In the first of our four part series, we give an overview of Windows Vista.

With ubiquitous internet connections both at home and on the move, and portable devices and personal media collections now part of our everyday lives, a digital lifestyle seems almost inescapable.

Windows Vista has, says Microsoft, been designed from the ground up to offer increased usability, reliability, security and performance, while also creating a platform that’s ready for the latest multimedia technologies, such as high-definition video, and integration with a constantly connected world. Business users haven’t been forgotten, with Microsoft making deployment easier and cheaper.

Since Windows XP was released in 2001, there have been major advances in PC performance, and Windows Vista is designed to take full advantage of new hardware – its graphical interface has, for the first time, been designed to make the most of the capabilities of modern 3D graphics adapters.

Having been subject to numerous delays and changes in specification, Vista is set to go on sale on 30 January 2007. Whether you’re thinking of upgrading your existing system or buying a completely new one, we’ll tell you what’s in store, and which edition of the new operating system you should consider, if you’re going to take the plunge.

We’ll give you an introduction to its new features, as well as a little technical behind-the-scenes information to show you what makes Windows Vista so different.

Starting with the new user interface and user applications, we’ll guide you though the new user experience, performance upgrades and security enhancements. Finally, we’ll discuss pricing, licensing and upgrading issues, as well as the system requirements for running the new operating system.

Having experienced all the versions of Windows since its inception, we think Vista is one of the best things to have come out of Redmond for a long time. There will undoubtedly be glitches and updates, but at least it has started off on the right foot.

Change is good
When you boot Vista for the first time, you’ll be greeted with a new desktop experience. From the Robert Fipp-designed start-up sound to the way it shuts down, everything about the interface has been overhauled, and much has been rebuilt from scratch.

While certain key features have been retained between Windows versions over the years, so as not to alienate users, the look-and-feel of the user interface has seen repeated upgrades. And, as PCs and graphics hardware have become more powerful, operating systems have, quite rightly, evolved to take full advantage of the new technology.

Vista brings with it the most significant user-interface changes in any version of Windows, yet still manages to seem familiar.

All versions of Vista, except Home Basic take advantage of a new method of displaying the Windows desktop. If your hardware meets the minimum requirements you will be able to take advantage of the new ‘Aero’ interface.

Modern graphics cards, even basic models, have a huge amount of processing power that lies dormant, other than when you’re playing 3D games or processing video.

In harnessing this power, Aero uses a new driver model – the Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) – to deliver a smooth, fast desktop that’s free of the tearing, glitching and slow window redraws users have come to loathe over the years. It also enables effects such as transparency, animations, lighting effects and live thumbnails.

Many have dismissed such effects as gratuitous ‘eye candy’, but a great deal of work has gone into improving the usability of the interface and, we’re told, nothing has been included without good reason.

Transparency (which can be turned off) is pervasive throughout the new desktop and is used to varying degrees in many features, such as the Taskbar, the Start menu and the new Windows Sidebar. These effects are collectively known as ‘Glass’.

Transparent menu bars direct your focus towards a window’s contents rather than the window furniture, such as borders and frames. Quite the opposite of showing off, these items are transparent to help you not look at them. And because of the soft blurring, or ‘frosting’, of items beneath transparent objects you’re aware of those items but not distracted by them.

By hovering over an application in the taskbar, a live thumbnail of the application pops up. If, for example, it’s a media player window displaying a video clip, the thumbnail will show the same moving video as the main application window.