The most obvious (though certainly not the most important) new feature is the Aero Glass interface. Windows users have been using a 3D interface for years. You can open as many programs as you want, and they stack up like sheets of paper on a desktop. It just wasn’t very obvious that you were using a 3D interface with items stacked up on your desktop. Aero Glass changes that by making the borders around program windows semitransparent, so you can see when there’s something behind whatever you’re looking at. Aero also adds a little drop-shadow around the window border to make it look more raised.

Flip 3D

In Windows Vista Along with the 3D appearance of Aero Glass comes a new way to take a quick look at all your open program windows. The old ways of doing things still work. For example, you can click the Show Desktop button in the Quick Launch toolbar to minimize all open program windows. You can still use the Alt+Tab shortcut key to switch between open programs.

Why don’t I have Aero Glass? -

Aero Glass isn’t available on all computers because it requires some heavy-duty graphics processing. More specifically, you need a graphics card that supports the Windows Display Driver Modem (WDDM). If your computer doesn’t have the necessary graphics hardware, you won’t get the semitransparent look, the dropshadows, or the Flip 3D option. But other than that, the rest will look and act roughly the same.

What if I don’t like Aero Glass?

If you have Aero Glass but don’t like it, there are many things you can do to change its appearance. If you have Aero Glass, you can turn it on or off by pressing Ctrl+Shift+F9. Or, if you just want to tweak colors and transparency in Aero Glass, click the Window Color and Appearance in the Personalize window. If you want an even more classic view of things, click Theme in the Personalize window. Then choose Windows Classic and click OK. (The Ctrl+Shift+F9 trick won’t work in the Classic view. You’ll have to choose the Windows Vista theme in the Theme dialog box and click OK before pressing Shift+Ctrl+F9 will work again.)

Windows Sidebar

Windows Sidebar lets you place gadgets on your desktop. Many gadgets hook into Internet services to keep you informed in real time. For example, there are gadgets for watching the weather, watching stock prices, and keeping up with headlines from your subscribed RSS feeds.  The window in the middle is the Gadget Gallery from which you can choose the gadgets you want to use. You might have different gadgets. Not to worry. There are plenty of gadgets online that you can download for free. If the sidebar gets in your way, you can put it into hiding until you need it. Or, you can turn it off completely and forget it even exists whatever works for you.

Quicker, Easier Navigation

In Windows Vista Hard disk space is cheap these days, so everyone has a ton of it. Many people have thousands of files stored in all the space, organized into many folders and subfolders. Navigating up and down through folders all the time gets old. Vista has quite a few new tricks up its sleeve to help with that. Probably the most important trick is the breadcrumb trail (also called an eyebrow menu) in the Address bar at the top of every folder. Some of you may recognize the concept from Web sites that offer similar navigation. In Vista’s eyebrow menu, you can click the name of any folder you see in the trail to go to that folder. But there’s much more to it than that. The eyebrow menu is worth its weight in gold. But it’s not the only improvement. There’s an optional navigation pane at the left side of every folder that contains quick links to common places. The links you see under Favorite Links are just examples. You can put links to any folders you like in there, and remove them just as easily. So you can constantly customize to reflect the folder you’re using most. The trusty Folders list is still available, too. You might not see it at first. To bring it up, just click the arrow next to Folders at the bottom of the navigation pane.

Sizing icons

In Windows Vista You’re not limited to discrete views of icons anymore either. In any folder, clicking the arrow next to Views in the toolbar takes you to a slider where you can choose a view and also adjust the size of icons. If your mouse has a wheel, hold down the Ctrl key while spinning the mouse wheel to adjust the icon size to your liking. Vista gives you more control over the size of desktop icons too. Right-click an empty portion of the desktop and choose View, then an icon size. Or, if your mouse has a wheel, click an empty portion of the desktop. Then hold down the Ctrl key as you spin your mouse wheel.

Sorting, grouping, and stacking

Across the top of every folder you’ll see column headings. You can sort, group, search, filter, or stack items by any column heading. Just point to any column heading and click the arrow. If you want to sort, group, filter, or stack icons by something that’s not in the column headings, no problem. Just right-click any column heading and add whatever column headings you need. So what’s a stack, you ask? Well, it’s kind of like a stack of paper and kind of like a folder. It looks like a stack of paper, but opens like a folder. When you open the stack, you see everything inside the stack.

Previous versions and undelete

Have you ever made a mess of a file while editing it? Then you close the file, and out of habit choose Yes when asked if you want to save your changes? Thereby replacing your good copy with the one you just ruined! If that happens in Vista, it may not be a problem. Right-click the file’s icon and choose Restore previous versions. The file’s Properties sheet opens to the Previous Versions tab. Then click the version you want to restore.

Search and Virtual Folders

In Windows Vista The new navigation tools really help make it quicker and easier to get around. But when it comes to getting around quickly and easily, no navigation is better than improved navigation. That’s what Search and Virtual Folders (saved searches) are all about. To understand these features, you first have to erase from your mind any thought of “looking for lost items” or the Windows XP Search Companion. That’s not what Search is about in Vista. In its simplest form, Search starts right at the bottom of the Start menu. If you know the name of a program or Control Panel applet you want to open, or some keyword associated with a document, person in your Contacts folder, or Windows Mail message, you don’t have to navigate at all to get to the item.

