Microsoft Windows Longhorn Build 5048 to be unveiled tomorrow at WinHEC

George J. Capnias — Wed, 27 Apr 2005 01:27:19 GMT

Αχ, πότε θα μπορέσουμε να βάλουμε τα χέρια μας επάνω σε αυτό το Build...

Three hundred and fifty three days, that's how long its been since the outside world has been given a peek at the state of Windows, Codename Longhorn. On that day, almost a full year ago now, at WinHec 2004 we received the Longhorn build 4074 DVD in our kit; as recently as today I saw someone in our IRC channel seeking a download of that same build. The long drought for a new build of Longhorn is officially over. I proudly present to you, build 5048...

What follows is not an assessment of stability nor critique of its features, but a peek into what we might be able to expect from a more complete operating system. Jim Allchin, vice president of Microsoft Platforms Group, has publicly predicted Longhorn is to be only 1/3 feature complete at the time of Beta 1. I don't think it too fair that we judge this pre-beta build to par with an OS that one would feel comfortable with on a day to day basis. Qualifying statements aside, I will comment though that with the limited time spent with this build, its been very very well behaved. I even left it booted for two days straight without it leaking memory all over my desk.

A few general observations:

5048 is to be considered a baseline platform, it doesn't have many bells and whistles. Like any builder, the architects at Microsoft have been working on the foundation first. To the casual observer, Longhorn feels like XP with a new shell. But that is truly where the similarities end. A quick glance at the root of the system drive tells a different story. Dig deeper, and the chasm widens. As I've only had a limited time with these recient builds, my thought is to leave the technical analysis to later when more concrete facts can be presented.

The above observation is the result of the hard work that's been going on under the hood. My opinion is there is a little bit of, "Lets make sure this build isn't a pig like last years." As I mentioned above, 5048 is well behaved. Aside from the many things that are noticeably not working, you can expect 5048 to hum along nicely until you get frustrated with it's missing and broken pieces. I even took some time to do a little gaming. While the hardware I have it installed on is no slouch, (Athlon 64 at 2.75ghz and 1 gig of ram, 6600GT) once I was immersed in a game, there was no noticeable lag. I'll leave the benchmarking and ruminating over performance to those that expect more of a pre-beta platform than should be expected of this particular spring chicken.

I also noticed a few items conspicuously missing, like the inability to run Add/Remove Windows Components. Seems the easiest way to disable access to features is to not let us install them. Then again I could be reading into something that just isn't complete. (no Run DLL32.EXE shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL appwiz.cpl,,2 doesn't work) Upon further inquiry, I was informed that currently this function is only accessible via a command line tool.

*UPDATE*

DWM enabled! See page 4 for details and spinny, twisty, transparent windows!
Full Story: WinBeta.Org Review of Longhorn 5048

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George J.

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Microsoft Windows Longhorn Build 5048 to be unveiled tomorrow at WinHEC