Microsoft's Vista a work in progress

Today's column was going to be about the cool new features in Windows Vista, and I planned to write it on a Vista PC.

Until I tried using one at a Microsoft conference last week. I'm not trying to bash the software, which is still under development and seems really promising.

But my experience was so bad, it left me wondering whether Vista really will be done by January.

I'd really be nervous if I were a PC maker, especially one who tried using the Vista 101 tutorial at Microsoft's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in Seattle.

I was heading for a couch and a Vista laptop in Intel's booth when a Microsoft kiosk running the tutorial on a PC caught my eye.

The tutorial is a slideshow of sorts explaining to Microsoft's partners how Vista "has more potential to fuel your business success than any previous version of Windows."

It seemed like a neat way to refresh my Vista knowledge while getting the feel of a PC with a Pentium 975 dual-core 3.46 GHz processor, 2 GB of system memory and a 512 MB graphics card. A perfect Father's Day gift, I thought.

A Microsoft staffer helped me log in as a PC maker, but the tutorial froze until the PC was rebooted.

"A network problem," she suggested, before leaving to help a guy having trouble at another kiosk.

My tutorial worked for a few minutes, then the audio track sped up and began chattering like a monkey, saying things like "win-doh-doh-doh-ah-ah-ahs."

The same thing happened to the other guy. He muted the sound and kept going. I turned the volume down and started taking notes.

When the Microsoft staffer came back, I told her about the glitch. She clucked about the network and asked if I was, by chance, a network systems engineer.

I told her I wasn't, but I could ignore the noises and keep going.

The other guy left. But a woman who started after us on a third PC breezed through without a hitch.

Apparently, the audio glitch slowed my 12-minute tutorial, which dragged on for half an hour before it froze again. I gave up and decided to poke around the system.

I was excited about Vista's new media player. It looks slicker than iTunes and lets you sort through music by clicking on album art. During Bill Gates' keynote at the show, I daydreamed about using a Vista PC as my home music server.

But when I started the player, the PC abruptly shut down. The screen went black, then a message suggested I hit F4 to run a RAID utility. Before I could digest that one, "Windows Error Recovery" began and it restarted itself.

I went to the Control Panel, where Vista said drivers were causing it to start slowly. I clicked "More details" but was stymied by one of Vista's key security features — that took a password I didn't have.

This isn't a technical review. Testers say a newer version is vastly improved, and stuff at tech conferences is often buggy. I was only trying to see how Microsoft was showing off its best stuff to its most important customers.

I can report that Vista's networking features worked like a dream. With a click, the system told me about my local area network connection, identified nearby PCs and an Xbox, and asked if I'd like to connect wirelessly to them.

I chose to play network engineer and clicked a button to "diagnose" that pesky network. It told me the connection was just fine, but I decided to head back to the office. For now, I'll stick with my circa 2001 Windows XP machine.

Reach Brier Dudley at 206-515-5687 or bdudley@seattletimes.com.