Vista Wins on Looks. As for Lacks ...

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.



Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company