eWEEK Labs Walk-Through: Vista Build 5381

The limited accounts in Windows XP are called standard accounts in Vista.

Vistas jump-off screen is fairly helpful, and thats a good thing.

A link on the welcome page leads to this slightly more detailed welcome page.

Vistas hardware requirements have been the subject of quite a bit of discussion. Vistas built-in performance rating tool should fuel further discussion.

While following up on leads for speeding up our test machine, our standard-rights user encountered a User Account Control dialog; there, we entered the credentials of a user with admin rights.

The performance rating page on our test system cited startup programs that were possibly slowing down the system.

Using Windows Defender, we checked out which programs on our test machine were set to run at startup. Interestingly, the programs listed as possible slowdown offenders werent listed.

Windows Defender also showed us the network-connected programs on our test machine.

Windows Defender listing of programs currently running.

The Vista rating tool cited particular drivers as possible performance problems, as well.

Links to common operations, such as changing display resolution, are organized a bit differently in Vista.

Vistas diagnostic tools are both useful and a bit flashy, but our standard-rights user wasnt allowed to view them.

As we noted in previous builds of Vista, MMC programs dont tend to get along very well with User Account Control.

Why does IE always default to custom security level?

So far, we havent seen a must-have gadget for Vistas Sidebar feature, but this processor meter could win our hearts.

One of our favorite IE 7 features is its knack for rendering RSS feed pages and offering us the option of subscribing; Firefox just shows the XML source.

Without admin credentials, our standard user couldnt install arbitrary applications and browser plug-ins–which is the idea.