Longhorn Beta Build 5048: Page 2 of 6

Similarly, the vaunted Glass features, to be delivered by the Avalon presentation system, are present only rudimentarily in build 5048. (They're not evident at all until you do a little messing around in the Windows Registry.) You might think of it as a partial Avalon emulation. The Start menu is just barely transparent, if you look very closely. The one readily apparent demonstration of both transparency and blurring is the titlebars of all open windows. The window control buttons — the minimize, maximize, and close buttons — also get a richer visual treatment with Glass turned on. Minimize and maximize turn blue when you roll over them with the mouse pointer, and the close button glows red. (The color roll-over behavior has a lesser counterpart with Glass turned off.)

That's a good segue to a discussion of the "graphics tiering" of the Aero user-interface, which was laid out in one of the more interesting sessions at WinHEC. Microsoft engineers and product marketing people currently envision two main divisions of graphics support, each with two variations. What that means is that, depending on the graphics card and monitor you have installed and your graphics settings, there will be four different presentation levels that you could see in Longhorn. The two lower levels are called "Basic Graphics" and the two higher levels are called "Aero." The Basic Graphics levels shake out to "Classic" (XP/2000 look-alike) and "To Go." The Aero levels are "Express" and "Glass." Longhorn will require DirectX 9 video support. The other factors that affect the graphics tier level you'll see include your bits-per-pixel color depth (number of simultaneous colors supported), the capabilities of your 3D graphics hardware, and the amount of video memory available to your graphics hardware. As you climb up into the upper video levels, each exposes more and more of the Aero and Glass look and feel. Microsoft's idea is to provide wide backward support for older machines while at the same time rewarding more advanced hardware with a richer user experience. If it can pull this off, I think it'll provide both a wide base for Longhorn adoption and create a built-in reason to upgrade your hardware.

The new Start Menu Click to Enlarge

By the way, to fully enable Glass in current Longhorn builds, Microsoft has said you need either an ATI Radeon 9800 or an Nvidia GeForce FX 5900, or better, video card. (I'm testing with the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB.) By the time the product ships, my guess is that the video hardware of 80% of PCs sold by major manufacturers will fully support Glass. If you're buying a PC right now that you hope to upgrade to Longhorn, I would get one with one of these two cards, and I would give strong consideration to 256MB of graphics memory. I often point out when I think it's a good time to buy a new Windows PC. Right now is not one of those times. If you do buy now, you might want to consider a lower-cost PC that you expect to last only two to three years with the understanding that you'll replace it with a higher end Longhorn PC after the new version of Windows ships.

But let's return to Longhorn build 5048. There isn't a lot to dwell on in this release, but the two structures that seem to have been received the most attention are the Start menu and Windows Explorer.