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Windows "Whistler" Beta 1 reviewed
The Windows of tomorrow looks solid
With "Whistler," the next version of Windows, Microsoft has finally jettisoned the old DOS-based Windows 9x line in favor of the NT-based Windows 2000 product family. As such, Whistler will ship in the same Professional, Server, and Advanced Server versions that we saw with Windows 2000, but it will also include a Personal edition for consumers as well as 64-bit versions of Professional, Server, and Advanced Server for users with Intel Itanium (IA-64) machines. Microsoft had been promising a consolidation of its Windows product families for some time, but Whistler will be the first product that finally achieves this goal.
As we'll see below, the path to this technological feat brings with it a number of issues. Consumers expect Windows to be compatible with all of their hardware and software, no questions asked. They want to be able to upgrade their existing version of Windows to the new version without having any problems. And they want Windows to be more reliable and stable than the 9x family. To varying degrees, Microsoft has addressed these issues in Whistler, which will offer a superset of the functionality of Windows Me on the client versions (Personal and Professional) while giving business users an evolutionary bump in performance and capability with the Server editions.
Note: For this review, I evaluated the 32-bit versions of Whistler Personal, Professional, and Advanced Server on a Dell Dimension 4100 system with an 866 MHz Pentium III processor and 256 MB of RAM, and a Compaq Presario 1700T notebook with a 750 MHz processor and 256 MB of RAM. However, this review will focus on the client versions of Windows Whistler at the request of Microsoft. Also, specific performance issues will not be addressed at this time because we're still at an early stage of development.
Where we've been: From alpha to beta
The path to Whistler Beta 1 has been fairly interesting, but I've already written extensively about the Whistler alpha releases on the SuperSite, so please refer to the following articles before continuing:
- Windows "Whistler" 2001 Previewed -- This preview focuses on two very early alpha versions of Whistler, builds 2211 and 2223.1, which were leaked out of Microsoft in early 2000. At this point, Microsoft was simply melding the Windows Me feature-set onto Windows 2000, while working on a few simplicity concepts that originated in Project Neptune.
- Introducing the Whistler Preview, Build 2250 --
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