Windows Vista build 5308 (febuary ctp) review:
About two months ago, I downloaded Winvista feb ctp, comunity technical preview.
Yes, I know that this might be illegal, but this is beta ; it contains
1000 glitches and errors. And Microsoft is going to post up a download link for beta 2 of
vista in may. I’m not incouriging anyone to download this vista
build. Its not worth it. performance is the key here, and there is practicly no antivirus
that works. So don’t do it.
So I installed vista on my 2.80 ghz toshiba 752 mb ram 30 gb harddrive computer. Mind you,
I got very shocking results, which you will see here.
After installing vista, i needed to use narrator. The narrator is improved, and there is a new cool sapi voice called microsoft Anna. I’m dying to get
it / export it from vista ; but I can’t because the sapi engine has been greatly modified, from 5.1 to 5.3.
Second, jaws. Jaws 7.10.256 is working great. By great, i mean excellent. Besides getting uap (user account protection) messages like do you want to install
freedomscientific video intercept? messages, all is fine ; video intercept installs, and jaws loads. Though for activation, I needed to disable uap with
the registry.
One more thing with uap: This might be the biggest issue with jaws. You know how it feels
when you have jaws running with reading and typing interrupt disabled?
Well, this is the case in vista. Its like: jaws says do you want to install this program? During the message, you press tab, but nothing happens ; jaws
continues on for hours if the dialog is too long. There is no way to stop it. After disabling uap however, it worked out fine ; it seems like uap is a
seperate mode that the computer activates. This is an issue that needs to be fixed ; but its too early, and I’m not scolding fs for this. Only jfw 8.0
will have vista support.
And third, games. This is IMPORTANT!
You know the old windows games like solatire and spider solitare and freecell? They work with jaws. Instead of using pictures and the mouse, the games
include buttons. like there is a button for 8 of spades in solatire, row 1, colomn 2 in
freecell, etc. There are 2 new games, mohjong (not correct spelling)
and purble place. It all works fine ; mohjong is Chinees chess.
Audio games work too. There arent many issues, except for super liam demo, where I get a
runtime error when starting the program. All others are fine.
A note to developers: Vista is using a new layer of programming. They still use win32, but the OS relies on .net technology to run. You can’t run vista
apps from xp, you get a not a valid win32 application prompt. This is why I can’t export sapi ; the sapiprxy.exe file, which runs to start the engine,
is using this new .net technology. So if you’re thinking of the future, you might consider issue. Though old apps run, some wont because the kernel
is re-written.
And last, performance. Vista is pretty slow. Jaws slows it down even more.
No antivirus software work (I tired norton 2003/2004, and nod32 2.51.20). This is why I uninstalled vista in the first place ; I can’t live without antivirus. Conclusions: Vista is going fine with accessibility. No problems with jaws, no problems with games, or any accessibility things. Some new vista programs
don’t work with jaws good. These are the new windows calendar, the new explorer shell / window (it works, but some links / parts don’t), and windows calaberation.
Windows defender, windows media player 11, and internet explorer 7 are fine.