MS Vista Review

Published: December 14, 2006
After five years of starts, stops, executive shuffling, feature
rethinks and delays, Windows Vista is finally complete. It’s
available to corporations already, and starting Jan. 30, it’s what
you’ll get on any new PC. Its programmers, who probably haven’t
seen their families in months, will have an especially merry
Christmas this year.

So after five years, how is Windows Vista? Microsoft’s description,
which you’ll soon be seeing in millions of dollars’ worth of
advertising, is “Clear, Confident, Connected.” But a more truthful
motto would be “Looks, Locks, Lacks.”

Looks

Windows Vista is beautiful. Microsoft has never taken elegance so
seriously before. Discreet eye candy is partly responsible. Windows
and menus cast subtle shadows. A new typeface gives the whole affair
a fresh, modern feeling. Subtle animations liven up the proceedings.

If the description so far makes Vista sound a lot like the Macintosh,
well, you’re right. You get the feeling that Microsoft’s managers
put Mac OS X on an easel and told the programmers, “Copy that.”

Here are some of the grace notes that will remind you of similar ones
on the Mac: A list of favorite PC locations appears at the left side
of every Explorer window, which you can customize just by dragging
folders in or out. You now expand or collapse lists of folders by
clicking little flippy triangles. When you’re dragging icons to copy
them, a cursor “badge” appears that indicates how many you’re
moving. The Minimize, Maximize and Close buttons glow when your
cursor passes over them. There’s now a keystroke (Alt+up arrow) to
open the current folder’s parent window, the one that contains it.

Some of the big-ticket Vista features and programs are eerily
familiar, too. The biggest one is Instant Search, a text box at the
bottom of the Start menu. As you type here, the Start menu turns into
a list of every file, folder, program and e-mail message that
contains your search phrase, regardless of names or folder locations.
It’s a powerful, routine-changing tool, especially when you seek a
program that would otherwise require burrowing through nested folders
in the All Programs menu.

A similar Search box appears at the top of every desktop (Explorer)
window, for ease in plucking some document out of that more limited
haystack.

New programs include the Sidebar, a floating layer of single-purpose
programs called gadgets ( Apple called them widgets) like a weather
reporter, stock tracker, currency converter, and so on; Photo
Gallery, a deliciously simple shoebox for digital photos; the bare-
bones DVD Maker, for designing scene-selection menus for home-burned
video DVDs; and Chess Titans, whose photorealistic board can be
rotated in three-dimensional space.

Flip 3-D, which presents all open windows in all programs as cards in
a floating deck, seems to be modeled on Mac OS X’s Exposé feature
— minus the ability to see all the windows simultaneously. You have
to flip through the “cards” to find the one you want.

Now, before the hate-mail tsunami begins, it’s important to note
that Apple has itself borrowed feature ideas on occasion, even from
Windows. But never this broadly, boldly or blatantly. There must be
enough steam coming out of Apple executives’ ears to power the Polar
Express.

Even so, brazen as it was, the heist was largely successful. Vista is
infinitely more pleasant to use than its predecessors. There’s more
logic to its folder structure and naming scheme. Things are easier to
find. Fewer steps are required to perform common tasks, especially
when it comes to networking.

And besides, not all of the new goodies fell from the Apple tree. The
new grouping, stacking and filtering options give you efficient new
ways to parse the masses of files in a window. If you have a spare
U.S.B. flash drive, your PC can use it as extra main memory for a
tiny speed boost. Windows Speech Recognition isn’t as accurate as,
say, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, but it’s beautifully designed and
much better than previous Microsoft attempts.

Laptop luggers will love the clever new Sleep mode. It combines the
best of the old Standby mode (everything stays in memory so it’s
ready to go when you reopen the lid) and the old Hibernate mode
(after several hours, Windows commits all this to the hard drive to
save battery power).

And then there’s Presentation Mode, the answer to a million
PowerPoint pitchers’ prayers: it prevents your laptop from doing
anything embarrassing during your boardroom presentation. It won’t
go to sleep, display a screen saver, pop up dialog boxes or play any
beeps. It can even automatically change your desktop wallpaper to
something uncontroversial, so your bosses won’t unexpectedly glimpse
the HotBikiniBabes.com photo that you usually use.

Locks

The visual and feature upgrades are nice, but for Microsoft, security
was an even more important goal. As well it should be; Internet
nastiness like viruses and spyware were sapping the fun out of
Windows PCs.

The list of internal fortifications could fill a stack of white
papers (and does), and the technical language could put the Energizer
bunny to sleep. But examples include Service Hardening, which
prevents background programs from tampering with essential system
files, and address-space randomization, which makes it impossible for
viruses to find important software bits in predictable places.

Other security-suite components are more visible. The much improved
Internet Explorer 7 (also available for Windows XP) alerts you when
you’re visiting one of those fake bank or eBay Web sites (called
phishing scams). Windows Defender protects your PC from spyware.
Parental Controls lets you, the saintly parent, dictate what Web
sites your children can visit, which people they correspond with
online, and even what times of day they can use the machine.

