Internet Explorer 7.0 Catches Up IE 7 won’t win any awards for innovation, having not quite caught up with features its free competitor, the Mozilla Firefox browser, came out with two years ago. But the improved security of IE 7, plus the addition of long-requested features such as tabbed browser windows, make Microsoft’s new browser a solid component of the OS rather than the backward stepchild that IE 6 became. (Users of Windows XP can and should download and install IE 7, if an upgrade to Vista isn’t immediately possible.) Besides the tabbed windows, IE 7 has (thankfully) copied several other features from Firefox, Opera, and other non-Microsoft browsers. These include the ability to add Internet search engines of your choice to IE’s search bar and a default Shink to Fit setting so Web pages will fit your printer’s paper size. However, IE 7 has also gained a few new features that other browsers may themselves need to catch up with. Pressing Ctrl+Q or clicking the Quick Tabs tab on the IE 7 toolbar tiles all of your open tabs into a convenient thumbnail view (  9).

When you have a lot of tabs open, Quick Tabs can save you a substantial amount of time that you might otherwise spend clicking at random to get back to a particular site. Page Zoom is another handy feature. When you’re viewing a web page that’s just too small or too large, hold down the Ctrl key and press + to make the page 10 percent larger, – to make it 10 percent smaller, or 0 (zero) to return the page to its original size. These special keystroke sequences work exactly the same way as they do in Firefox, except that IE 7 scales both images and text. (Firefox 1.5 scaled just text.) The keystrokes work whether you use the symbol keys on the main keyboard or the numeric keypad. There’s also a small Page Zoom button on the extreme right of IE 7’s status bar. You can click it once to scale a Web page to 125 percent, click it again for 150 percent, and click it a third time to go back to 100 percent.

Fit the Full URL on Printouts Sometimes, you want to print out some Web page you’ve found, so you can recommend the site to a friend later. But if the Web address (URL) is a long one, it’s likely to be truncated in the footer of the printed page. That’s because IE, by default, uses a large font and cuts off any of the URL that doesn’t fit on the same line as today’s date. You can make URLs print in full almost every time by clicking Tools -> Internet Options. On the General tab, click the Fonts button and then select a Web page font that’s more compact than Times New Roman, such as Vista’s Cordia New. (This font, which is similar to Arial, also becomes the default font for Web pages that don’t specify a font.) If that doesn’t print the entire Web address, give URLs a separate line. To do so, pull down the Printer toolbar and select Page Setup. Enter in the Header field to devote the full header to the URL (aligned to the right). Then enter in the Footer field to print the date on the left and the page number on the right at the bottom of each page.

A Web page’s title takes up space that’s best devoted to printing the full URL, in our view.) IE Protected Mode and Phishing Filter Internet Explorer 7.0, when running under Windows Vista (not XP or earlier operating systems), operates by default in Protected Mode. This means that dishonest web sites that a user happens to visit cannot trick IE 7 into changing Windows system files or other crucial configuration details. A separate feature, but one that can work in concert with Protected Mode to keep users out of trouble, is Microsoft’s new Phishing Filter. IE 7 regularly downloads from a Microsoft server a list of web addresses that appear to be fraudulent. These sites may get on the list because they’re collecting passwords or credit card numbers from gullible consumers, they’re downloading spyware to people’s computers, or for other reasons. In any case, IE 7 doesn’t display known phishing sites, instead warning the user about the identified problems with the site.

The features just described are only two of the several Microsoft has added to Internet Explorer. Others include protection against cross-site scripting attacks (in which one site takes over a window used by another site), ActiveX suspension (which disables the most dangerous ActiveX controls), and Windows Defender, which guards against spyware. It’s too early to say whether the new IE security features will add up to an adequate level of safety for Windows users, or whether third-party security products must still be added to Windows. It’s likely that Microsoft’s own programs will play second fiddle to third-party developers, who concentrate specifically on antiphishing and antispyware research. Read the comparative reviews of security add-ons in respected computer magazines to learn which products provide the best security - and then invest a few bucks in any independent downloads that are top rated.