Search for tags (keywords)

In Windows Vista The Start menu search is handy. But there’s much more. Searching in Vista goes way beyond looking for lost files. You can search all your documents for “relevance” or “meaning” rather than just by filename. The searches are much quicker than in earlier versions because Vista’s search doesn’t slog through the whole file system every time you search. Instead it searches an internal index of filenames, file properties (tags and metadata), and document contents. If you’ve used Media Player, you’ve already had a sense of how that works. In Media Player you can click a genre like Classical, and see all your Classical songs, no matter who the artist or what folder the songs are stored in. Likewise, you could click Artist and see all songs by a given artist, regardless of what folder each song is in. Windows Vista extends that capability from Media Player to all the files on your hard disk. And any external hard disks you have, too. Searches in Vista don’t slog through the whole file system looking at tens of thousands of irrelevant files along the way. That’s too slow and tedious. Instead, Windows Vista searches through a search index. The index contains filenames, tags (keywords), and even the contents of messages and files. So when you search for something like “catwalk” you get all files that have that in the filename, tag, or even inside the document. And you get it much more quickly than you would in XP.

If you’re familiar with online search engines like Google, then the best way to think of the new search feature is as a search engine for files and folders on your own computer. Because that’s what it really is.

You can also launch a search from the Search box at the top-right corner of any folder. But you have to be aware that those searches include only the current folder and its subfolders. Nonetheless, it’s very powerful and useful because you’re not limited to searching for filenames and wildcards. You can include specific file properties in your search criteria. For example, a search for genre: rock finds all files that have Rock in the genre property. A search for to:hobart finds all Windows Mail messages addressed to Hobart. A search for subject:vista finds all files that have Vista in the Subject property. The possibilities are endless.

To take full advantage of the new search capabilities, you have to invest a little time in learning how searches really work. If you just try a few searches and give up, you’ll never truly appreciate all that the new search index has to offer.

Saved searches (virtual folders)

In Windows Vista You can save the results of any search you perform as a virtual folder. A virtual folder acts like a real folder. When you open it, you see the files it contains as icons. To see examples of virtual folders, click the Start button, click your user name on the Start menu, and open your Searches folder.

The virtual folders in your Searches folder are just examples. You’re not stuck with just using those. You can create all the virtual folders you want. The beauty of it is that you don’t have to go searching every time, because the virtual folder always reflects what’s on your hard drive right now, not what was on it when you last performed the search. Getting the most from searches, the search index, and virtual folders requires that you invest a little time in learning and understand how it all works. For best results, spend some time fine-tuning the search index to work the way you need it to.

Security is a huge issue these days. The basic problem is that the PC and early operating systems were conceived and built before there was an Internet. The idea was that a PC would be a personal computer, and people didn’t need a whole lot of security. After all, who would write a malicious program to wreak havoc on their own computer? The Internet changed all that. The Internet allowed the bad guys who could write malicious software to harm other people’s computers. Personal computers were sitting ducks for such attacks because nobody was thinking about such things when personal computers were initially conceived. All of the solutions to the security problems so far are like afterthoughts, held in place with spit and paper clips. You have to purchase and install third-party programs, learn to use them, and keep them up to date. It’s just a pain. Ask any security professional what the real solution to the security problem is, and you’ll get this answer: “Security has to be designed and built into a program from the ground up.” And that’s just what the people at Microsoft did with Vista. It’s not just Windows XP with a pretty face.

It’s an entirely new operating system built from the ground up with security in mind at every step in the process. Still, there’s no such thing as a 100 percent secure computer or network. (Any security professional will tell you that, too.) The computer is a programmable machine. And as such, it can be programmed to do good things or bad things. It all depends on who wrote the program and for what purpose. Designing security into Vista from the ground up makes it a lot tougher for the bad guys to write programs that do bad things to your PC. But where there’s a will, there’s usually a way, so you still need some security programs. Well, actually, you just need one security program. You need an antivirus program because that’s the only security that’s not built into Vista. But you don’t need a third-party firewall or anti-spyware software. The new Windows Firewall keeps out hackers and worms from the minute you start your computer. Windows Defender keeps away the spyware.

When people ask me what’s new in Vista, what I really want to say is Everything. It’s really a whole new way of using a computer. Long gone are the days when people managed a few files and folders on external disks without an Internet connection. In today’s connected world, we deal with massive amounts of digital information in many forms, and from many sources. Vista was designed and built from the ground up with that new reality in mind. This article has been a sort of view from 30,000 feet of what’s new in Vista. Here I’ve focused on the main things that most users will want to explore. But really there’s much more than can be covered in a single article. Here’s a quick recap of what’s hot: n Aero Glass brings a three-dimensional quality to the basic user interface to better reflect what’s really happening on your desktop. n Although it doesn’t look like much, the little breadcrumb trail at the top of every folder greatly reduces the amount of time and effort you’ll spend navigating through folders. n Previous versions of files let you easily recover accidentally messed up and deleted files, even if you haven’t backed them up. n Searching in Windows Vista is nothing like the old Search Companion.

And it’s not about finding lost files. Instead, it provides a new layer of organization that transcends location and filename, bringing things together based on meaning and relevance. n Security isn’t tacked onto Windows Vista as an afterthought through countless extra security programs and patches. Most of the security is hidden deep inside where you’ll never see it, keeping malicious software from doing its desired dirty work. n Parental controls finally give parents the ability to control their children’s computer and Internet use. n Windows Photo Gallery is a great tool for managing, tagging, and fixing your photos. n Windows Mail and Internet Explorer bring new ways to manage your mail, surf the Internet, and keep your computer, and yourself, more secure. n Use Windows Vista’s built-in support for CD and DVD burning to create music CDs, DVD movies, and backups of all your files. n Speech Recognition is greatly improved and works virtually everywhere. n The Backup and Restore Center makes it easy to back up and protect your important files. n Windows ReadyBoost can use modern flash memory to dispense with the short delays caused by fetching data from the paging file, providing a smoother, more fluid computing experience.