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Everything big is already present and accounted for. At this point in the game, Microsoft is working on fit and finish issues: bugfixes and minor UI tweaks.

If you're interested in Vista's core improvements instead of news about last-minute polish, Wikipedia has a decent guide: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_Vista

Thanks for the link; I'm downloading the 5728build right now, so hopefully within a few days I'll have a review up on my blog

Its going to be loaded on a fairly modern machine, Core Duo, 256MB Graphics card, so it'll be interesting to see how it performans.

As for the naysayer in a previous post regarding whether its 'beta 2 qualit' - they are fixing bugs, the simple fact is, there is more to software development that fixing bugs under the hood, there are also visual bugs that need fixing too.

leos,
What's possible is that when the UI moved over to the completely new rendering infrastructure for Vista, that they had to reimplement the classic look in an emulated manner (I suppose a close example of this is looking at Swing on Java on some versions doesn't look very native. Also consider the UI widgets in IE are all emulated and not the actual platform widgets... long writeup on Slashdot about this about a year or more ago)

So my guess is when they reimplemented the look ontop of the new structure, some things changes. Paddings changed, alignments changed, etc... just enough for things to look "hmm... that seems a little off".

Which is a frustrating feeling, especially when you never realized JUST how atuned to the pixels of a previous layout/look you were... like knowing something is wrong, but can't put your finger on it.

Nope.

Worse is an understatment, the classic theme in Vista looks horrible. The new Vista parts of the interface clash with the old look and many parts don't even line up or fit properly. Text gets cut off, icons are jammed up into corners way out of their proper position, and many dialogs are solid white instead of gray. The whole thing looks like an amateur skinners unfinished attempt to make a classic theme for Windowblinds. It really is terrible and it doesn't look like they care so it will probably stay that way.

Edited 2006-09-23 23:55

I know what you mean. I hate how the files and folders light up when you hover your mouse over them, makes it very hard at least for me to work with it. Files should ONLY be highlighted when they are selected, this is a terrible design decision. Then there are all the legacy folders that aren't really folders but junctions that point to the real folders. Supposedly it's for backwards compatibility with XP but in reality it just makes for a big confusing mess. Don't even get me started on the junctions that point back to themselves so they just go on forever.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v739/KR74/neverending2.jpg

omg... Yes indeed.

buy a PC.
and you won't have to wait 2 to 5 years to get old PC games ported to your platform.

But seriously, who care about games?

Yeah, it's not like it's a multi-billion industry anyway.

Games is a multi-billion pound industry

...but that industry is very handheld/console based. Even the PC gaming market contains very few hardcore gamers; Most PC gamers are casual gamers. If you don't believe me look at how many machines sell now with a noddy onboard graphics card vs that of a superninja graphics card, and thats with Vista potentially weeks away.

Saying that he hardcore gamers are a very vocal community.

"Mostly you don't have to wait"

And why is then that I can only get Chessmaster 9000, and it isn't even an universal binary?

I do care about games, especially chess games.

Sorry, I know that I didn't follow the golden rule that irony don't work in text. My point was boot camp. I prefer OS X as a proffesional platform, and think apple is leading hardware design (and software, to get on topic with the themes :-) ). Most of the popular games are available, but if you really want to play a game that isn't available, use boot camp or parallel desktop.

SK8T, you want to know a dirty little secret? We can install MacOS X just as easily on our PCs as you can on your MAC. The difference is our hacked version is free but illegal.

The UI isn't changed at all, except for UI bugs.

Also, even if it had been changed... UI designers are not the same people working on bug fixes.

Blur in compiz is still very slow, and we don't have any qt or gtk theme that makes use of ARGB colors yet.

Hell it runs perfectly on my GeForce 2 Go and 1GHz Pentium 3M. CPU usage isn't high so it can definitely can take a worse CPU. The real requirements for the vista-style affects in Linux seem to be something from the GeForce 2 era (original GeForce cards are infact too old) and probably around a pentium 2 and 128 MB of RAM.

At least 1GB of ram just to display the theme smoothly? I wonder what they've done to it to make it so resource heavy. XGL/Compiz runs smoothly on my athlon-tb 1200mhz with 256mb ram and a geforce4 ti. What does the vista UI offer that XGL/Compiz can't, that requires som much resources? I'm not suprised though since it is after all Microsoft we're talking about.

Those specs are overstated. The minimum supported specs for Glass requires a DX 9 GPU w/ 64MB of RAM and 512MB of RAM for Vista. The difference in minimum GPU spec vs XGL/Compiz is that MS uses DX 9 GPUs w/ Shader Model 2.0 as a base requirement so they can guarantee the availability of features they use for composition, rendering, scheduling, virtual memory, and resource sharing.

Do they make any other themes?? Aero's color sucks....

There are ~7 preset colors for Aero Glass, and you can use custom colors. I think there's also a setting to adjust some things like opacity IIRC.

So the colors will be able to be changed more than the current XP version?