We got our Beta 1 release of Windows Vista a few days ago. Needless to say, we were excited to see what Microsoft had in mind with its upcoming, so went straight to the DVD drive and put in the disc. Yes, the new version of Windows ships only on DVD (at least the Beta does).

The first thing you will note when you put in your Vista DVD is that the command line prompt is: ‘Press any key to boot from CD/DVD instead of just CD.’

Anyway, the installation is not the usual irritatingly questioning variety from the yesteryears. It’s simple and asks only for Product Key, EULA, Install Type (Complete, Custom, etc), the computer name and the partition you want to install on. Here, you can create/modify/delete partitions if you so choose, but since we had a new hard drive, we didn’t bother fiddling around with these options.

The Boot

On every boot up, Windows took over a minute staying stuck at the black and white Windows "codename" Longhorn screen with Athlon 64 3500+, 1GB (512x2 Dual Channel) of Corsair DDR400 RAM and a 256MB NVIDIA 6600GT. Apparently, Microsoft wasn’t kidding when it said that the system requirements are pretty heavy. And it in fact requires a minimum of 512MB of RAM if you want all the slick graphics. Furthermore, for the attractive looking GUI, you will also need a dedicated graphics card with DirectX 9.0 support.

What is GDI?

GDI stands for Graphics Device Interface and is the standard that Windows uses for creating graphical objects and putting them out on displays and printers. GDI is not directly responsible for drawing program menus or the like. Basic Windows games such as Solitaire and Pinball that don’t exactly require a 6800 Ultra to play utilize GDI massively. GDI is also used to print text/images on a printer, and since it’s essentially the same language that is directing both the printer and the images on your screen, the reproduction is more or less exact

The reason why DirectX is used for high-end gaming (actually, for any thing that can be classified as gaming) is because it lets the programmers use a lot more of the features that the hardware supports (for example, rasterization: the conversion of images into tiny pixels), which is not possible using GDI.

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