So here we are!

Some of you already know that we have been working on a Vista review for quite some time now. But the story of this achievement is very similar to the story of Vista itself (e.g. many changes of direction and a recent decision to start from scratch).

First allow us to introduce ourselves. I am Vincent Hermann, and if you are a PC INpact reader you may know me as a newswriter working for our beloved editor Marc “Bunny” Rees. Writing this review needed tons of technical knowledge. Therefore, I asked the help of Jerôme Bosch (a.k.a. Charon), a developer, friend, and Ma-Config.com webmaster. We have a common interest for software in general, and we realized that the Vista operating system was not really all that it seemed in the first place.

So, facing the sempiternals:

• “This system is nothing but a new theme for Windows XP.”
• “You’ll need a next-generation computer to run it.”
• “My applications won’t work anymore.”
• “The DRM won’t let me do what I want”
• “You’ll need Microsoft’s approval to develop software on Vista.”
  

We decided to write a review that would go straight to the point while answering most of the questions. This task appeared to be more demanding than we had originally foreseen because of new elements being constantly brought up. The major difficulty lied particularly within Vista’s development cycle: new features and updates were always arising and forcing us to permanently change our version. So we waited for things to settle down a bit. We would like to specially thank Guillaume Belmas, MVP Microsoft, for his support in this project and Michael Cesneau for the translation from french.

Time proved us right and with the Beta 2 of the system now released, the development axes are now fixed. The final version should be released in a few monthes but we will probably have to wait another two or three months for a commercial release.

Is Vista really different from the Windows we already know? This is what we are inviting you to discover in this review.