http://www.maximumpc.com | oct 08 | MAXIMUMPC | 31
Vista was supposed to mark the launch of a new revolution
in Pc gaming, spearheaded by the full might of Microsoft as
manifested in the Games for Windows initiative. With prom-
ises of everything from a fully fledged online matchmaking
experience (a la Xbox Live), easier installations, and (most
importantly) a host of killer AAA titles, Games for Windows
looked poised to really challenge console dominance and
modernize the Pc as a gaming platform.
What Games for Windows actually did was tie the DirectX
10 API to Vista simply to drive sales of the oS. the first Vista-
exclusive AAA Games for Windows title was a downrightgeriatric port of Halo 2, a game that originated with the first
Xbox and doesn’t use DirectX 10! to add insult to injury, there
was no technical reason for a three-year-old ported Xbox
game to be Vista-only. true, the community quickly released
a patch that opened the door for XP gamers, but we still can’t
understand who possibly thought this was a good idea.
Microsoft continued down the suicidal Vista-only path for
one more release, Shadowrun. Despite innovative gameplay
and cross-platform support for its Xbox counterpart, the
Vista-only release was enough to doom FASA Interactive,
the studio that created the game.Fun AnD GAMeS — notAn exercise in Angering Potential customers: DirectX 10
the fact that those five prompts look and
behave differently, even though they’re all
asking for basically the same thing: permis-
sion to write to a protected area of your
system. To make matters even worse, none
of the UAC prompts actually tells power
users what the app is doing. When you
click that Allow button, all you’re doing is
adding a speed bump to whatever malware
you might be installing.
Executed properly, UAC could have
been a savior for people wont to install every
application they find. Unfortunately, the UAC
prompts quickly become so annoying that
most users either disable them (the power-
user option) or mindlessly click Allow (the
mom option).
ActivAtion
Activation has been a hassle since Mi-
crosoft first included it with Windows XP.
Microsoft’s never really honored its stated
90-day limit for discarding activation infor-
mation either. After installing the OS once
or twice, you inevitably have to call some
poor sap manning the activation hotline to
enable Windows. What bothers us about
Vista is the inclusion of the Windows
Genuine Advantage software, which peri-
odically checks in with Microsoft to ensure
that the copy of Windows you’ve already
activated remains genuine.
That’s all well and good, unless something
confuses WGA. Unfortunately, just about ev-
erything confuses WGA. It could be something
as simple as a BIOS reset that sets the clock
back a few years. Or it could be that Micro-
soft’s entire activation process shuts down
for a few hours—like it did last August. But at
least Microsoft curbs piracy of Vista and other
activated software by treating its
customers like criminals, right?
Well, not so much. Hacked ver-
sions of Vista that simply bypass
activation are available on BitTor-
rent sites around the world.version overloAd
In the old days, there were two distinct
versions of Windows: one for home users
and one for corporate users. For home, you
bought Windows 98; IT departments bought
Windows NT (at least the serious ones did).
With Windows XP, this trend continued,
despite the fact that both the home and
enterprise OSes used the same core.
With Vista, the old home and enter-
prise distinctions went out the window,
as Microsoft added three more versions
of Windows, removing crucial features
like the 3D UI from the low-end release
and forcing power users who want access
to both work-friendly and enthusiast
features to shell out for the $400 Ultimate
edition. To help justify that exorbitant
price, Microsoft promised Ultimate Extras,
the first of which didn’t materialize until
months after launch, and those that did
appear were disappointing. A bad Texas
Hold ’Em game, a backup utility that
should have been included in every box,
and support for other languages do not
“ultimate extras” make.
Oh, and if you used Windows XP Pro-
fessional at home and wanted to upgrade
to a less-expensive home version of Vista,
you were out of luck. The only upgrade
path that worked from XP Pro to anything
with Media Center capability was the
spendy Ultimate edition.‘one More thing’
If the last eight years of watching Steve
Jobs smugly introduce “one more thing”
have taught us anything, it’s that no mat-
ter how technically sound (or alternately,
how fatally flawed) a product is, every
major release desperately needs one or
two supersexy features to incite lust in
geeks everywhere. Every time Jobs rolls
out a new product, he teases the audience
with a feature or two that you simply
cannot wait to use. These features not
only leave customers clamoring for the
new product but also give those pesky
users sitting on the fence a rationale for
upgrading. While Vista had the technical
chops in the form of the Aero renderer
to deliver some potentially astounding
apps, Microsoft’s best effort was Flip3D—a
gimpy knock-off of a feature that OS X
implemented infinitely better.
Aside from that, most of the apps in-
cluded with Vista are rote updates of their
forebears—from Movie Maker to Photo
Gallery. There’s very little that’s new, even
when the apps themselves are brand-new
(see Windows Mail). Worse than nothing
new, there’s not much in a stock Windows
install to inspire anyone—even the stereo-
typical dullard PC user.the reliability Monitor provides a general
idea of how stable your machine is. All our
rigs are unstable.