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Vista Apps And Utilities Review
On top of the revamped shell, Vista includes new and enhanced applications.
Some, such as Windows Media Player 11, are quite good. Others are less so:
Windows Calendar, Windows Defender, and Windows Mail. Power users will want more
sophisticated equivalents.
Vista ships with Internet Explorer 7, which is a major improvement over IE6. To
my mind, though, IE7 still falls short of Firefox 2. IE7 finally supports tabbed
browsing, and has a convenient Quick Tabs view that shows thumbnails of open Web
pages. But it lacks incremental in-page search. IE7 scales printed output
better, can zoom entire pages, and includes a number of security improvements,
among them anti-phishing warnings.
In my testing, IE sometimes forgot my preferences for hiding add-on toolbars,
and it consistently ate my first few keystrokes after I pressed Ctrl-T to open a
new tab. Still, if IE7 sounds appealing, you don't need Vista to get it: There's
an XP version at Microsoft.com.
Two of the more compelling applications in Vista are Windows Photo Gallery and
Windows Media Player 11. Photo Gallery manages large numbers of digital photos
with tags, incremental search, and basic editing such as cropping and red-eye
reduction.
Vista makes incremental improvements to the little-known Windows Movie Maker app
for ¬authoring videos, and also includes a convenient Windows DVD Maker that
lets you package up videos and title screens to create and burn movie DVDs.
Of course, you'll also find a variety of diversions, from the usual collection
of classic games such as Solitaire and others to new titles such as Chess Titans
that showcase Vista's 3D capabilities.
In addition to full applications, you'll find a variety of enhanced tools and
utilities. Parental controls let parents restrict access to applications and Web
sites, or limit the hours kids can log in. New Activity Centers organize related
tasks. Vista's Network Center, for example, makes it easy to monitor network
status and open file shares, and its Mobility Center lets you perform portable
PC tasks such as altering power settings or entering presentation mode.
(Presentation-aware apps can then, say, prevent IM windows from popping up
during your sales pitch.) And the Performance and Reliability Monitor is a
central location for monitoring system health.
Vista's Backup and Restore Center includes Complete PC Backup, which uses
full-disk imaging similar to Norton Ghost or Acronis's TrueImage. Some editions
of Vista include version control that lets you roll back to previous versions of
documents.
For corporate IT and power users, Vista also includes an improved event log with
filtering and notification options, more sophisticated task scheduling, and
diagnostic tools such as a memory tester.
New accessibility features round out the OS and include built-in text-to-speech
and speech-recognition capabilities that look fairly sophisticated.
Let me know if you need anything else.
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