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Pros
Improved security. Slick Aero interface. Pervasive search. New APIs and hardware support. Better built-in apps.
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Cons
Hefty hardware requirements. Minor bugs and rough edges in UI. Lack of a killer app to compel adoption. Many features also available for Windows XP users.
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Bottom Line
Vista offers a lot of improvements over Windows XP, but most of them are conveniences rather than essentials.
Vista Apps and Utilities
On top of the revamped shell, Vista includes new and enhanced applications. Some, such as Windows Media Player 11, are quite good. Others are less so: Windows Calendar, Windows Defender, and Windows Mail. Power users will want more-sophisticated equivalents.
Vista ships with Internet Explorer 7, which is a major improvement over IE6. To my mind, though, IE7 still falls short of Firefox 2. IE7 finally supports tabbed browsing, and has a convenient Quick Tabs view that shows thumbnails of open Web pages. But it lacks incremental in-page search. IE7 scales printed output better, can zoom entire pages, and includes a number of security improvements, among them antiphishing warnings.
In my testing, IE sometimes forgot my preferences for hiding add-on toolbars, and it consistently ate my first few keystrokes after I pressed Ctrl-T to open a new tab. Still, if IE7 sounds appealing, you don't need Vista to get it: There's an XP version at Microsoft.com.
Two of the more compelling applications in Vista are Windows Photo Gallery and Windows Media Player 11. Photo Gallery manages large numbers of digital photos with tags, incremental search, and basic editing such as cropping and red-eye reduction. We reviewed WMP 11 (go.pcmag.com/wmp11), awarding it an Editors' Choice for its improved browsing, search, and interface. A Window XP version is available as well.
View All Vista makes incremental improvements to the little-known Windows Movie Maker app for authoring videos, and also includes a convenient Windows DVD Maker that lets you package up videos and title screens to create and burn movie DVDs.
Of course, you'll also find a variety of diversions, from the usual collection of classic games such as Solitaire and others to new titles such as Chess Titans that showcase Vista's 3D capabilities.
In addition to full applications, you'll find a variety of enhanced tools and utilities. Parental controls let parents restrict access to applications and Web sites, or limit the hours kids can log in. New Activity Centers organize related tasks. Vista's Network Center, for example, makes it easy to monitor network status and open file shares, and its Mobility Center lets you perform portable PC tasks such as altering power settings or entering presentation mode. (Presentation-aware apps can then, say, prevent IM windows from popping up during your sales pitch.) And the Performance and Reliability Monitor is a central location for monitoring system health.
Vista's Backup and Restore Center includes Complete PC Backup, which uses full-disk imaging similar to Norton Ghost or Acronis's TrueImage. Some editions of Vista include version control that lets you roll back to previous versions of documents.
For corporate IT and power users, Vista also includes an improved event log with filtering and notification options, more sophisticated task scheduling, and diagnostic tools such as a memory tester.
New accessibility features round out the OS and include built-in text-to-speech and speech-recognition capabilities that look fairly sophisticated, though we were still testing these features at press time. Look for a full report at go.pcmag.com/vista.—next: Vista: The Experience >
