Vista, for Better and Worse

By Rob Pegoraro
Sunday, January 28, 2007

Windows Vista lands in stores Tuesday, more than five years after its predecessor Windows XP debuted. With that much time for Microsoft to rewrite its operating system, you might expect it to be a sharp break from the Windows we've known.

It isn't. For all the ways that Vista looks and works differently from XP, it remains recognizably Windows underneath.

And that's not always good. In a week that I've been using Vista full-time on two laptops and one desktop, I've seen many things that I hated in XP: error messages that don't offer any advice on how to correct them, programs that inexplicably fail, annoying stalls and one "blue screen of death" crash.

(At least I didn't have to stare at the same old stupid hourglass icon while the computer chewed its cud -- Vista bores you with a spinning blue circle instead.)

Vista is not a cheap or easy update. The version most home users will want, Home Premium, sells for $159 if you upgrade from an older copy of Windows. But Vista needs far more power under the hood than XP: 15 gigabytes of free disk space and a gigabyte of memory.

Many PCs meeting those requirements still can't run Home Premium, since their graphics cards are too slow to draw its slick "Windows Aero" interface.

Once installed -- after online "product activation" to tie your copy to your computer -- Vista may then require you to upgrade some of your old programs. Most software that I tried worked fine in Vista (including iTunes, Firefox, Quicken and Skype), but some needed updates.

Nobody should think of buying Vista without first running Microsoft's free Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor ( http://microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready) to see if his hardware and software measures up.

The obvious reward for putting up with all that is Vista's visuals. Like the Aqua interface of Apple's Mac OS X, Vista's Aero front-end teems with transparent effects that lend a sense of depth-- such as when you can see through the edges of windows and the Start Menu to spot what's behind them.

Aero further simplifies things by replacing generic icons with live previews of windows. For example, when you shuffle through active programs (by clicking on the taskbar, hitting the Alt and Tab keys or using the Windows-icon and Tab keys to bring up a nifty "Flip 3D" view), you get a thumbnail view of each window, not the usual abstract symbols.

In an equally helpful trick, folder icons include tiny previews of their contents.

Vista (again, like Mac OS X) incorporates a search form at the top of every window -- a massive upgrade from XP's search tools, but not from what you get for free in Google Desktop. The same goes for Vista's Sidebar, which, like Google Desktop's Sidebar, offers quick access to things like weather forecasts and your calendar.

Vista's rewritten Start Menu, however, does too little to simplify the access to your installed programs. Instead of traversing a long list of sub-menus that branch off the Start Menu, you have to scroll down a long list of folders that runs down the left half of the Start Menu.

All versions of Vista -- even the Aero-less $100 Basic edition -- feature a huge change in security. Where older versions of Windows trusted every user and every program not to mess with the system, Vista is far more suspicious. If you take an action that might affect the guts of Windows, Vista asks you to confirm that, in an exceptionally direct manner: It dims all of the screen except for an alert with the bureaucratic-sounding title of "User Account Control."

But these confirmations popped up even for such seemingly innocuous actions as syncing a Zune music player for the first time. I couldn't install a single new program, no matter how minor, without jumping through this hoop.

The constant barrage of nags -- something the too-slim manual and Vista's online help don't warn you about -- is a disaster in the making. They don't teach which programs are safe; you get the same vague warning whether you're installing a video game or a virus. Eventually, many users will ignore these apparently meaningless warnings and click the "Continue" button out of habit.

Software that plays by Vista's rules should not need this special permission as often. But Microsoft says you'll always need to authorize a new program's installation because the basic design of Windows doesn't separate add-on software from core system components.

After the flash of Aero Glass and the frustration of these confirmations, Vista offers a few notably useful extras to people who can pick them out of the two dozen or so Microsoft freebies (all named Windows something-or-other) in the Start Menu's sub-folders. Most useful among them: Windows Easy Transfer, which -- after some fiddling with its settings -- can copy over files and settings from an old computer.

Vista also includes Windows Mail, a years-overdue update to Microsoft's fossilized Outlook Express that blocks spam and phishing e-mails; a program to backup your data automatically; a digital photo album; calendar and address-book software and the ability to burn DVDs as well as CDs.

Vista users with children of a certain age can employ new parental-control software to time kids' computer use, block or allow specific programs and Web sites and restrict access to certain games.

For most people buying a new PC after Monday, getting a Windows PC will mean getting a Vista PC; there's no choice to be made. And there need be nothing wrong in that case -- on a computer with enough memory and processing power, Vista clearly exceeds XP.

But for most people with older machines, Vista demands too much to justify its benefits. If you fall into that category, you're better off upgrading XP by adding third-party programs -- for instance, Google Desktop, the Firefox Web browser, Thunderbird mail program and the Picasa photo album -- to paper over XP's deficiencies. Wait for Microsoft to fix the inevitable bugs in Vista and for Windows developers to rewrite their software to work better in Vista.

Then, if you're both patient and lucky, by the time you're ready for a new computer, Vista will be ready for you.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro atrobp@washpost.com.