Little over two weeks ago Microsoft released their newest operating system since Windows XP.

At the annual CES (Consumer Electronics Show) Bill Gates showed the world the finer points of Vista, and how it functioned. It includes a sleek new interface, an Office 2007 package, capabilities promised to increase your desktop’s speed and comes with IE7.

And as usual, PC users around the world crossed their arms and asked the question: “That’s nice. But where are the bugs, and what’s really so great about Vista?”

To start off, some of Vista’s main attributes are its security functions, networking functions, administration privileges, Wi-Fi support. It has its own schedule for defragmentation, preloads programs you use all the time with an embedded Superfetch, and the security functions, Firewalls and scans, are all done in the background with no interuption to you. New graphics cards and programs, DirectX 10 in particular, will enable games compatable with Vista to simulate never-before-seen realism, while audio capabilities are increased to match it in Windows Media Player 11

The Start Menu had a revamp as well, it looks more user-friendly, and its search functions will give you the option of finding any file, stored in any drive on your computer. New 3D acceleration makes your desktop look futuristic and worthwhile, a new ‘clear glass’ interface being part of the Vista design. Checking how much space is in each drive has never been simpler with content bars underneath each drive icon.

And remember those old, slightly sketchy tablets for handwritten functions in processers and GUIs? Vista’s NewTablet is the latest tablet-tech from Microsoft, with its own capability to recognise different handwriting styles - personalised hand writing styles.

Although an improvement, these features are not quite the revolution Microsoft intended, but they are an improvement, and useful especially for businesses using the home computer. One of the major aspects of the darker side of Vista is quite simply, processing speed! Unless you have plenty of RAM, (which you will if you’re buying a new machine) installation will be painful, sleep mode will take a while to reconnect to a wireless network, and the system may go much slower than originally intended.

There are other minute darker (and lighter) aspects to Vista, but you’ll have to discover them yourself as part of the Vista Experience. I wouldn’t recommend installation on a machine with anything less than 300 MB of RAM and 1.5 GHz of processing speed, however if you’re buying a new machine - and Windows XP will still be available for purchase on new models for a year or so - ask for Vista, or failing that, at least a Mac OS X.

[…] ahead of its time in digital graphics, functionality and design, and that was back in 2005; before Vista, and before Microsoft had a chance to unviel Home Server, and a range of other […]

computer games compatable with windows vista…

yes indeed……