They’ve been replaced with a simpler breadcrumb trail, which displays each ‘level’ of navigation, or folder, as a clickable buttons. The most obvious change to Vista’s window furniture, after many years of confusing users in the name of backwards compatibility with DOS, is that at last absolute paths have been given the heave-ho. I’m already beginning to forget ‘where’ things are in XP, because all I need to do in Vista is type a name.Įqually dramatic is Vista’s upgrade to the way windows are navigated. In fact, once you’ve tried getting to your files, applications and email by using the search box to get to them, you’ll probably wonder how you ever put up with having to navigate through complicated menus to get to your files. Searches can be saved and stored too, should you want to come back to them later. Type Word, for instance, and Microsoft Word appears at the top of your list type the first few letters of a folder or file you want to get to and that will appear too. Not only does it search files and folders, but also applications, your internet browsing history and even your email. Click Start, then type in the name of an application or file – the search box instantly gains focus so you can search right away – and as you type, matches appear in the Start menu above. With indexing switched on by default (XP had this but it wasn’t turned on out of the box), results are instant. With Vista, Microsoft has dramatically increased the usability and speed of its search. Windows’ search tool has always been useless … hasn’t it? Not this time. More significant than this is the addition of a search box to the Start menu. Gone is XP’s unwieldy cascading list of applications and in comes a list with a scroll bar, which contains everything within the menu neatly and in a far more elegant manner than simply filling the screen with one huge menu. The first indication that more thought has gone into ease of use is the improved Start menu. As well as new clothes, Vista gives Windows a much-needed repackaging and reorganisation that actually makes difference to the way you use your PC. You can dock various ‘gadgets’ here, including a clock, sticky notes, an RSS news feeder, a photo slideshow, contact list and various other handy mini-applications.īut Vista’s beauty is not just skin deep. This takes a similar – albeit altogether more attractive – approach to Google’s Desktop sidebar. The more frivolous sidebar is a nice touch too. Hit Tab while holding down the Windows key and the stack smoothly cycles through each one, just like a virtual Rolodex. Hit the Windows key and Tab and instead of flat, anonymous icons, you get previews of all your currently open windows stacked in 3D. There is now an alternative to the old Alt-Tab method of switching between applications called Flip 3D. There are other ways in which Vista shows off its new 3D capabilities though, apart from the transparency and glass effects. If you’ve downloaded and used Windows Media Player 11, you’ll already have a good idea of how Vista shapes up – it’s slick, no doubt about it. Minimised Windows fade out and gracefully slide into the taskbar, live previews appear as you hover over minimised application buttons in the taskbar, and the whole look and feel is a lot more mature than XP. If your PC or laptop has the hardware (we’ll deal with this issue in more depth later) you’ll get transparent windows that let you see through them to what’s behind and much more sophisticated animations than with XP. This is a makeover that’s worthy of the name. But in the case of Vista’s rather swish-looking Aero interface, it’s more than just pretty version of XP. And yes, to a certain extent that’s true. Has Vista got enough in its locker to persuade millions of users to make the switch? Read on to find out…Ĭynics will tell you that Vista is just XP with a brand new wardrobe – underneath it’s just the same old operating system. There has been the odd security bump along the way and, sure, it has the odd annoying foible, but apart from the fact that it’s beginning to look a little long in the tooth, XP is still in rude health. After all, there’s not nearly quite so much to fix with XP, which has, by-and-large, done a decent job of running home, business and, latterly, entertainment PCs throughout the land for a good while now. There’s no doubt that the move from XP to Vista was never going to be as dramatic or ground shaking as the move from the much-derided Windows 98 to XP, no matter how hard the Microsoft spin machine worked at convincing us it was. On the face of it, Vista has its work cut out.
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