It's been a long wait. Microsoft first started talking about Vista, then known as Longhorn, in 2001, before the release of Windows XP. Finally, over five and a half years later, you can walk into a store and buy a copy of the new operating system.
Despite the wait, Vista emerges from Microsoft's Redmond code labs with more than its share of rough edges. It has bugs. It has security holes. It has inexplicably flawed features. It also has beauty, strength and intelligence.
Smart users will hold off on buying Vista until Service Pack 1 comes along, probably within a year, to repair some of the most egregious defects. Or they'll sidestep many potential problems and buy a new computer tailor-made to run Vista, with the new operating system pre-installed.
The technology suckers among us will have already rushed out, bought an upgrade copy of Vista Ultimate and attempted to install it onto our old XP machines. If you're one of those suckers, make sure you run the Vista Upgrade Advisor and take its advice. Otherwise you're likely to encounter some of the blue-screen errors we experienced during our testing or find that Vista runs... sort of.
If you've already given yourself to Vista – or are contemplating doing so in the near future – this guide will help you get up and running with a minimum of heartache and disorientation.
Probably the best tip for those of you already familiar with Windows is this: be prepared to spend some time unlearning. It will really help. Vista makes you perform common tasks in an uncommon manner, and you may find yourself tempted to short-circuit some of its new features and make it look and act more like an XP clone. That's certainly easy enough to do. Give it time: Vista's new ways are not perfect, but in most cases they're a big leap forward from XP and its predecessors.
A solid foundation
The articles in this Vista Superguide look at the core features of Vista: installation, the vastly modified Start Menu, the new Explorer, and Vista's excellent search capabilities.
This just scratches the surface. Underpinning the interface makeover, Vista sports new and improved technologies that make it more secure and far smarter than earlier versions of Windows. It also offers a grab-bag of new or revamped applications and utilities, including Windows Calendar and Contacts, Readyboost and Readydrive, Windows Media Center, Photo Gallery and DVD Maker among others. I'll be covering each of these in future articles.
Vista's Backup program dumbs things down to the nth degree (click the image for a full-size screenshot).
Security
Vista will not herald the end to Windows' security problems, but it is most definitely a step in the right direction.
Some of the new security highlights are:
- A firewall that monitors both incoming and outgoing traffic.
- PC Backup And Restore, which allows you to rebuild your entire computing environment after a disaster.
- Windows Service Hardening, designed to prevent critical services from messing with the file system, registry or network. This is one of Vista's backup defence strategies: if hackers find a vulnerability in a Windows component, service hardening won't prevent the component from being attacked, but it will minimise the damage that the compromised component can wreak upon the rest of the system.
- Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR), a nifty piece of footwork which causes system files to be loaded into random memory offsets whenever you reboot, thus stymieing attacks that depend on knowing the memory location of these files.
- Extensive parental controls, that will make it easy for a family to share the same computer.
Subtleties
In the coming months, you'll hear plenty about all the big shiny new features in Vista. But it may well be the little, below-the-radar things that will make you a Vista lover or loather.
In the what-were-they-thinking department, consider these little gotchas:
- WordPad can no longer open or edit Word files.
- When you close a Sidebar gadget, such as a To Do list, you lose all its contents.
- The backup program doesn't let you select individual folders and files for backup.
Smart copy and move dialog boxes help eliminate errors.
Just when you're starting to fume at these shortcomings, you'll encounter subtle little wonders such as:
- Per-application volume settings for adjusting sound, instead of a single system-wide setting. Smart file renaming. Vista automatically selects only the filename and not the extension, making editing much easier.
- Resizable dialog boxes. No longer will you have to deal with obscured text.
- Smart copying. Try copying a bunch of files from one folder into another folder which already contains files with the same filenames. Vista provides three options for each file: Copy And Replace, Don't Copy, and Copy, But Keep Both Files. In the latter case, the copied file is renamed. A checkbox at the bottom of the Copy File dialog lets you elect to follow the selected procedure for all subsequent operations.
© 2007 Rose Vines
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