Get the best from Windows Vista

Windows Sidebar
Although it’s possible to add extra mini programs (often called gadgets or widgets) to the Windows XP desktop, you’ll also need to keep a special program running all the time to control them, and that wastes valuable resources. Vista’s built-in Sidebar, which can be positioned on either side of the screen or hidden, integrates gadgets into Windows for the first time and provides a decent selection of useful ones straight out of the box. We particularly like the regularly updated running news headlines, the weather information tool and the contacts manager.

Elsewhere, Microsoft has encouraged developers to produce their own gadgets for Sidebar, ranging from live train times and Manchester United fixture lists to ones that watch Ebay auctions, track Facebook activity or search sites such as Google, Wikipedia and Amazon. To add more gadgets to Vista’s Sidebar, just click the plus sign at the top of Sidebar and then click the ‘Get more gadgets online’ link at the bottom right of the dialogue box.

Photo Gallery
Windows XP included some rudimentary features for cataloguing and editing photos but Windows Vista’s Photo Gallery can do so much more. It allows photos to be sorted and displayed in different ways: by date, by using star ratings or using descriptive tags such as ‘holiday’ or ‘Corfu’. Vista users can rate photos by opening them in Gallery and then clicking on a star rating between one and five, or add descriptions by clicking the Add Tags button on the same screen. Spend some time doing this and it’s then possible to use Photo Gallery to display all the five-star photos in a library, for example, or just those that have been tagged with a particular word or words.

Photo Gallery can also perform the sort of simple photo fixes that most people want to do, such as adjusting the exposure and colour balance, cropping a picture so only part of it is displayed, and removing
red-eye. There’s even an Auto Adjust tool that can improve many photos with a single click. Once photos have been fixed and organised, you can save a folder of photos to a blank CD or DVD, or click the Make a Movie button to make a slideshow using Windows Movie Maker. For many people, Photo Gallery includes all the tools they need to look after their snapshots.

Improved security
Windows Vista’s security isn’t perfect, so, as with Windows XP, you’ll need to add an anti-virus tool to stay safe online, but it’s a massive improvement over Windows XP and other previous versions. The new User Account Control (UAC) tool stops and warns you if a program is attempting to make a major change to your computer, and although some users don’t like this interruption we think it’s a useful tool (if you disagree, you can disable UAC).

Vista’s firewall is improved, too, although by default one of its best features isn’t turned on: see our step-by-step guide opposite for how to use it. Better yet, Vista comes with a comprehensive set of parental controls that allow a concerned parent to restrict the amount of time their kids spend on the PC, set limits to where they can go on the internet, specify time slots for internet access, or even control the programs and games they can run. Elsewhere the free and included Windows Defender tool does a reasonable job of watching out for spyware and and cleaning out any it finds.

Media Center
Windows Media Center has been around for a while, but before Vista you had to buy a specialised PC to use it. With the tool now built into Vista Home Premium, though, you can play CDs or DVDs, listen to digital music, download movies, run beautiful slideshows of photos stored on the hard disk and even, by adding a TV tuner worth a few pounds, watch and record television. And if you’ve recorded a favourite programme or film, you can even save the results to a DVD to watch elsewhere.

Media Center has a simple interface that can be used from a distance if you have a suitable remote control, and setting the whole thing up is a doddle. The television functions are particularly good, too: you can pause live TV if the phone rings, for example, and the two-week television listings make it simple to record every episode of a particular show with just two button clicks. It’s also possible to send the files stored on a Vista PC to other devices on the same home network, so you can record TV programmes on the computer and view them on another device connected to the TV. If you’ve got a Vista Home Premium PC, you’ll find Media Center in the Start menu.