1. Eye Candy. OK, obviously one of the big selling points to Vista is it’s eye candy. And, without doubt, this is a good looking operating system. Using the “Basic” interface doesn’t really provide much that XP doesn’t have. The Aero interface, though, gives the OS a nice, modern feel. Transparent windows, animation effects, useful previews and ALT-TAB screenshots, etc. So, I give props to Microsoft for the eye candy. At the same time, it’s not really that new. Apple has been doing it for years, and you can now make the free Ubuntu operating system make Vista look stupid using the Beryl add-on. 2. Better Start Menu. The Vista start menu now has a useful desktop search built right in. Similar to Launchy, which allows you to launch programs by simply typing, the Vista start menu allows you to quickly begin typing the name of the item you need and it will pop up for you. So, for example, if I want to launch Audacity and it is buried in the folder structure of my start menu, I just start typing “Aud…” and by that time Audacity has appeared in the application list. Press Enter and it launches. 3. Breadcrumbs. It’s about time, but the File Explorer that comes with Vista is now much more intuitive. The best feature is the fact that it now uses breadcrumbs. When you navigate deeply into your file system, you have a full breadcrumb trail so you can see where you are and quickly navigate up the folder tree. 4. Image Previews. This comes from the eye candy department, but the File Explorer now allows you a quick preview of the contents of a folder by actually modifying the folder icon to show file screenshots within. Again, not all that useful, but it looks nice. 5. Windows Firewall. The firewall built into XP was a total joke. The one in Vista is actually fairly respectable and you no longer need to disable it and install something else (as was usually recommended with XP). 6. Windows Defender. This is the spyware detection and removal application from Microsoft, born from Giant Antispyware (which Microsoft purchased). It isn’t the perfect antispyware utility, but it still has some useful features. Once of them is the Software Explorer tool which allows you to easily see and control the items that are starting automatically on your computer. This wasn’t quite as easy to do for newbies on XP, and usually involved using a third-party utility. Vista is a good operating system, but quite frankly, it has more annoyances than benefits at the moment when compared to XP. All of the above items I listed are nice, but none of them really justify moving away from Windows XP. I did it mainly to be an early adopter and be able to talk about Vista from a firsthand viewpoint. But, unless you are buying a new PC and are practically forced to use Vista, I would recommend people stay with XP for now. Microsoft is overcharging for this thing big time, and a little bit of eye candy and a few convenience features is not worth the hefty price tag that they are asking for this operating system.
