Features and Use

While I make no attempt to make this article a full review of Vista, here you can get a quick idea of what new features and appearances Vista will supply.

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Here is the default desktop for Vista Ultimate — a new start menu and task bar along the bottom and a side bar of gadgets on the left.

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Right-click on the desktop and select properties from the menu and you’ll be presented with this menu to alter display settings and just about everything else on the system.

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Background options are pretty robust including support for widescreen desktops out of the box.

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The start menu goes through a dramatic shift in Vista including a programs menu that doesn’t extend across the desktop at all, but stays inside the Start Menu instead.

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Here is a selection of gadgets that come with Windows Vista as well; options for a notepad, weather and more are available.

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Here I have added the notes and CPU utilization gadget to the side bar.

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The control panel is different but still follows a similar setup to help new users find the information they need easily.  If you are a believer in the old ways, you’ll appreciate the “classic view” option.

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Here is more information on the performance score that Vista gets from your PC.  It tests performance of your processor, memory, graphics, gaming and primary hard disk and assigns a simple number to its levels.  Here in our case, we hadn’t installed the NVIDIA video driver yet so our scores there are the lowest option – 1.0.

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You’ll definitely notice a lot more security pop ups on your Vista OS — here we are asked to verify that the driver application we want to run is safe since Windows can’t verify it for me.

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Your “My stuff” folders are even more dominant now than in the past!  Contacts, Saved games, videos, downloads, links and more are shown here.

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Windows Explorer is still in the OS and used for sorting through all the files on your PC, though with faster searching and organization powered by Vista.

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The device manager is seen here in basically the same form we have known from Windows XP. 

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Aw, we hardly knew ye, Windows Vista…

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One other interesting feature is only accessible from hitting F8 during the boot process — Vista includes its own memory tester application that will reboot when completed and report the results there.

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