11 Reasons to give Microsoft’s Vista a chance

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Little things matter.

Vista, the new computer operating system from Microsoft, is a collection of little improvements that will save you a lot of time and grief in your daily computing.

Microsoft is billing Vista as making it “easier, safer and more fun” to use your PC. Nobody can be sure that Vista delivers on this until it’s battle-tested in the real world, but early tests by millions of guinea pigs so far suggests Vista meets its goals. It’s the first real makeover of Microsoft’s Windows operating system for computers since Windows XP debuted in 2001.

Consumer versions of Vista debut Jan. 30: Home Basic for $199 and Home Premium for $239. Ultimate, for $399, is for power users or small businesses. I’ve played around with Vista on four different machines and know enough to say what I like about it.

It hasn’t crashed on me. On reliability, compatibility or security, it should be better than previous versions of Windows, says Joel Durham, author of “Windows Vista Ultimate Bible,” (Wiley, 2007) an upcoming book on the most expensive version of Vista. We’ll find out for sure once hardware and software companies finish shipping thousands of “drivers,” or programs that ensure Vista works with the computer’s hardware.

When I asked Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates how he felt about developing Windows Vista over five years, he said, “Best $6 billion I ever spent.” Is it worth your money? Well, lucky for Bill, it is.

Here are 11 reasons why:

1. When you move your mouse over the borders, you’ll find they’re a little thicker so it isn’t as hard to grab them and expand the size of a window. On the side of the screen, you can find useful options on the Windows Sidebar, where you can view the icons for “gadgets” _ mini-programs connected to the Internet. The icons for the gadgets are always visible on the right side of your screen; they deliver live information such as news headlines, the time in certain cities or local traffic.

2. Maneuvering with 3-D effects on the screen is a novelty in the Windows world, even if it isn’t new to Apple Macintosh users. If you hold the Tab and Windows keys down (as long as you’re not using the low-end Basic version), Vista takes all of your open Web pages and presents a sideways 3-D view of them.

This feature is called Flip 3D and is part of the so-called Aero Glass 3-D effects that aren’t present in the Windows Vista Home Basic edition. The pages run by as if you were rotating a Rolodex. The edges of open pages are also translucent, so you can more easily see what page is nested behind another one.

3. With the “preview pane,” you have the ability to preview files and Web pages before you open them. If you put the mouse arrow over a Web page tab at the bottom of the screen, it will present a “live thumbnail” mini-view of the page so you can tell quickly if you really want to open it. The same goes for files in the My Documents folder.

4. Search ability is integrated throughout the operating system so you can search for something inside any folder or dialog box. There is always a search field to use wherever you are in the system, and Vista remembers your most recent or frequent searches.

Thanks to the U.S. Justice Department, you can easily change your default search engine from Microsoft’s search tool to Google’s or a host of others. (Just click the arrow tab in the search box.) It comes with Internet Explorer 7.0, but you can also change the browser.

5. Vista has a built-in version of the Windows Media Center user interface, which was once a separate version of Windows XP. The Media Center interface has large print viewable from 10 feet away and has a menu system that you can navigate via a TV remote control. It allows you to navigate through movies or music stored on your PC and view them on a TV screen.

Microsoft has deals to allow you to download movies to your computer or get unique sports information from providers such as Fox Sports. The interface does things like automatically downloads album art to go with your music files. It’s easy to hook up devices such as Microsoft’s Xbox 360 video game console so you can retrieve a video stored on your PC and play it on a TV connected to the Xbox 360.

6. I like the built-in parental controls that you once had to install on your own. With Vista, you can create a series of users for each member of the family and limit what your children can do.

You can limit permission so that your child can’t play Mature-rated games on the computer. You can prevent a child from Web browsing, chatting with strangers or downloading a file without your permission. And you can even set the times when it is OK for your child to be using the computer.

7. Vista comes with DirectX 10, graphics software that enables game developers to pack more action into 3-D animated games. With the Game Explorer, which is a kind of folder just for games, you no longer have to look through a bunch of menus to start a game.

8. If you have the bad habit of not backing up your PC, there are fewer excuses with Vista. The Backup and Restore Center lets you do that with a click on one button.

You can choose whether you want to back up to a Universal Serial Bus flash drive, a secondary hard disk on your computer, or a server connected to the same network as your PC. You can even roll back the clock on version changes to your documents in case you want to recover an altered document.

9. One of the big improvements in Vista is the Windows photo gallery. You can easily take the “red eye” out of photos by clicking on someone’s eyes and dragging a box around them with the mouse. You can even merge two photos into one with the basic tools that are built into Vista.

You can organize your photos by tagging them with categories such as “wildlife” or “family.” The photo gallery also organizes photos by date taken, ratings or public pictures that you can share with everyone who uses the machine. You can print photos to your printer or send them off to a Web-based photo printing service.

10. The best-looking feature of Windows Vista is Dream Scene, a cute visual detail that Microsoft kept secret until Bill Gates’ keynote Jan. 14 at the Consumer Electronics Show. With Windows Vista Ultimate, the high-end $399 version of the operating system, you can set any video as the background wallpaper of your computer.

If you have video of a waterfall, for example, you can always see it running in the background as you do any task, even when your screen saver isn’t running. This is known as an “extra” for Windows Vista Ultimate, meaning it is available as a separate download after Jan. 30. It requires a good graphics card and plays only Windows Media or MPEG (Motion Picture Experts Group) files.

11. One feature guaranteed to save a few years from your life is that you can change the default on how to either put the computer to sleep or to shut it down with a single mouse click. No more questions like, “Turn off computer?” when you click to shut down.

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Dean Takahashi writes the “Tech Talk” column for the San Jose Mercury News. He can be reached at dtakahashi at mercurynews.com.