Support for RSS News Feeds IE 7.0 includes an easy way to subscribe to news feeds, regularly updated information that sites publish in the format known as Really Simple Syndication (RSS). When a surfer visits a site that publishes one or more news feeds, a square broadcast icon on IE 7’s toolbar changes from grey to orange. Clicking the icon takes you to a page that explains the content of a feed and provides a clickable link that subscribes you ( 10). This is a big improvement over previous news feed buttons in other browsers, which formerly displayed raw XML code when clicked. After you’ve subscribed to a news feed, you can read it using IE 7’s Favorites pane. This subwindow is accessed by clicking the yellow star in IE’s toolbar and selecting Feeds. The latest news items can be sorted by date or title or filtered by categories provided by the author of the feed (  11). IE’s native feed handling isn’t as capable as a dedicated reader’s, such as NewsGator, or an online news aggregator’s, such as Bloglines.com. But the addition of RSS support in IE is certain to make this form of communications popular with a much larger chunk of Internet users than had discovered news feeds prior to Vista.

There’s No Support in IE 7 for Secure RSS Unfortunately, IE 7.0 shipped without built-in handling for secure news feeds. These are feeds that users can access only by providing a username and password. (For additional security, such feeds may also be encrypted before being sent across the Internet.) This lack of support means companies can’t use RSS to deliver information privately to authorized employees who use IE. Also, publishers can’t use RSS to distribute premium content to paying subscribers who use IE. Dedicated news aggregators, such as NewsGator, do allow users to enter a username and password to subscribe to secure RSS feeds. You only need to do this once; the aggregator securely stores your password and periodically uses it to access and download the info you requested.

Sources within the IE development team tell us that support for secure RSS was left out of IE 7.0 to keep the project on schedule, but that it’s a high priority for release as an upgrade. Watch for a download that will add this feature to IE.

Encrypt Entire Drives with BitLocker Screaming headlines in recent years have made the public aware of stolen laptops and desktop computers that contained the personal records of thousands of millions of individuals. These thefts might not have exposed anyone’s personal data if the hard drives in the stolen computers had been encrypted and protected by strong passwords. Various third-party solutions have long been available to encrypt sensitive data folders and entire hard drives. With Vista, Microsoft now enters this market with BitLocker Drive Encryption. BitLocker has some advantages over competing encryption products because, integrated as it is into Windows, it can check the integrity of a computer system before the Windows user interface is ever loaded. BitLocker can tell when a hard drive has been moved to a different computer - as would be the case if a drive had been stolen - and can defend against brute-force attacks.

BitLocker also integrates with Microsoft’s Active Directory domain service scheme. The remote storage of digital keys that can unlock or restore data if a user forgets a password is a difficult and labor-intensive chore for IT administratrors. BitLocker handles this by using Active Directory to escrow the keys securely, while still being able to help an authorized (but forgetful) user access crucial data that’s stored in a password-protected drive. BitLocker is available only in Vista Ultimate Edition, which can be purchased separately or upgraded to from the Home and Business Editions, and Vista Enterprise Edition, which can be purchased separately or upgraded to from the Business Edition.

Use Easy Transfer to a New PC Moving all of your old files and templates from one PC to another - not to mention duplicating all of the settings and preferences that you spent hours perfecting in your old copy of Windows - has been a royal pain for years. Microsoft provides a better solution to this problem with its Easy Transfer utility in Vista. The program accepts files and preferences from Windows 2000 and Windows XP machines, as well as machines running Vista. You can select just data files to transfer to the new PC or transfer entire clumps of e-mail messages and contacts, Internet settings, and complete user accounts as well ( 12). No information is deleted from the old PC, so you have plenty of time to confirm that the data has been transferred correctly before erasing anything on your obsolete system.

The transfer requires that you install an Easy Transfer program from Vista to the older computer. Also, both the new system and the old one must be capable of exchanging data through one of the following methods:

1. A local area network
2. A USB Flash drive or external hard drive
3. Recordable CDs or DVDs

Microsoft is also promoting the use of a USB Easy Transfer Cable. This procedure, like the other methods just listed, also involves installing to the old computer the Easy Transfer program, which can be found on a CD that’s included with the cable. You then plug the provided cable into both machines and start the transfer from the new machine ( 13).

Don’t Pay Big Bucks for a Cable As far as we can tell, an Easy Transfer Cable is just a USB printer cable with a computerstyle connector on both ends and firmware in the middle that helps Vista recognize the cable as a Plug-and-Play device. We’ve seen such cables advertised for $45 USD. Connecting the Ethernet ports of both machines - using a crossover patch cable (about $6 at Radio Shack) to create a simple 2-PC local area network - seems like a cheaper and faster alternative. You may still need the Easy Transfer program, but that should be a simple download.

