make it my default browser! Please! I hate Internet Explorer! I even have grown to hate Internet Explorer 7.

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Okay, Part 1 is over. Time to shut the computer down. You get 30 seconds to change your mind, or you can force the issue by hitting the big button.

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Windows logs you off, and then begins shutting down all of its services.

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Windows finally shuts down.