Windows Hacks: Vista Comes Into View

Faster On, Faster Off

Though computers continue to run faster, starting up and shutting down Windows seems to take a bit longer every day. Vista will speed up your machine's boot process only when your system has hardware that supports the Extensible Firmware Interface. Still, the new OS snaps more quickly out of energy-saving sleep modes on all systems. Microsoft claims that the faster reawakenings are due to Vista's ability to overrule any foot-dragging drivers and applications that take their time shutting down.

Vista's Start menu replaces XP's Turn Off Computer option (which opens a second dialog box of power-off choices) with a new power-off button that forces the OS to write the contents of memory to a file on the hard disk and then slip into low-power standby mode. (Unfortunately, when I tried this on my test system, a hardware incompatibility caused it to reboot instead of going into standby.) Another button lets you restart or shut down the PC as in XP, but the option to hibernate (putting the system in a zero-power mode) appears to be missing for now.

Speedier App Launches

Previous Windows versions prefetch some application files to get them started more quickly, but Vista's Superfetch feature takes this to a new level. XP preloads files that an application has opened recently into available memory before the program calls for them, but Superfetch tracks all the programs you use over the course of months and keeps your most frequently used files in memory permanently (if you have sufficient RAM).

Since system memory is often tight, Vista's ability to use a USB flash or external hard drive as additional Superfetch storage space could be a true time-saver. Plug a mostly empty drive into a USB port, and Vista will ask whether you'd like to use some or all of it to speed up your computer (see FIGURE 4 ). The Superfetch partition Vista creates on the USB drive is encrypted, but USB drives are notoriously easy to lose, so people working with sensitive data may want to avoid using such drives for Superfetch caching.

When I plugged in a 512MB USB drive and reserved 431MB of it for Superfetch, programs launched much faster the second time I opened them; however, my test system had 1GB of RAM, and the applications appeared to launch just as quickly after I unplugged the drive. You'll probably get the best results when you use a fast USB drive (the latest have data-read speeds near 30MB per second).

Automatic Maintenance

While Windows XP lets you refresh your device drivers via Windows Update, they're available only as optional downloads when you visit the Windows Update site. Vista automates new driver downloads and offers them for your installation approval. This could smooth the upgrade process for anyone whose hardware isn't supported in Vista's initial release--if a driver is available subsequently through Windows Update, Vista will bring it to you rather than making you find it.

Vista's error reporting is more automatic as well. When applications crash in XP, you're asked if you'd like to send a report to Microsoft--but it's not like Microsoft will reply with a fix. When Vista encounters a problem, and you elect to report it, you'll get an answer back with a solution, if there is one. Of course, if the response is useless, we'll all be racing to disable this link with the Redmond mother ship.

Refreshed for Success

Vista's Aero interface looks slick, but more significant, it makes Windows and its applications easier to use by endowing screen elements with photorealistic depth, color, texture, and transparency. Along with the Aero look are several new and welcome utilities. We were shocked--shocked!--to find that many of these tools are eerily similar to programs bundled into Apple's Mac OS X.

Windows Media Player 11 receives a streamlined interface, with simplified music library navigation, bigger controls, and iTunes-like light colors (see FIGURE 5). The new image manager, Windows Photo Gallery, applies the same interface design to picture viewing, simplifying the process of printing images, burning them to DVD for television viewing, or viewing slide shows on the PC. And Windows Movie Maker can now burn your movies to DVD thanks to Vista's Windows DVD Maker program (as with Windows Media Player's DVD playback support, however, you'll have to pay extra to download the necessary codec). Vista also introduces a new Windows Calendar that supports the iCal standard, and it lets you publish and subscribe to calendars on the Web.

Living with Windows XP for so long without a significant update has made me realize that it's a pretty good operating system. Vista's improved security features and performance tweaks would make it a very good one, but the OS's sleek interface and useful new tools suggest something that's even better: coolness.