Real killer features for Vista?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 01 February 2007 16:33

Your IT - Entertainment

Are there really any killer features for Vista, or must we wait for Vista 2? Which makes me wonder… will they call it Vista 360?

Articles on Vista are flying thick and fast all over the Internet, with a recent article from ZDNet’s Ed Bott saying that a new way to store photo metadata, the inclusion of voice recognition and inbuilt desktop search are Vista’s three killer features.

Among the articles that look at Vista’s features and Microsoft’s motivations is an article from Computerworld talking about ‘The trouble with Vista’ and how Microsoft has lost its customer focus, catering instead to big customers and its own need to eliminate piracy by finally forcing them to pay up if they want to use Microsoft’s latest software, amongst other findings.

A new way to store metadata for photos is not a revolution, the ‘Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP)’ is simply a standard that integrates metadata in the same file as the photo, instead of in a sidecar file. That said, it is a great development, especially considering that tens of billions of digital photos are taken each year.

Voice recognition and desktop search aren’t new either. Now that Nuance (formerly Scansoft) have updated Dragon NaturallySpeaking from version 9.0 to a free Vista update to version 9.5, Vista has some real competition in the voice recognition stakes. As the update only came out on the 30th of January, no reviews have emerged as yet, although I will be downloading the 1.03Gb update soon to try it out and see what’s it like, and then report on it at iTWire.

As for desktop search, Microsoft previewed this in 2003, but was last to release an app that could do this for Windows XP, beaten by Copernic, Google, Yahoo and others.

Where Vista excels is on visual and usability levels. Vista is great to look at – and if you’re using an operating system every day, the interface is a welcome and refreshing change. It’s definitely easier to use and look at than any previous version of Windows. In short, the new interface works better, on both visual and fronts.

Vista also excels as a smarter operating system, better able to anticipate your needs. For example, if you’ve installed a driver that didn’t work properly, System Restore is smart enough to know that you might just want to roll back to before the driver was installed. I know because I needed to do just that, and it was certainly a good surprise to see.

Some, at this point, might say that a better operating system wouldn’t have problems with drivers. While a new operating system actually shouldn’t have this problem at all, and should just be compatible, the reality is that new operating systems break existing drivers, and the business of driver writing is obviously not an easy thing.

If it were, my current ‘Vista capable’ system wouldn’t only have half the sound card working, where the headphone and microphone sockets don’t work. The on-board microphones don’t work either – all it does it play sound through the speakers with a USB microphone/headset needed to use programs like Skype.

What else is missing,  and what is/are Vista's killer features? Read onto page 2 for more...