By the time Vista hits the shelves early in 2007 it will be almost six years since Microsoft's last major desktop operating system release. There's no doubt this new operating system has plenty to recommend it over its predecessor, Windows XP, but given Vista's long incubation period, it's hard not to feel somewhat disappointed in the result.
Originally, Vista was to be a truly spectacular break from its past with a radical new file system, called WinFS, leading the pack among a number of revolutionary technologies. As the Vista development schedule slipped and slipped again, Microsoft ripped out WinFS, a Web development system known as Indigo and a graphics presentation system called Avalon, leaving a far less ambitious product. The beta phase of development saw other enticing but less significant enhancements, such as Virtual Folders, given the kibosh as well.
Despite this, Vista is still a major leap forward - at least as significant a jump as that from Windows 95 to Windows XP. It's more secure, more reliable, more good looking and far smarter than XP. That'll make it hard to resist if you have any trace of technolust running through your veins. It's also different enough from XP that you'll need to devote a significant amount of time to learning its ins and outs, and that may give some people pause when deciding whether to upgrade.
Security
Vista is the first of Microsoft's operating systems to be built from the ground up with security in mind. Microsoft has rewritten Windows' core code to make it far more secure. Vista also includes technologies to combat spyware and phishing and to make your computer more resistant to outside attack and control.
While Vista shows plenty of signs of Microsoft's new focus on security, much of the evidence is hidden from view, threaded through Vista's foundation code. Features such as Windows Services Hardening - which prevents compromised Windows services from altering configuration settings - mostly run below the user radar.
Advanced file and system backup is built in. (Click the image to see a full-sized screenshot.)
Things you will notice, though, include a beefed up firewall that monitors both incoming and outgoing traffic; parental controls that make it a whole lot easier to manage and monitor your children's computer usage; and User Account Control.
The latter is designed to prevent you from accidentally installing software or making changes to settings that might damage or compromise your computer. Unfortunately, UAC works by halting certain actions and displaying prompts before you can continue. The whole system freezes until you respond to the prompt. It seems likely this is going to confuse many Windows beginners and simply annoy long-time users, who may end up clicking OK without really thinking. It's a bit of a no-win situation for Microsoft. If you really want a more secure computing experience, you should be prepared to train yourself to understand and use User Account Control and to think before you click.
Vista will ship with Internet Explorer 7, the new version of Microsoft's browser. This is a far better browser than earlier versions of IE and Vista users get the additional benefit of Protected Mode. Protected Mode prevents the browser - or any outside code trying to operate through it - from doing anything that could harm your system. In effect, the browser's local actions are corralled within the Temporary Internet Files folder and it is unable to write outside its confines. Despite the improvements, IE 7 still has an uncomfortable amount of code in common with IE 6 and there's nothing about the browser that's likely to wean anyone away from Firefox or Opera. At least those who use whatever browser ships with the operating system will be safer than they were when running IE 6 on XP.
Although Vista is undoubtedly more secure than any other Windows operating system, it is by no means impregnable. An ominous indication of that emerged during the Black Hat security conference in August 2006, when Microsoft placed the Beta 2 version of Vista in the hands of security professionals and hackers, inviting them to test its defenses. It was a bold, confident move by Microsoft. Unfortunately, on the last day of the conference a researcher demonstrated a successful attack and installed a rootkit (a stealth program designed to subvert a system) on Vista. In order to do so, the researcher had to ignore a security prompt displayed by the system, but that's just the sort of thing users are likely to do when confronted by Vista's manifold User Account Control warnings. Since then, Microsoft has done a lot of work to reduce the number of UAC prompts displayed by Vista; here's hoping that will be enough to render the system more palatable to users, and hence more effective.
What the Black Hat experience shows us is that Vista will not herald the end to the plague of security vulnerabilities we've suffered over the years. Still, given Vista's security focus, it's reasonable to expect the number of problems will decrease significantly.
The new interface
At first sight, Vista appears to be comfortably similar to Windows XP. Desktop icons have a slicker look and the new Sidebar with its Gadgets occupies the right of the screen, but it's still recognisably a Windows desktop.
Click the - now-circular - Start button (renamed the Start Orb), and this impression is reinforced. Until, that is, you let the mouse pointer rest on All Programs, waiting for the sub-menu to pop open. It doesn't. Instead the left side of the Start Menu is replaced with an in-situ Programs menu that scrolls in place. That scrolling menu takes a lot of getting used to.
Alt-Tab application switching is now known as Flip...
Look at the Start Menu once more and you'll see a search box at the very bottom. These search boxes appear all over Vista and they're a sign that Microsoft has finally wised up to the fact that previous versions of Windows made it really hard to find files and programs. Not so with Vista. Start typing a few letters in the Start Menu search box and Vista instantly displays a list of matching programs. It's a great time saver.
...and then there's Flip 3D (use WinKey+Tab to access it)
The search feature works best when Windows has indexed the content of your hard drive. Note that, by default, Vista doesn't index drives other than C:, so if you want to shift all your data onto a second hard drive, you'll need to enable indexing on that drive.
