We waited more than five years for Vista. As you may recall, Windows XP was released with much fanfare in October 2001. But instead of the next Windows version shipping in just a couple of years, as originally expected, Microsoft lost its way in the development process. Vista didn’t make it to consumers until early 2007. Was it worth the wait? The short answer is, “Yes.” We believe Vista is a major advance on Microsoft’s previous operating systems. If you’re buying a new PC today, we don’t hesitate to recommend that you get Vista rather than requesting XP or another, older operating system. (If you’re upgrading an older PC to Vista, by contrast, be sure to first read our tips in Article 3.) In 2001, Microsoft executives widely claimed that XP was “the most secure operating system we have ever delivered.” In fact, XP and its new Web browser, Internet Explorer 6.0, were full of maddening security holes that previous operating systems didn’t suffer from. ActiveX exploits, drive-by downloads, and many other kinds of weaknesses were quickly exploited by black-hat hackers. Microsoft has been issuing patches for XP and IE 6.0 ever since. The Vista OS and the new IE 7.0 browser are welcome steps toward changing that. Will they never need patching? We’d hardly say that. But Microsoft has added “hardening” features to Vista that should make remote exploits more difficult for hackers to carry out. Besides improved security, XP users who switch to Vista will also find enhancements in desktop searching, Windows Sidebar access to applets called gadgets, PC-to-PC content transfers, and even new games - mahjong and (finally!) chess. Unlike the first articles of most articles - which are filled with boilerplate thank-yous and personal musings - we really do want you to read this article. Instead of filling our first few pages with acknowledgements of names you’ve never heard of, we’ve moved the credits for our valued sources into the articles they helped us with. In these pages, we aim to give you a crash course on Windows Vista. In other words, read on and you can learn the most important new features of Vista in the time it takes to sip a nice, hot cuppa Joe.

It’s impossible to cover all the new features of Vista in a single article. Many features warrant their own articles because there’s a lot to say about them or we found secret information that isn’t in the Help text you get with Vista. Other new Vista features, although important, may be so straightforward that they don’t have any particular secrets. If not, we haven’t devoted any further space to them in this article. But even features that don’t have hidden features may be important for you to know about when you turn Vista on for the first time. Exposing those features to you is the purpose of the following overview.

The New Start Menu In Vista, the Start button is no longer called Start, and the Start menu looks completely different from the menu you may be used to in Windows XP. However, it’s still there at the bottom of the screen, and you may find it a bit better organized. The old Start button has been replaced by a lighted sphere that displays the Windows flag logo. Instead of submenus that fly out to the right of the main menu, Vista displays your most recently used programs in a primary window. If you don’t like the new look, you can get the old Start menu back by reverting to the familiar XP submenu system. Right-click the Start Button, click Properties, select Classic Start Menu, and then click OK. If you click All Programs, the Start menu switches to a display of collapsing folders. You can expand each folder to show you all available programs, but the Start menu keeps the list within the primary window.

What Happened to the Run Menu? One thing you won’t find on the default Start menu is the Run option, which generations of Windows users have employed to start programs that may not appear on any menu. The omission isn’t a problem - if you know the secret. Simply type the name of the program you want to run (such as notepad) into the Start Search bar just above the Start button and then press Enter.

Secret Windows Aero You’ll see a slick new look to objects and applications in Vista - if you have a version of the operating system that supports it and hardware that’s modern enough to render it. The new Aero interface gives translucency to the chrome that surrounds most application windows. This enables you to see what lies beneath a window, whether the foreground app is stationary or you’re dragging it to a new location. If the translucency of window chrome irritates you, you can switch it off. Click Start -> Control Panel -> Customize the Color Scheme and then turn off

Enable Transparency. Perhaps more important than translucency is the new live thumbnail effect that Aero adds to the taskbar at the bottom of the screen. Hover your mouse over a button that represents a minimized application, and you’ll see a miniature picture of what’s in the app at that moment. This can be helpful in deciding which of several minimized applications to switch to. You can see the Aero interface (formerly code-named Aero Glass) if you have Vista Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, or Ultimate Edition, and your video board supports the advanced features of Microsoft’s new Windows Driver Display Model.

Can Translucency Help Productivity? Translucency may seem like an unimportant feature, but a source within Microsoft’s Usability Labs tells us that the bold colors of the window frames in Windows XP were found to distract the eye from whatever material was in the main application window. Lightening up the window colors - by making them partially translucent - was found to improve how quickly a person could work with the content within applications.

Flip 3D Many Windows users know about Alt+Tab. You can hold down the Alt key and press Tab repeatedly to switch to any application that’s currently open. The Aero user interface adds a powerful enhancement to task switching. Alt+Tab still works - even better, in fact, because now thumbnails of each application are displayed, not just titles. But you’ll probably abandon Alt+Tab in favor of Windows+Tab, called Flip3D, which shows you a revolving set of windows at an angle so you can see exactly what you’re switching to.

One of the windows that’s shown in the Flip 3D view is always your Windows Desktop. That makes it easy to minimize all of your applications. Simply hold down the Windows key (either the left one or the right one), and then press Tab until the miniature window that looks like your Desktop is uppermost. You can reverse the order that Flip 3D cycles through your open windows by holding down the Shift key in addition to Windows+Tab. In our tests, the Desktop window has always been displayed as the bottom-most application when we pressed Windows+Tab. To minimize all applications and display your Desktop, therefore, hold down the Windows key, then press Tab, Shift+Tab, and let go of the Windows key.

Programs Explorer Replaces Add/Remove Programs Legions of Windows users have become accustomed to using the Add or Remove Programs dialog box in the Control Panel to uninstall applications that they no longer want taking up space on their hard disks. So, in its frustrating way, Microsoft has renamed this feature to make it even harder to find than it was before. To reconfigure or completely remove an application, you now use the Programs Explorer (  4). This applet also enables you to turn on or off many of the built-in features that come with Windows Vista, such as the Indexing Service. Fortunately, the Programs Explorer is still available through the Control Panel. You just need to know to look for it in the Ps instead of the As.

Put Some Gadgets in Your Windows Sidebar Apple users have long been able to take advantage of the Mac OS X Dashboard, and Windows users have been able to download Yahoo Widgets (formerly Konfabulator Widgets). Those things are still available, but now Vista has its own little tools, known as gadgets. Vista gadgets live in the new Windows Sidebar (  5) - which you can move to the left or right side of the screen by right-clicking it and selecting Properties. Or you can put Gadgets on your Desktop by dragging the little context menu that appears when you hover your mouse over a Gadget.

Using the Properties dialog box, you can configure the Windows Sidebar to start every time Windows starts or only when you want it to appear. If you configure it to require manual intervention, get it back by clicking Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> Windows Sidebar.

Instant Search and the Search Pane An interactive Instant Search bar is now a feature of every Explorer window in Vista as well as Vista’s Start menu. This may not slow the progress of third-party desktop search applications that are increasingly being promoted as Windows downloads from the major search engines. But Microsoft is, in fact, trying to build into Vista advanced search functions to render such downloads unnecessary. article 6 shows the results of .jpg entered in the search bar of the Start menu. Pressing Enter opens the more-capable Search pane. In this pane, you can refine your search or organize the results by file size and other attributes. The Instant Search bar can be a handy way to search within a particular application window. Vista’s search function becomes context-specific in many such applications. article 7 shows the Vista Control Panel in its classic view, which is somewhat cluttered with applets. article 8, by contrast, shows the result after you enter options into the Control Panel’s search bar, which selects just those applets with that word in their titles.