Introduction to Windows Vista

In the first of our four part series, we give an overview of Windows Vista.

With ubiquitous internet connections both at home and on the move, and portable devices and personal media collections now part of our everyday lives, a digital lifestyle seems almost inescapable.

Windows Vista has, says Microsoft, been designed from the ground up to offer increased usability, reliability, security and performance, while also creating a platform that’s ready for the latest multimedia technologies, such as high-definition video, and integration with a constantly connected world. Business users haven’t been forgotten, with Microsoft making deployment easier and cheaper.

Since Windows XP was released in 2001, there have been major advances in PC performance, and Windows Vista is designed to take full advantage of new hardware – its graphical interface has, for the first time, been designed to make the most of the capabilities of modern 3D graphics adapters.

Having been subject to numerous delays and changes in specification, Vista is set to go on sale on 30 January 2007. Whether you’re thinking of upgrading your existing system or buying a completely new one, we’ll tell you what’s in store, and which edition of the new operating system you should consider, if you’re going to take the plunge.

We’ll give you an introduction to its new features, as well as a little technical behind-the-scenes information to show you what makes Windows Vista so different.

Starting with the new user interface and user applications, we’ll guide you though the new user experience, performance upgrades and security enhancements. Finally, we’ll discuss pricing, licensing and upgrading issues, as well as the system requirements for running the new operating system.

Having experienced all the versions of Windows since its inception, we think Vista is one of the best things to have come out of Redmond for a long time. There will undoubtedly be glitches and updates, but at least it has started off on the right foot.

Change is good
When you boot Vista for the first time, you’ll be greeted with a new desktop experience. From the Robert Fipp-designed start-up sound to the way it shuts down, everything about the interface has been overhauled, and much has been rebuilt from scratch.

While certain key features have been retained between Windows versions over the years, so as not to alienate users, the look-and-feel of the user interface has seen repeated upgrades. And, as PCs and graphics hardware have become more powerful, operating systems have, quite rightly, evolved to take full advantage of the new technology.

Vista brings with it the most significant user-interface changes in any version of Windows, yet still manages to seem familiar.

All versions of Vista, except Home Basic take advantage of a new method of displaying the Windows desktop. If your hardware meets the minimum requirements you will be able to take advantage of the new ‘Aero’ interface.

Modern graphics cards, even basic models, have a huge amount of processing power that lies dormant, other than when you’re playing 3D games or processing video.

In harnessing this power, Aero uses a new driver model – the Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) – to deliver a smooth, fast desktop that’s free of the tearing, glitching and slow window redraws users have come to loathe over the years. It also enables effects such as transparency, animations, lighting effects and live thumbnails.

Many have dismissed such effects as gratuitous ‘eye candy’, but a great deal of work has gone into improving the usability of the interface and, we’re told, nothing has been included without good reason.

Transparency (which can be turned off) is pervasive throughout the new desktop and is used to varying degrees in many features, such as the Taskbar, the Start menu and the new Windows Sidebar. These effects are collectively known as ‘Glass’.

Transparent menu bars direct your focus towards a window’s contents rather than the window furniture, such as borders and frames. Quite the opposite of showing off, these items are transparent to help you not look at them. And because of the soft blurring, or ‘frosting’, of items beneath transparent objects you’re aware of those items but not distracted by them.

By hovering over an application in the taskbar, a live thumbnail of the application pops up. If, for example, it’s a media player window displaying a video clip, the thumbnail will show the same moving video as the main application window.

New task switcher
The familiar Alt & Tab method of cycling through your open desktop windows has been enhanced, using Windows Flip or, for Aero users, Windows Flip 3D. Flip uses transparency and live thumbnails to great effect, helping you select easily from your running applications.

Flip 3D goes one step further by animating larger images of your open windows in 3D. You can scroll through them using your mouse’s scroll wheel or by holding down the Windows key and pressing Tab repeatedly. Users without Aero can use Flip, but without the transparency and live window previews.

Even if your PC isn’t capable of running Aero, or you choose not to enable it, you will still benefit from Vista’s many new user interface components and enhancements.

Right Start
The completely redesigned Start menu is faster to use and incorporates two major new features. First of all, the ‘All Programs’ program option no longer flies out across the screen, obscuring your desktop items. Instead, a hierarchical icon-driven menu system remains entirely contained within the Start menu rectangle.

Also included is the new Instant Search bar. Here, you can type the name of any content you’re looking for and the results will appear more or less instantaneously in the window pane above. This search can include any content on your PC such as progams, documents, folders or emails. The results of the search are automatically grouped according to type.

Launching programs and finding content in this way is much faster than having to navigate a series of menus and windows. In most cases, Windows will have found what you’re looking for before you’ve finished typing your keywords.

Robust shell
Today, we have to deal with vast quantities of data, not only documents we’ve created, but also email, web-based information, digital photos, videos and music. The new shell in Vista is designed to scale up gracefully as the volume of user data increases.