The right side of the Start Menu contains links to familiar items such as the Control Panel, Documents (it's no longer My Documents or My Computer), Music and Pictures.
Another area of significant change is Windows Explorer (the program used to display folder windows, not to be confused with Internet Explorer, a browser used to view Web sites). Explorer windows have been totally redone. Gone is the menu bar (although it's still accessible by tapping Alt). Instead, there's a turbo-charged 'breadcrumb' navigation bar. This bar lets you see the exact path you've taken to get to where you are; it also lets you jump to almost anywhere in a trice.
Beneath the breadcrumb bar is a tiny strip which is all that remains of the old, sizeable task pane.
At the bottom of the window is a preview pane, a thing of beauty. It not only gives you a peek at the contents of a selected file, it also lets you add keywords or tags, attach a rating to the file and change the author. You can use any of these criteria, and many more, to search for files and sort them.
Vista provides a variety of ways to view your files including Details, Tiles, List and four different Icons views (small to extra large). It has also restored the ability to click the Views button to shift between views, something XP omitted.
Use Vista's Groups to organise files by name, date, type, keyword, author or any other property.
Different file views are nothing new, but Vista goes a lot further. You can group or stack files by any file property such as date taken, tag, keyword, author or filetype. You can also filter files, so only those files matching certain criteria appear in the window. Filtering by multiple criteria is a cinch: all you do is click a column header, tick any of the available options (such as a date range), then continue selecting options from additional columns as required. From the Organize Menu you can choose additional file management options. This includes a Layout option which lets you hide or display various parts of the window, including an interactive Preview Pane.
Multimedia
Each new version of Windows has provided more sophisticated handling of photos, audio and video, and Vista is no exception. With Vista, Microsoft now provides applications for managing all types of multimedia: WMP 11 for music and video; Photo Gallery for images; Movie Maker for video editing; DVD Maker for burning audio and images.
WMP 11 has a far more pictorial and dynamic design than earlier versions and it has also been simplified. Unfortunately, it still uses Microsoft's own music database, a woefully scanty resource, to update album information. If you're into classical music, in particular, you'll find yourself having to update album information manually much of the time.
Windows Media Center is integrated into Vista.
The Photo Gallery is an all-new program. It provides a centralised way of viewing your photos and images, with photo management tools and simple editing capabilities. The Auto Adjust feature provides a one-click photo makeover and lets you see the new settings made to brightness, contrast, tint and colour temperature so you can tweak the settings further if you need to. If you've had any experience with Microsoft Digital Image Suite you'll find a lot of familiar features in the Photo Gallery.
Vista's integrated DVD burning is handy for creating menu-driven slideshows and video, but don't throw away your third-party burning software. DVD Maker can't burn data or disc images, nor can you use it to burn audio discs.
Despite the major change in version numbers, Vista's Movie Maker 6 is a minor step up from XP's Movie Maker 2. It includes new effects and transitions, streamlined Tasks list, integration with DVD Maker, and recorded TV support.
The preview pane provides multimedia controls.
The real story with multimedia on Vista is the inclusion of Windows Media Center in the operating system. Media Center was formerly available as a standalone operating system, an extension of Windows XP Professional designed to turn a PC into an entertainment hub.
Now, Media Center is built into the operating system. It offers its own simplified full-screen interface providing access to your photos, audio, video, recorded TV programs (if your system includes a TV tuner) and online content. It's designed to work either with a mouse or a remote control.
Reliability and stability
The Beta 2 version of Vista was buggy and unstable, far more so than one would expect from a late beta. That led to fears that the early 2007 release date for Vista would slip once more. But then Microsoft came out with a series of vastly improved interim builds and surprised much of the testing community with its prompt release of Release Candidate 1 (RC1), on which this review is based.
That means an early 2007 launch is back on the cards. The problem is, RC1 is not as bug-free as one would hope. We encountered problems with the search feature, which was excruciatingly slow to recognise mass file changes even after the index had been built. Vista also failed to handle mass file deletions on a number of occasions, requiring all windows to be closed and then reopened before the deleted files disappeared from Windows Explorer.
There are also some very poor design decisions in Vista which make parts of the operating system feel hastily hacked together, despite the very long development cycle. The Music, Pictures and Videos folders, for example, are no longer sub-folders of Documents. This means to do a full data backup you have to keep track of multiple folders, instead of simply doing a (My) Documents backup. And, if you decide to move Documents to a second drive in order to separate your data from your system files, things get decidedly messy. You have to move each "special" folder separately and, after doing so, some apps are still clueless about the changes, including Microsoft's own Photo Gallery.
The new Network Center fails to centralise network functions. You're likely to find yourself going in circles trying to track down how to adjust particular network settings.
Another example of design sloppiness is the inconsistency in the look of some windows and Wizards. For example, Wizards in XP feature a Back, Next and Cancel button, letting you step back and forth through a process. In Vista, Wizards sport Next and Cancel buttons in the lower right, while the Back "button" is a browser-style arrow in the top left. It's very confusing.
Despite these shortcomings, Vista garners major points for its much improved set of reliability and safety tools. System Restore now captures the entire state of a system in a restore point, making it far more useful. Vista also automatically records earlier versions of files, and you can access these Previous Versions by a simple right-click of a file. The Disk Defragmenter runs automatically by default.
