Vista Ultimate

I upgraded to Windows Vista Ultimate last week. The latest version of the Windows operating system offers several enhancements to security, stability and support, as well as behind-the-scenes improvements that make Vista fun and simple to use. To be honest, I am more caught up with the fun and the simple. Naturally, I want the guarantee that my computer won’t crash and that applications will run at their best, but it’s also important that my time computing is as appealing and as straightforward as possible. With Vista, I was even impressed with the clean, novel packaging.

The new Start menu is clutter-free and has some amazing new icons. Scroll over any menu option and you get a summary of what it does. A translucent, high-definition icon related to the menu item pops up. Scrolling over “search,” for instance, brings up an explanation of search, as well as a sharp magnifying glass on top of the menu. And I like the see-through frames. They make working so much fun.

Nuts and bolts

Installing Vista was simple. I had little to do with upgrading my laptop from XP, but D said it was quite smooth and much easier to install on my portable computer than on his tormented and over-the-hill PC. It took only a couple of hours, followed by some tweaking and downloading the day after. Well I never! Those ads for Mac (with the Mac looking young and put-together and the PC wearing a hospital gown) weren’t entirely truthful!

Picture perfect

Vista includes the Windows Photo Gallery application for organizing digital images and videos, and applying quick fixes to photo color and framing.  

Pimp my Laptop

Vista comes with all sorts of gadgets (small applications, like clocks and stocks) to personalize your screen. I now have the local weather (in Celsius), a calendar and a clock displayed on my sidebar. Of course, I don’t need a clock gadget, considering that the time is displayed on the lower right-hand corner of the screen, but I liked the clean look of the analogue dials. You can also display multiple stocks and news, or keep your screen gadget-free.

Vista comes with scalable desktop icons and some beautiful “wide-screen” images. You can also set a video to the background background, but this takes up processor power.

Instant Search

The Start menu now includes a search box, to find applications, documents and emails on your PC. As with the search function in XP, the Vista search narrows the search results as you type more characters. With Vista, however, you can also use Instant Search to launch applications. To launch Word, for instance, I’d type w-o-r-d, then click enter. This is simpler than searching for the blue and white icon with the big bold “W.” The Word icon was always present in the list of recently used items on the left side of my XP Start menu, but other icons would often be upstaged by new icons, and when I needed to launch them again, I’d have to hunt them down.  

I have not yet tried out any of the new games available on Vista and I’m still discovering subtle improvements to the user interface.