Where previous versions of the shell have been focused very much on files, the new version is capable of handling different types of data – whether it’s on your local hard drive, your network or the internet.

By integrating search capabilities with every Explorer window, finding the data you’re looking for has been greatly simplified. The shell is also robust enough to deal with returning many thousands of search results, and with folders that contain huge numbers of items, without impacting upon the responsiveness of the system.

A new indexing service looks through your documents, creating metadata as it goes. This enables you to search for content based on advanced contextual searches. For example, a search within an Explorer window could be used to find all the photos taken on a given day, or all emails from your boss.

Explorer windows themselves have seen a radical overhaul. In addition to the integrated search facilities, they are now able to take advantage of much larger icons and thumbnails. You can move between the different sizes and display options using a new ‘Views’ slider.

The address bar has been replaced with a new ‘breadcrumbs’ display that allows you to navigate back up and down the filesystem within the address bar itself, and the familiar ‘File / Edit’ menu structure is now hidden (pressing the Alt key brings it back), replaced with a context-sensitive command bar, which displays single-click tasks applicable to the window contents.

At first, the unfamiliarity of these new Explorer windows may cause some frustration for Windows XP users, but after a short period of acclimatisation we’ve found them to be much quicker to use and much more flexible than the venerable Windows Explorer.

Looking for Mr Sidebar
The Windows Sidebar is a separate application that optionally runs as part of the desktop. It enables the use of simple applets, called gadgets, which are easy to create using XML and simple scripting.

Many, such as clock, calendar and weather gadgets, are bundled with Vista and more can be downloaded from the internet. Sidebar can be hidden, taking the gadgets with it, or you can drag gadgets onto the desktop, where they can exist independently of the Sidebar, often acquiring enhanced options in the process.

Cleartype default
Windows XP introduced Cleartype to improve the readability of screen fonts on LCD monitors, and in Windows Vista it’s now enabled by default. Several new fonts have been developed that take advantage of the way Cleartype works. Throughout the desktop interface, the new Segoe UI font is used, which has been developed specifically to improve on-screen readability.

Windows Anytime Upgrade
If you find the various editions of Windows Vista rather confusing, or if you simply don’t know which features you will need, then Windows Anytime Upgrade (WAU) lets you upgrade your operating system online without the hassle of having to re-install.

Accessed via an icon in the Welcome Center, WAU allows you to compare your currently installed version of Windows Vista with compatible upgrades, feature by feature.

Retail copies of Windows Vista, regardless of which edition you choose, come with the complete code for all the Vista features. The version that’s installed is determined by the product key you provide at installation.

If you choose to upgrade online, you’ll be connected directly to a Microsoft partner, who will take your payment and offer a small file for download, which will upgrade your licence and allow you to upgrade your copy of Windows by installing the extra features from your DVD.
WAU keeps all your applications, documents and settings in place so you won’t need to visit the shops and buy a whole new boxed upgrade version of Windows and install it from scratch. Plenty of online help is provided, along with instructions on how to upgrade a PC other than the one on which you download the upgrade.

This is a feature that’s ripe for exploitation by those after a free upgrade, but this would mean converting a legal copy of Windows into an illegal one. Perhaps users would think twice before risking their paid-for product key in this manner.

Which Vista should you look at?
There will be five different editions of Windows Vista on sale in the UK, each of which will be delivered in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Windows XP was also available in five editions, but two of these – Media Center Edition and Tablet PC Edition – were designed for specific hardware.

With Vista, the various editions are differentiated based on their intended use – be it business or home – and the level of features required. A further important difference is that all the retail editions of Vista will be shipped with both 32-bit and 64-bit versions included, and you will be asked to to make a choice during installation.

For consumers, the Home Basic, Home Premium and Ultimate editions are the suggested options. For small businesses, Business or Ultimate versions are available and larger businesses are offered the Business or Enterprise editions, which are not available in retail stores.
Unfortunately, you can’t upgrade from the 32-bit to the 64-bit versions so, short of a full re-install, you’re stuck with whichever version you select originally.

While the widespread delivery of the 64-bit version of Windows is likely to boost vendor support for 64-bit drivers, there are still areas of incompatibility, so before installing the 64-bit version be sure to check with your hardware and software vendors for 64-bit support. Windows XP 64-bit drivers will work, but they must be digitally signed to work properly with Vista.

System requirements for Windows Vista
Despite the horror stories of Windows Vista requiring huge amounts of fast hardware to run, relatively modest systems are capable of providing a user experience with a level of performance that is at least comparable to that of Windows XP.
Windows Vista is, however, much better equipped to take advantage of any advanced hardware you have available, and it’s on these PCs where it really starts to shine.

One of the key requirements for a successful Vista upgrade is sufficient memory. With less than 1GB of Ram, Vista is likely to perform more slowly than Windows XP, but above that amount it is expected to outperform Windows XP quite dramatically.


Paul Monckton, Personal Computer World, 19 Dec 2006