Here you go, and this is for if you have viewed the slideshows at
www.pcmag.com (have to dig around for it).
Windows Vista Review
This is a review of Microsoft’s new operating system Windows Vista. This will be a pros and cons look at this new OS.
Different settings have different authority. The slideshow wasn’t very specific on which settings. Access to My Computer looks more like a Macintosh OS9 screen, as everything is right there with branches and ratings of different kinds. Security hasn’t changed much, either except for the formatting of the windows themselves. A security setting that is default is one that gives the user limited access to different areas in User Account Protection. Another security feature is the Trusted Platform Module chip which encrypts the entire volume(s) on a hdd to make stealing more difficult.
Windows Vista (WinVista) is heavy on presentation to the user. The setup screen appears to be a high bitrate presentation, and seems to have only two steps which is a big improvement over the several restarts of other Win OS’s. There are lots of animated screens and pretty-to-look-at features. When you open My Computer, you no longer have the two-dimensional window on a window, they can be shown to be at an angle, as if you were looking at it with the edge tilted slightly to or away from you, called “live icons.” Also with lots of icons. I prefer List View so you can see more at once. This is done with a new keyboard command, Win+Spacebar. The keyboard commands have changed, also. Alt+Tab used to switch between different open windows and the desktop but now it displays whatever is in a given window that you are looking at. Movies and files are all viewable this way in a thumbnail view. If you have a few different items open, they slide to the side as you select/deselect them. When you use a mouse and drift over an item, a tool-tip-ish balloon pops up and gives you a brief description. Control Panel has the familiar XP styled category view, which I suppose is able to be reverted to classic view. All of the window borders appear to be partially transparent. Searching from theStart button is supposed to be made a little easier because it’s right there in front of you that you may look at other computers on a network (your network that is). Copying still has the same elements, a stop button and a status bar. One cannot improve much on a simple tool like that one. Virtual folders are set up for users instead of actual folders set up in the harddrive. Users can also be allowed to set the clock. This was different in other Win OS’s in that only administrators could set the clock.
Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) uses tabbed browsing, an I dea I have only seen implemented on Mozilla’s web browser Firefox, which is a nice feature to have.
Folder layouts are now based on different users rather than folders. A path may be C:\Nathan\Docs\, rather than C:\Docs\Nathan. Not a big change but enough to shake the boat and look fancy. The OS can go back to MS when it finds errors much like in XP. Some messages, like “replace this file with this one” if it’s the same name hasn’t changed. File sharing has more than a name and password. You can specify which users have access. WinVista uses “stacks” to organize now. This is more of a graphics-brag than anything else.
In overview, it seems to me that WinVista took some old ideas and polished them up a little more, changed a few things to make you re-learn old functions and is experimenting with ideas that are aimed to make computering more pleasant and secure. Parental control was a thing you had to buy but now it’s integrated. Some things have been made more complicated but such is life. I think they’ll get better with time. After all, it took them about five years to get Win95 right with Win98SE. So stay tuned.
