eWEEK Labs Walk-Through: Microsoft Vista

Central to Vistas new facility for finding things is the systems overhauled indexing engine, which improves upon the indexing service of elder Windows versions by offering much greater speed, the capability to index more sorts of data and pervasi

We found that, in Vista, the fastest way to find what we were seeking was to open the Start Menu and type into the search box at the lower left corner. As we typed, Vista returned results right in the Start Menu pane. From there we could select one

We could also save our searches as virtual folders, which would update themselves as new results appeared in the index. For instance, Vista ships with a few premade search folders, such as Recently Changed, which returns recently mod

For parsing different file types, Vistas indexing service depends on the same IFilters used by Microsofts other indexing engines, such as the one for its SharePoint Server and that for its Windows Desktop Search add-on for Windows XP.

Another performance-related concern attached to the indexing service is its potential effect on battery life; reading from changed files on disk and writing to the index mean more activity and shorter battery life. From Vistas Power Options config

Windows Vista sports a heavily overhauled Explorer file manager that offers up several ways to view and organize files based on their metadata. We could assign bits of metadata, such as tags, stars or author names, through a new pane at the bottom

We could opt to view these bits of metadata in columns alongside traditional attribute columns such as file type or date modified, and we could also view our files split into metadata-based groups or stacks.

Until applications begin doing a better job creating metadata automatically for the files they create, users will have to spend time adding this information themselves. For certain Vista applications, the system offers a new file open and save dialog

We found that Explorers interface has changed enough to make it confusing to use, at least initially. The familiar Explorer menu bar—File, Edit, View, Tools, Help—is hidden by default in the new Explorer, and we found ourselves fumbling ar

Explorer now features a new sort of address bar that makes it easier to navigate the nest of folders in which you find yourself, but only once youve gotten used to it. Expect to spend a bit of time adjusting to the new Explorer.

In Vista, the number of control panel items has continued to grow larger, but Microsoft has paired its configuration tool categorization efforts with integrated search, which makes finding the tool you know exists a lot faster than scanning through a

Vistas control panel keeps track of recent configuration tasks youve undertaken and keeps a list of the last three in the lower left corner of the control panel.

Helpful, as well, is the control panels knack for offering up links to configuration tools related to the one youre using. For instance, in the screen on which we could select a power management plan, a left-side panel listed links for requiring

There are a few places where the interface changes have, to our displeasure, created extra steps to perform some common operations. For instance, in XP we are accustomed to checking the IP address and other network adapter status information and to

The state of the command line has improved considerably in Vista. Vistas directory naming conventions, for instance, are much improved from a command-line users perspective—gone is Documents and Settings and the My**QTE*

Vista includes a new volume mixer tool that allowed us to control the volume of Windows system sounds and those of individual open applications independently, which comes in handy as the number of sound-producing applications on ones system conti

Vista now includes a new control dialog, called the Mobility Center, which collects configuration options related to tablet or notebook PC use—such as battery, Wi-Fi radio and file synchronization controls—into a single location for ease

With a microphone attached to our machine, we could say Show numbers, and the application in the foreground would appear with numbers superimposed on all of the applications buttons and fields. We could then press a button or enter a

While dictating to our Vista test machine, we could correct words and phrases that Vista had recognized incorrectly by choosing from a list of similar words or phrases that we might have meant.

Vista inherits from Windows Server 2003 a nifty feature known as Previous Versions—we could right-click on a file or folder, choose the Previous Versions tab, and check out a list of earlier versions of that file or folder, each coinciding with

Another new feature on the Vista usability front is the systems Sidebar, which hosts mini-applications much like those that reside in Mac OS Xs Dashboard. There is probably opportunity here for some interesting, in-house-developed applets, but we

After we launched Vistas overhauled Event Viewer, the tool scanned our systems logs and presented us with a summary of events that were grouped into Errors, Warnings, Informational Items, Audit Successes and Audit Failures, with counts of each ev

We could create custom views based both on individual system logs and on particular event sources from within different system logs. For instance, it took less than a minute for us to point and click our way through the creation of a custom view pr

Another Vista diagnostic addition that caught our eye is the systems new Reliability and Performance Monitor, which offers a summary view of the current load on a machines CPU, memory, disk and networking systems, as well as the option of drillin

We could also create customized performance charts drawing on a large number of network, disk, CPU and memory counter types reflecting either current load information or load data from saved logs. And we could include information both from our loca