Unfortunately, Vista new Solitaire code seems to have broken one way that neerdowells have cheated at the game for years. This scandalous behavior was first revealed in Windows 3 s 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 11in Windows Vista

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. 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. 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. 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 in Windows Vista

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,  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.

Movie Maker and DVD Maker in Windows Vista

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 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. 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.

Windows Photo Gallery - Windows Vista

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. 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. 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 Windows Vista

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. 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 s we can reveal are covered in the following articles. Join us as we explore the inner workings of Vista.