Parental Controls Vista adds a new Control Panel applet to the mix: Parental Controls. Assuming that you’re the first person to password-protect this feature, you can ostensibly dictate the times that other users can log onto the PC, the ratings of the games they may play, the names of any programs they are prohibited from running, and the nature of the web sites they can surf to (  14). We say ostensibly, because this is exactly the kind of feature that every teenager in the world will be looking for a way to hack around. For one thing, gaining access to the master password gives any user the ability to change the restrictions at will. When the master password is set, the responsible adult is asked by Microsoft to also set a password hint. Most adults, fearing they might forget the password, will set a reminder such as my date of birth. This hint, as implemented by Microsoft, is visible to anyone using the system. Thanks, Dad, now I can adjust the parental controls any way I like. The Parental Controls system might be useful if you’d like to kick your kids off your home PC at, say, 9:00 p.m. so you can surf the Web without competition. We’re not sure it’s foolproof even for that, however.

Don’t Assume Too Much If you think Parental Controls on your home PC are going to effectively bar your kids from seeing whatever they want on the Internet, you’re fooling yourself. The average teenager has access to dozens of PCs that you don’t control - even cell phones can download web content today. You’re better off training your kids what not to install from the Web, like free offers that actually contain spyware. That’s a much bigger threat to your household’s security than uncensored Internet access itself poses.

New Games: Mahjong and Chess No major version of Windows is complete without the inclusion of a new game. Vista takes this important principle to a new level. Not only are there entirely new games - including Mahjong Titans and Chess Titans, which represent respectable challenges for serious players of either game - but all of the old Windows games have been updated with photorealistic and 3D imagery. That old standby, Solitaire, for example, is much improved. Not only are the cards more crisp and vivid than ever before, when you move a card from one pile to another, the exposed card turns itself over in a smooth animated effect. Right-clicking an eligible card moves it to the home position. And, if you have many eligible cards (such as when you’ve

succeeded in placing all the cards in columns), right-clicking the green felt background of the game moves all the cards home. All of the new Vista games benefit from enlarging their windows to full-screen. Watch closely when you do this, and you can actually see the objects in a game become richer and more realistic when they have more pixels to render themselves.

Thinking of Cheating at Solitaire? Unfortunately, Vista’s new Solitaire code seems to have broken one way that ne’erdo- wells have cheated at the game for years. This scandalous behavior was first revealed in Windows 3 Secrets all the way back in 1991. As that article explained it, you could click Game -> Undo when playing a Draw Three game, and the last three cards you turned over from the deck would go back on the pile. If you then held down the Shift key while clicking the deck, only one card at a time would turn over, allowing you to pick up a crucial card that wasn’t originally on top of the stack. Whether by omission or design, that trick no longer works, and you’ll just have to win at Solitaire the good old-fashioned way. (You can still, however, undo the turnover of your last three cards if you suddenly see a move on the board that might benefit.) Want to get better 3-D rendering? If you think the special effects in Vista’s new games are spectacular, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. If your hardware supports it, you can get even better 3-D effects by manipulating a little-used control. In Chess Titans, for example, pull down the Game menu and select the Options dialog box. If the pointer called Graphics Slider isn’t all the way to the right end of the range, push it there with your mouse. When you click OK, you’ll immediately see the playing pieces become sharper and smoother. We can’t guarantee that this extra rendering effort will make your computer opponent a little stupider, but it’s worth a shot.

Windows Media Player 11 Windows Media Player 11 (WMP 11), a key part of Microsoft’s campaign to make Windows the centerpiece of users’ digital entertainment collections, is notably changed in Vista from earlier Media Player versions. The so-called Media Library, for example, now provides additional views of digital files, including genre, year of release, and ratings (  16). Ripping CDs to digital files has been enhanced in WMP 11. Two new audio formats appear for the first time: Windows Media Audio Pro and lossless WAV (  17). The Pro format, strangely enough, digitizes sound at only 64 kilobits per second (64 Kbps), about half the bit rate of the older Windows Media Audio format. Lossless WAV, by contrast, is so high quality - with a bit rate in the high hundreds of Kbps - that ripping a single CD to disk produces files that total approximately 600 MB. Hard drives are cheap these days, so whether you really want or need the extra tonal range that comes from lossless ripping may depend on whether you’ve already filled up most of your disk space. If you happen to have more than one CD drive installed on your PC, WMP 11 will rip files from all of them at once. That won’t make feeding your discs into the CD trays any more fun, but it will get it over with faster. Version 11 provides a variety of ways to organize, play, and view your music and video collection. In case you decide to reverse the process, and burn your digital files to CDs, WMP 11 has added new forms of support here, too. A disk-spanning feature calculates the number of CDs needed - if your collection exceeds the capacity of a single CD - and automatically burns your playlist over multiple discs.

