Figure F |
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| The Windows Calendar is a brand new feature for Vista. |
The Calendar also includes a Task list and allows you to set reminders as much as two weeks or as little as five minutes prior to a scheduled appointment. You can set recurring appointments, and you can have multiple calendars on one PC and share your calendar with others -- on the local computer or across the Internet.
Windows Calendar supports the iCalendar format, so you can export your calendar to a Web site and allow others to subscribe to it, and you can subscribe to the calendars of others and view them alongside your own. You can also easily invite participants to meetings.
Unlike Outlook's calendar, though, Windows Calendar isn't integrated into the e-mail client, and the calendar and task information aren't stored on your Exchange server.
More new programs
Vista includes the Windows
Photo Gallery, which helps you organise and view your digital photos and videos
more easily. You can even do rudimentary photo editing and print them from
within the gallery, which replaces the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer in XP and
gives you much more flexibility in improving your photos. Unlike the Picture and
Fax Viewer, Photo Gallery lets you adjust exposure and color, crop pictures,
and quickly fix "red eye," as shown in Figure G.
And if you get carried away with your editing, don't worry: There's an Undo button and a Revert to Original Selection option.
Figure G |
 |
| The Vista Photo Gallery gives you basic editing capabilities. |
Like XP, Vista includes Windows Movie Maker, but with some enhancements. The DVD Maker makes it easy to burn your movies to disc, and you can create chapters and menus that let you jump to specific scenes. You also have more control over the quality and size of your video files.
Vista includes several new games, such as Inkball, Purble Place, and Chess Titans, a 3D chess game that's great for learning how to play.
Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate editions also include the Windows Media Center application that's based on the Windows XP Media Center Edition. In Vista, it has a spiffy new, more sophisticated look, as shown in Figure H.
Figure H |
 |
| Media Center is included in Vista Home Premium and Ultimate Editions. |
With Media Center, you can organise and view DVD movies, home videos, digital music, digital photos, and recorded or live TV within an easy-to-use interface. You can hook up the computer to a widescreen TV and use a Media Center remote control to do all this -- and surf the Web, check your e-mail, and run other applications -- from your living room sofa.
Most editions of Vista include Windows Media Player 11, which has a new look and feel and a redesigned media library that's easier to navigate.
Security, Security, Security
All this bling is cool and
exciting, but one of the primary reasons for Vista's
existence is to provide Windows users with a more secure operating system.
14%
7%
Vista is the biggest rip off of OSX. It has features that have been in linux and OSX for ages. Instead of ripping of ideas off other companies and infecting your pc with viruses how about some real innovation for Microsoft.