http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/14/te...erland&emc=rss
December 14, 2006
State Of The Art
Vista Wins on Looks. As for Lacks ...
By DAVID POGUE
"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."
Linear Mode
