Rob Pegoraro
Monday, March 6, 2006; 9:30 AM

The view of Windows Vista -- Microsoft's long-delayed, oft-discussed, soon-to-be-endlessly-hyped successor to Windows XP -- is still awfully murky for something that's allegedly shipping by this fall, but some details of this operating system are getting clearer.

On Feb. 26, Microsoft announced it would sell six versions of Vista. Anews release offers broad outlines of the five that the company plans to sell in the United States. The sixth -- the stripped-down Starter Edition -- will be sold in developing markets overseas, like the Starter Edition of XP.

Of those five domestic releases, two will be marketed for home use, two for business use and one for both markets. Here's what Microsoft had to say about these versions in a Friday interview:

Home Basic: This low-end edition includes the most important features of Vista, its systemwide file-search engine and upgraded security, but leaves out the most obvious feature of it -- the new Aero interface. Instead of the visual effects you may have seen in online previews -- for instance, transparent window borders, thumbnail previews of windows that pop up out of taskbar buttons and appear in the Alt-Tab list, "flip-3D" application switching and animations when you open and close a window -- you'll see something closer to what you get in Windows XP now.

The Basic edition's bundled programs will also omit some higher-end features. For example, its Movie Maker video editor won't be able to handle high-definition footage or burn DVDs, and its backup software won't be able to schedule regular backups or save your data to networked drives.

Because many older PCs don't have the graphics cards needed to display the Aero interface in the first place, I suspect this edition may be most popular with people upgrading from XP.

Home Premium: This offers everything in Home Basic plus the Aero interface. It also combines the features of the Media Center and Tablet PC editions of Windows (although I'm not clear about the relevance of the Tablet software on a machine lacking the touchscreen it requires). Premium's bundled software will include the features left out of Basic -- you'll be able to edit HD movies and burn DVDs, and you'll also be able to schedule backups and use network drives.

Premium will also include a couple of data-sharing features. It will support PC-to-PC synchronization of files and Windows Collaboration, which lets two people view and edit the same document.

Both Home editions, however, leave out the one feature that can force a home user to spring for a copy of XP Professional: the ability to join a domain-based office network as well as the workgroup networks used in homes. They also leave out Remote Desktop Connection software and support for multiple processors (but multiple-core processors are fine).

Business: This is basically the successor to Windows XP Professional. It offers everything in Home Premium, plus the high-end networking features absent from the Home releases, and minus the Media Center software. It also throws in basic file encryption and fax- and scanner-sharing software.

It also provides a souped-up backup program that can copy the complete contents of a drive. This program's "time warp" option can revert individual files to older versions.

Enterprise: This corporate-oriented version offers everything in Business, plus stronger "BitLocker" drive encryption, Virtual PC Express (if you need to run an older version of Windows for test purposes, this program will let you host that inside your copy of Vista instead of in a separate installation) and a Unix compatibility layer that can run some command-line applications written for that competing operating system.

Again, the Media Center elements of Home Premium are absent from Enterprise.

Ultimate: This fuses Enterprise and Home Premium into a veritable smorgasbord of features.

What if you buy one edition -- or your PC ships with one preinstalled -- and you want to trade up? Other news sites have since reported that Vista will include an "Anytime Upgrade" feature that lets a customer pay for another edition, download a license key online, and install it using their existing Vista DVD -- which will already contain all the bits for every version of Vista.

Microsoft wouldn't confirm or deny that Friday, however. The company also -- still -- isn't talking about prices or system requirements.

What does seem certain is that it's going to be harder for customers to pick the right flavor of Vista. While Microsoft offers just as many editions of XP today, offshoots like Media Center and Tablet are only available to people buying a computer designed specifically for them.

Apple Plugs Some Holes

On Wednesday, Apple made some news of its own. It released a security update intended in part to fix a vulnerability that had put Mac OS X's security (briefly) in the (small-type) headlines.

This flaw concerned how Apple's Safari Web browser handles downloaded files. If Safari thinks a download is a "safe" file -- for instance, a compressed archive, a disk image or a picture -- it will automatically open it. But if an executable file was disguised as a JPEG picture in the right ways, Safari would open it anyway -- as demonstrated by a proof-of-concept file two weeks ago.

With last week's security update installed, Safari no longer opened that test file automatically, instead warning that it might contain an application. (Ignoring that warning and double-clicking the downloaded file would still run any file hidden therein.)

A note on Apple's tech-support site about the security update explains how Safari, Mail and iChat now take extra steps to verify a download's contents before pronouncing it "safe." (You can read a much more comprehensive discussion of file-identification techniques in the TidBits newsletter.)

Apple seems to have responded relatively fast in this case -- assuming that it learned of this when everybody else did -- but I still think it missed an opportunity here. Lots of innocuous downloads contain executable files, enough that a Mac user can start ignoring the warning that "this download contains an application."

What made that proof-of-concept download different was its attempt to conceal its true nature, an attempt that should be obvious to the operating system's scrutiny. That's what Safari ought to say up front -- not only that the download hides an application, but that it's lying about it.

(Apple's security update does not, by the way, seem to do anything to secure the Input Managers feature abused by the "Leap-A" virus that briefly appeared a few weeks back.)

Live Chat Today

I'll be online at 2 p.m. ET today to talk about the subject of yesterday's column, Microsoft's Windows Defender (Beta 2) anti-spyware utility. I suppose that Topic A will be something along the lines of, "Recommend a beta system utility? Are you nuts?!" Read my review to find out why I think this is actually a good idea. If you miss the chat at 2, you can read the transcript at the same link any time.

Also in Sunday's personal-tech pages, Frank Ahrens devotes Web Watch to exploring the reasons why people blog. (As one blogger told him: "Blogs may be the most complex pen-pal system ever created." Another was more cynical about blogging: "It gives people the opportunity to live out the fantasy that they are special, without actually having to put in too much effort.")

Also, Brian Krebs writes about his experience using a Web add-on for Internet Explorer and Firefox called SiteAdvisor that tries to warn you when you're visiting -- or are about to head into -- a site that's up to no good. (The article is a shortened version of a post on Krebs's washingtonpost.com blog, Security Fix.)

And in Help File, I explain how to get a security update that Microsoft's Windows Update can't seem to fetch on its own, and what the mysterious Web error code "500" means.

Questions? Comments? Send them to rob@twp.com.