And then there's the System Repair Tool (SRT), which kicks in when there's a boot-up failure. In many circumstances it can not only diagnose the problem but repair it, too. Vista is full of such automatic repair tools. In fact, on one of our test systems, it diagnosed and fixed a major, long-standing video hardware problem which even the manufacturer had been unable to fix. That problem system had been automatically rebooting itself every few hours for the past year. The very first time the problem surfaced after installing Vista Release Candidate 1, Windows recognised the problem and eliminated it.
Vista also provides good support for existing hardware and software. For those who remember the grief caused when trying to upgrade to Windows Me and XP from Windows 98, the upgrade to Vista will be a pleasant surprise. Of course, Vista's hardware requirements are fairly hefty, so you're unlikely to be running it on a very old system.
Tools and apps
Vista comes with an assortment of new tools, technologies and applications, some of them so-so, some of them real showstoppers:
- SuperFetch. This is very smart memory management technology, which ensures that data and files needed by an application are loaded into RAM. SuperFetch enhances the already-useful Prefetch technology in Windows XP. It provides faster loading of regularly used applications – something that was dramatically apparent during our tests.
- ReadyBoost lets you plug in a USB key, SD Card, CompactFlash or other memory device and have Vista use that memory to boost system performance.
- ReadyDrive provides very fast startup and much faster resume from hibernate on hybrid drives (new drives that combine flash memory with a hard drive).
- Flip and Flip 3D. Flip is the new name for the Alt+Tab key combination used to switch between open applications. Flip looks better than its predecessors and is more informative. Press Winkey+Tab instead of Alt+Tab and you'll bring up Flip 3D, a snazzy live graphical view that displays any window activity (such as a video playing).
- Automatic document backup, both for files and for your entire system.
- Built-in speech recognition. Despite an embarrassingly bad demonstration of this feature, a video of which made its way onto YouTube, it's not half bad, especially for controlling Windows and launching programs.
- Windows Calendar. At last, a calendaring app for Windows, and this one is ICS compatible so you can subscribe to other calendars online.
- Windows Meeting Space. A replacement for NetMeeting, Meeting Space supports peer-to-peer application sharing and uses the new People Near Me service to connect you to others on the network.
- Windows Sidebar is a pale imitation of Google Desktop's Sidebar. It occupies a transparent strip on the right of Vista's desktop and houses a variety of Gadgets. Here's hoping Microsoft makes major improvements to the Sidebar Gadgets before Vista's final release; in their current state, they're minimally useful and barely configurable, making the Sidebar nothing much more than a waste of space.
- The Windows Mobility Center centralises control of notebook features such as power management, display settings and orientation, wireless networking and synchronisation. For Tablet PC users, the Handwriting Recognition Personalization Tool improves handwriting recognition; pen navigation has been improved; and there's now support for touch screens.
- Windows Mail replaces Outlook Express. It's not particularly impressive, and its clear that Microsoft would rather you subscribe to its Windows Live Mail service and use the Windows Live Mail Desktop application instead. Live Mail has more features, including multiple account support, anti-virus, spam blocking, newsgroup and RSS feed support, and photo e-mail, plus integration with MSN Spaces blogging and MSN Messenger.
Should you get Vista?
Vista is something of a roller coaster ride. It's easy to get really excited about it and just as easy to feel at times let down. Some of the shortcomings in RC1 are sure to be remedied by the time Vista goes gold, but Microsoft is unlikely to tinker with most of the basic design flaws that make Vista a little frustrating and occasionally bewildering to use.
The first version of any operating system is likely to have its complement of bugs, and we already know Vista is no exception. So we should expect to see a Vista service pack appear within a year of the operating system's release. Holding off until the initial problems have been addressed may prove a smart option, and that's what we recommend for most users who are considering upgrading to Vista: wait for Service Pack 1.
The in-place All Programs menu takes some getting used to.
There are two exceptions to that:
- Enthusiasts. If you're a sucker for new technology, there's no doubt you're going to love Vista. It's filled with fascinating new toys, smart improvements and whizbangery. Anyone who enjoys using a computer for the sake of the technology will have a blast with Vista.
- Anyone buying a new computer. If you're planning to buy a new computer next year, make sure it comes with Vista. It's undoubtedly superior to XP and the improved security alone makes it worthwhile. Be prepared, though, to spend quite some time getting used to the new way of doing things.
On the other hand, you should definitely hold off buying Vista if:
- You're an organisation or company without dedicated IT and training resources. Unless you're prepared to commit to a solid training schedule, you're better off delaying moving to Vista. Chances are, by the time Service Pack 1 surfaces, at least some of your staff will have started using Vista at home, and that will make the transition a lot less painful.
- You look upon your computer purely as a tool or use it simply to get a particular job done. For example, if you use your computer for email and correspondence, you really don't need Vista. If you use your computer primarily for cataloguing and managing photos, a job which Vista accomplishes with considerable more aplomb than XP, then you may want to upgrade.
© 2006 Rose Vines
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