Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium review

It's been delayed, rewritten and had features put in and taken out of it, but finally Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system is here.

While previous versions of Windows have kept it simple with just two versions, Vista has four. Vista Business and Vista Ultimate are designed for business use, leaving Home Basic and Home Premium for regular users.

Home Basic is cheaper than Home Premium, costing £82 for an upgrade and £162 for the full version, but it lacks many of the new features that make Vista so appealing, including the new Aero interface. For that reason we've focused our review on the Home Premium version, which also includes Media Center, giving you a simple way to organise your videos and photos and a free EPG for recording TV. If you want to see the differences between the editions, see the table on Microsoft's website (http://tinyurl.com/nultf).

One thing you've probably heard about Vista is that it needs a significantly more powerful PC to run than Windows XP. That's not exactly true, and Vista should run on pretty much any PC bought in the past couple of years. If you're in any doubt, Microsoft's Vista Upgrade Advisor (http://tinyurl.com/o5bq4) will tell you if your PC is good enough and suggest any upgrades you might need to make.

Once you've installed Vista the Windows Experience Index score tells you how fast your PC is. This tests your processor, memory, graphics and hard disk, so you can see which component is holding your PC back. Instead of listing an application's requirements, manufacturers will be able to list just the required Experience Index score, which should make buying software much easier.

Easy 3D

To run the 3D Aero interface you'll need a DirectX 9-capable graphics card. The interface uses transparency, so applications' title bars are see-through. Some applications can even set the level of transparency, so they can appear ghost-like on your desktop. It looks nice, and Aero's soft lines give Vista a Mac OS X feel.

Aero also gives you Flip 3D, which is the new way of switching between tasks. Instead of pressing Alt-Tab, Windows-Tab cycles through your applications in 3D. We were impressed to discover that if you do this while playing a video, it continues to play. It's good to see that the desktop is now its own object, so you can quickly get back to it without having to minimise all your open applications. However, we'd have liked to have seen a copy of Mac OS X's task-switching feature, which tiles all the open applications on the desktop so that you can select one with a single mouse click.

Gadgets

Vista sees the introduction of the Sidebar, which is pretty much a rip-off of Google's Desktop Search sidebar. As with Google's version, the Sidebar can display Gadgets, such as a clock, calendar and RSS feeds, and you can download new ones, such as the Outlook Info Gadget that we've been using to display our Inbox, Appointments and Tasks. Gadgets aren't locked to the Sidebar, and you can drag and drop them anywhere on your desktop.

Microsoft has also integrated its desktop search into Vista. Unlike Google's Desktop Search, Vista doesn't index your entire computer; it indexes only key folders, including My Documents. This makes sense if you think about it, as this is where you'll keep most of your files. You can add other locations to the index if you like, which is handy if you keep files elsewhere.

The new email client, Windows Mail, which looks and acts like Outlook Express, integrates with the index, so searching through your email is really quick. As with Google's Desktop, you can extend the index to other applications and file-types by downloading iFilters. Many of these are free, but you have to pay for others.