Then there’s User Account Control, an intrusive dialog box that pops
up whenever you try to install a program or adjust a PC-wide setting,
requesting that you confirm the change by entering your password.
This will strike most people as an unnecessary nuisance, and you can
turn it off. But it’s actually one of Vista’s most important new
protection features; when the day comes that a virus is making
changes to your PC, and not you, you’ll know about it.

Lacks

Various Microsoft divisions split up the duties of writing the 50
million lines of Vista code, and they didn’t always share the same
vision. The most visible areas received the most attention, but many
darker, less visited corners weren’t visited by the Microsoft
Makeover fairy at all.

As a result, Vista has something of a multiple-personality disorder.
Links for common tasks sometimes appear at the left side of a window,
sometimes the right and sometimes across the top. In wizards (step-by-
step “interview” screens), the Back button is sometimes at the
lower-left corner of the dialog box, sometimes at the upper-left.
Microsoft has hidden the traditional menu bar in some programs (you
can summon it by tapping the Alt key), but not in others.

Here and there, you’ll find some jaw-dropping misfires, too. For
example, Photo Gallery can play slide shows — but if you want music
too, Microsoft cheerfully suggests that you first switch into another
program and start some music playing there.

Windows finally comes with a prominent backup program. That’s great,
except that you can specify only which categories of things to back
up (pictures, e-mail, and so on), not which specific files or folders.

And then there’s that Sidebar, the floating layer of mini-programs.
If you close one of the gadgets, you lose its contents forever: your
notes in the Post-it Notes gadget, your stock portfolio in the Stocks
gadget, and so on. You couldn’t save them if you wanted to. How
could Microsoft have missed that one.

Some useful XP features have simply been removed. NetMeeting, a
program for collaborating across a network, has been replaced by a
Vista-only program called Meeting Space — which lacks its
predecessor’s voice- and video-chat features.

And WordPad, the built-in word processor, can no longer open
Microsoft Word files. That, evidently, is a ham-handed attempt to
force you into buying Microsoft Office. (Let’s hope the masses
realize that they have a free alternative at docs.google.com.)

What to Do

Windows Vista is not, as the Web’s chorus of caustic critics claim,
little more than a warmed-over Windows XP. Its more intelligent
navigation and more powerful file-manipulation tools provide you with
greater efficiency from Day 1. And while the more secure plumbing
doesn’t guarantee a virus-free future, it will certainly make life
more difficult for the sociopaths of the Internet.

That’s not to say, however, that Vista is worth standing in line for
on Jan. 30. Moving to Vista means hunting for updated drivers for
your printer, audio card and so on, not to mention troubleshooting
incompatible programs. It also means some relearning, thanks to
features that Microsoft has moved, removed or rejiggered.

Microsoft isn’t helping the confusion issue by releasing Vista in
five versions, each with different features: Home Basic, Home
Premium, Business, Enterprise and Ultimate. For example, the latter
three offer Complete PC, a feature that backs up your entire
computer, programs and all; Home Premium and Ultimate offer Media
Center, which plays music, videos and photos on your TV. You
practically need an operating system just to choose an operating system.

The prices range from $100 (for an upgrade version of Home Basic) to
$400 (for the full version of Ultimate). Most people will probably
wind up paying $160, the price to upgrade to the Home Premium edition
from an earlier version of Windows. (Avoid Home Basic, which is too
stripped-down to be worthwhile.) For a fee, you’ll be able to
upgrade from one edition to another.

Of course, none of this factors in the price of the new PC you’ll
probably need. Vista requires a fairly modern PC, and unless you have
a powerful graphics card, some of its most useful new features turn
themselves off. You can download the free Vista Upgrade Advisor from
Microsoft’s Web site to see if your PC will be able to handle Vista.

According to a SoftChoice survey, in fact, only 6 percent of existing
corporate PCs have enough muscle to run all of Vista’s goodies. No
wonder Microsoft expects that only about 5 percent of PC users will
upgrade their existing computers to Vista.

Online, there’s much talk of Vista’s place in the universe. Is it
too little, too late? Does the Mac’s uptick in market share threaten
the dominance of Windows? Does Web-based software make operating
systems obsolete?

None of the above. Windows isn’t going anywhere, the landscape
won’t be changing anytime soon, and the corporate world will still
buy it 500 copies at a time.

In other words, it doesn’t matter what you (or tech reviewers) think
of Windows Vista; sooner or later, it’s what most people will have
on their PCs. In that light, it’s fortunate that Vista is better
looking, better designed and better insulated against the annoyances
of the Internet. At the very least, it’s well equipped to pull the
world’s PCs along for the next five years — or whenever the next
version of Windows drops down the chimney.

E-Mail:Pogue@nytimes.com