Windows Vista

Windows Vista is the name of the next major version of Windows, and the successor to Windows XP. With Windows Vista (formerly codenamed "Longhorn") Microsoft decided to reach for the brass ring and make this upcoming Windows release an all-encompassing major upgrade with a new security architecture, a hardware 3D-enabled user interface, and many more exciting new features.


Windows Vista wallpaper 1	Windows Vista wallpaper 2	Windows Vista wallpaper 3

...StyleXP/Windows-vista

AERO

Error processing SSI file

The new user interface in Vista is called AERO. This doesn't mean it's light, fluffy and full of holes - it actually stands for Authentic, Energetic, Reflective, and Open, in case you wondered. Visually, it's an evolution of the Windows XP desktop shell and it's clear from the meaning of the acronymn that AERO is much more a design philosophy than an actual one-off desktop theme.

Instantly this will begin to appeal to those of you who long for a more... Apple flavoured desktop environment. It's heavy on the graphical effects, and rightly so. For the first time, Windows will take advantage of your 3D accelerator to offer reflective and transparent effects in windows with a negligible load on the OS. How so?

In Windows XP currently, applications each redraw the screen individually. If a part of the screen needs updating, whichever application is doing the updating simply draws over the top of it and sends the newly drawn image over to the graphics card for output. Windows has no memory of what was previously on screen before it was redrawn.

AERO uses the 3D hardware to layer redraws on top of each other , off-screen (similar to how off-screen render targets are used in 3D). The use of the 3D hardware makes it possible to achieve composition effects that were horrendously slow previously. For example, transparency can be achieved by blending redraw layers in hardware, so that the windows behind it show through. Windows can fade in an out by changing the transparency level. Windows can be manipulated as 3D objects and tiled, moved or rendered in different ways from those we have now. The composition is done in hardware because graphics hardware spends all its time in games compositing scenes in this manner, and so is very fast and efficient at doing so.

Consequently, a DirectX 9 graphics card will be required to run AERO at maximum speed and quality. Could we see Windows Desktop benchmarks in our graphics card reviews pretty soon?

Looking at the GUI itself, the start menu has clearly changed very little, being Microsoft's well researched 'GUI for the masses' project. However instead of filling your screen with sub-drawer after sub-drawer of programs, it now refreshes the list in the existing left hand pane as you can see from the second image. You can also use the search feature to 'smart find' applications as you begin typing the name, a little like Apple's Spotlight .

Navigation and Virtual Folders

The most obvious change from a user perspective is the new appearance of Explorer windows, which have yet again been designed for the home user in mind. My first impression of navigating the system was that getting to grips with its simplistic, but arguably helpful, interface would not be too difficult.

You have the option of adding ratings, authors and keywords to any file (as opposed to the option of doing so mainly to music files through Windows Media Player) in order to make them searchable through the improved search function or Virtual Folders. Virtual folders appear like normal folders, but they're actually more like saved search queries. For example, you might have a Virtual Folder on your desktop called 'Today', which is defined by the query 'All files I've opened Today'. When you click the Virtual Folder, that's exactly what you'll get inside - regardless of the actual physical location of the files within your existing directory tree. As the file searching function has been suitably streamlined within Vista, these kind of operations are done exceedingly quickly.

Security

Now, security has been a... hot potato, let's say, for Microsoft after all these years. This time however they're determined not to drop it and have donned the oven gloves in Vista. Unlike (in fact, almost completely opposite to) the Unix world, Windows has often required the user to have very powerful, if not full Administrative rights to the local machine to install, configure and run many applications or change settings.

With Vista, your user account is far more secured than previously but does not suffer from the (often frustrating) restrictions of a 'limited account'. Vista has adopted the idea that you enter an administrative password to do potentially system damaging things from within any user account. Obviously if trojans or viruses try to worm (pun intended) their way into the system, they're going to find far more barriers in their way.

With other methods of protection such as the ability to load file/registry changes into virtual space on the machine (so the changes are only applied for that user) and restrictions on what installed services can actually do, this looks to be the toughest Windows yet. Whilst we've all heard that one before, there's certainly some interesting concepts in here taken from more 'popular' players in the security market.

Internet Explorer 7

When we're looking at web browsers, there's not much to say. IE6 has clearly been dwarfed in terms of functionality by Firefox and Opera, which have both adopted a few features which have become part of the standard set of tools adopted by many converts.

IE7 follows the trend with Tabbed Browsing, something I'm sure you're all familiar with - but here, its implementation is little different to its older cousins. The initial difference I have found is that it automatically offers you a new tab ready each time you click over to an existing one, which does make opening multiple pages a tiny bit quicker.

It's clearly too soon to make a judgement on whether IE7 is the new secret weapon in the Browser Wars, however with promised new security features in the works which should keep out trojans, browser hijacks and general user idiocy it will certainly give the current favourites a run for their money.

Screenshots