URGE, Brought to You by MTV Microsoft may never be able to match the experience that millions of iPod buyers have had downloading music from Apple’s iTunes Store. But you can’t blame the Redmond company for trying. URGE, shown in Article 18, is a new music service featured in WMP 11 that has its roots in the American video cable channels MTV, VH1, and CMT. The parent corporation, MTV Networks, imbues URGE with a music library that’s said to be two million songs strong (which should be enough to keep you entertained for at least a few weeks). The service, available only in the United States at this writing, provides unlimited listening for a monthly subscription fee, or you can buy individual tracks, similar to iTunes. Besides the usual 99-cent music downloads, URGE offers over 6,000 music videos, more than 500 playlists by genre, and some 130 commercial-free radio stations in a wide variety of styles. If you can’t find what you want on URGE, WMP 11 still boasts partnerships with several other online audio stores. These include the selections of Audible.com, Napster, XM Satellite Radio, Microsoft’s own MSN Music, and so on (  19).

Movie Maker and DVD Maker Audio files don’t get all the action in Vista. Windows Movie Maker makes anyone with a camcorder downright dangerous. In case you like to subject your friends and family to your video masterpieces, Movie Maker enables you to edit your raw video down into a more bearable length - say, 30 seconds? If you insist on your film noir running longer, however, you’ll find a variety of special effects and transitions that can make almost any of your original content truly ghastly (  20). Although they’re two separate applications, Vista’s DVD Maker complements Movie Maker. After you’ve edited your video to your liking, burn it to one or more DVDs for posterity. DVD Maker publishes your work in MPEG-2 format, which means it’s theoretically possible to burn DVDs straight from your camcorder. That assumes, of course, that your material wouldn’t first benefit from a little, ahem, editing (  21).

Windows Photo Gallery Despite all the glamour of audio and video media, Microsoft hasn’t forgotten plain old still photographs. Windows Photo Gallery is a built-in tool you can use to organize, tag, enhance, and print photos from cameras, cell phones, and other digital devices (  22). A new thumbnail slider - a user-interface widget that’s revealed by clicking the maginfying glass near the bottom of the window - enables you to quickly zoom your photo collection up and down to fit as few or as many images onto the screen as you may desire. Photo Gallery includes several basic sliders that enable you to fix (or ruin) your original photos in your own particular ways. For example, you can manually adjust the brightness, contrast, and color of a photo. A fix red-eye control is included for those pics that suffer from a wee bit too much flash (  23). When you’ve got your photos the way you want them, Photo Gallery can turn your selected images into slide shows, screen savers, e-mail attachments (with five levels of compression), and prints, or burn them onto CDs or DVDs. For those of you who like to edit your videos in Movie Maker (discussed previously), you can import videos into Photo Gallery. It displays each video as a thumbnail so you can mix and match video material with your stills. Undo your fixes, no matter how many steps you took. In case your heavy-handed tweaks don’t look so good, Photo Gallery retains the state your image started in. Simply click the Revert to Original icon to switch back to the picture the way it was before your “improvements.”

Windows Media Center In those Vista versions that support it, Windows Media Center turns a PC into a DVD player and digital video recorder all in one. (Media Player is included in Vista Home Premium and Ultimate editions.) In Vista, Media Center has been developed to support widescreen and high-definition monitors. It works fine on older 4:3 displays but takes full advantage of greater capabilities when present in the hardware found on a system (  24). PCs that include a TV tuner enable users to watch, record, and pause live programming. With multiple tuners, it’s possible to watch a program on one channel while recording another program on a different channel. Besides TV and motion pictures, Media Center also supports audio files and still photography. You can direct slide shows and music playlists as well as watch live or recorded video programming.

There’s Much More We’ve barely scratched the surface of the changes you’ll find in Vista, compared with the capabilities of Windows XP. Numerous improvements, large and small, show themselves in features as home-oriented as DVD burning and as business-oriented as Internet Protocol version 6; as silly as Microsoft’s XPS portable document format (which no computer other than Windows Vista and XP can read) and as serious as screen magnification for users with impaired vision. Most of the new and improved applications are relatively easy to understand and are adequately described in their Help systems. Those that have secrets we can reveal are covered in the following articles. Join us as we explore the inner workings of Vista.