Real killer features for Vista?

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

Your IT - Entertainment

The most important one they could have included wasn’t included – Windows OneCare, with firewall, anti-virus, system tune-up and backup support. I’m testing out the latest 1.5 version on the 90 day trial, and while it doesn’t look as slick as Symantec’s ‘Norton 360 beta’ for Vista and doesn’t have as many features, so far, it’s doing a good job of the basics it’s meant for.

But plenty more good stuff is included. We finally have a Windows operating system that has built-in search that works properly and is actually useful to use. We have proper photo management, a calendar, a DVD movie maker, better backup and defragmentation (although Diskeeper 2007 with Vista support will undoubtedly do a better job on the defragmentation front now that an update is available).

Built-in anti-spyware only does part of the security job, and isn’t rated online as being as good as some of the competition, but it’s also a standard feature and is supported by a better browser with tabbed browsing as standard and a small, but growing collection of plug-ins.

There’s also better support for drivers (when the rest of them actually start arriving), inbuilt support for today’s very affordable graphics tablets giving any Vista PC with Vista Home Premium or up most tablet PC capabilities (except for writing directly on your desktop PC and screen which decidedly can’t be tucked under your arm) and inbuilt voice recognition that actually works really well and will surprise people into actually using it.

Even Windows Media Center is now standard for most Vista users, finally letting you turn your computer into a TV and video recorder if you want to, along with having access to a very snazzy interface for accessing online movies, organizing your photos and videos and accessing other online features and more with a DVD-like remote control.

Vista’s killer feature is all of these things together. Sure, it’s possible to cobble all of this functionality into Windows XP, or Mac OS X or even Linux. But now we have an operating system that has all of this functionality as standard, raising the bar for the others to come close to, meet, or even preferably jump over, with Apple no doubt wanting to impress with OS X 10.5 when it arrives.

Vista is clearly a big advance on operating system technology, with so much packed in as standard, with the ability to use other third party apps if desired, as has always been the case.

But what of Vista’s future? What about 'Vista 2', or even a 'Vista 360'? Read onto page 4 for the conclusion...