This new version supports Vista, so I thought I’d give it a go properly (I’d previously used Vista without the Aero stuff.)

My machine is a MacPro 2.66ghz quad-core woodcrest doodah, with Radion X1900 graphics, so not exactly a slow machine, however, Vista with its Aero interface felt like trying to use XP whilst wearing boxing gloves after drinking 3 or 4 shots tequila.

Everything feels sluggish: the response when dragging windows, double clicking things, even typing.

The 3d flip thing is a joke. It doesn’t let you see all windows at once (they obscure each other), you can’t use them as drop targets, and it often makes your windows really small. Eg, this Firefox windows was rendered minimum size and off-screen, so after coming back from 3d flip, I had to use the task bar right click menu to get it back.

There seems to be a lot of flicker that detracts from the otherwise smooth and translucent display. This is especially noticeable when the authorisation dialog pops up (incidentally, if it pops up when you’re in 3d flip mode, you don’t always get to see it.)

The effect when a window opens is nice, but this is not consistent with other window effects, such as the start menu appearing (instant) or normal menus appearing (fast fade in) or windows restoring from task bar (zoom.)

After these first impressions, I’d summarise by saying that I’d rather use XP for my day-to-day Windows work, and I’m glad that I don’t have to use Windows at all that often, with OS X being my primary OS.

I wonder why this is? Did Apple do nothing until the release? Microsoft were changing the internals of Vista right up to release day (and will no doubt continue to do so until it’s really finished), so maybe that’s it.

Or maybe Apple did it on purpose, to help Windows people who are already Apple customers to switch to Mac… that seems unlikely too, as if you’ve just shelled out an arm and a leg for Vista, you’re hardly going to jump ship.

If it is true, will it backfire? Newly wowed Vista users may just see Apple software and peripherals as second rate and go buy a Zune.

Whatever, for the time being, if a lot of your life revolves around your iTunes library and iPod, forget Vista.

Still no Wii… did I actually order one? or was it a dream…

I needed a laugh, so why not?

Like Vista, you need to click endlessly on a sequence of buttons to get anything done, with an annoying perceptible delay after each click. The videos themselves are low quality flash video. They are buffered, but not long enough, so you have to endure frequent pauses, no manual pause button to let it catch up, and they take forever to begin.

Apple manage to get much higher quality movies with near instant start, so what gives?

Not a good way to start wowing me.

So after a couple of minutes I managed to watch a movie about “Digital Memories.” A sort of blurry version of iLife Quicktour (and of course, iLife has been around for years.)

Next, I watched a movie on “Productivity.” It stuttered through demos of Spotlight and Dashboard (sorry, desktop search and gadgets), showed the mail client “which comes as standard!” and then went on to show off Office 2007, but instead of seeing business productivity gains, showed documents like “Out family newsletter,” very reminiscent of iWork Pages.

Only one more to watch now before I get to enter the prize draw. I soldered on.

Next up was “Communication” which showed off Internet Explorer 7 with new, ground breaking features, like tabbed browsing, and Vista’s better security and parental controls. Better late than never, I suppose.

By now, I was feeling a “wow,” but in the context, of “wow, what a lame product launch.”

Good news though, I can now enter the draw! Clicking on the link, however, I was greeted with this:

We’re sorry, but we were unable to service your request. You may wish to choose from the links below for information about Microsoft products and services.

In the interest of fairness and to see if it was a glitch, I went through the whole thing again, twice.

Still broken.

So I’m left a much lower opinion (and chance of purchase) of Vista, and no chance of winning a prize.

And I still haven’t got my Wii.