Now set to ship in January 2007, Windows Vista will be Microsoft's first major operating system release since it introduced Windows XP in 2001.

The new OS is designed to offer a shiny new user interface, better security, improved data organisation and near-instantaneous search. silicon.com sister site GameSpot took a closer look at what Windows Vista has to offer.

Look and feel

Windows Desktop Manager
The next version of Windows brings an end to 20 years of 2D desktop rendering. Windows Aero is actually just a theme, or skin type, used by the Desktop Windows Manager, a new graphical system built into Windows Presentation Foundation. While Windows Vista is Microsoft's DirectX 10 vehicle, the 3D Desktop Windows Manager requires only DirectX 9.0. The switch to 3D rendering means that Windows will now have a use for that fancy $400 graphics card on the desktop.

Numerous people have shown that an unprotected PC with a fresh install of Windows XP can be compromised within minutes of being connected to the Internet.

Instead of displaying plain old windows, the new 3D user interface elements will be able to scale, rotate, and be manipulated with ease. The new desktop paves the way for new navigation features, such as Flip3D and an improved Alt-Tab application-switching interface. Flip3D lets you navigate through all your application windows by pulling your open windows together and arranging them into a 3D Rolodex format that you can cycle through and select by using your mouse or arrow keys.

The new Alt-Tab interface presents thumbnail shots of the contents of each window, as opposed to the Alt-Tab interface found in Windows XP, which provides only an icon of the program. As is the nature of beta software, nothing is set in stone; the look and functionality might change considerably.

Windows Aero
Aero is Microsoft's new default 3D desktop theme. Gone are the bright blues and smooth colour gradients of Windows XP. The new transparent Aero theme features subdued colours and unobtrusive, rounded corners ready for the web 2.0 era. Transparencies and soft fade effects give Aero a polished look. The borders of each window blur objects lying under them, leaving the window you are working on in focus while giving you a hint of what lies beneath. It's all very pretty.

Mouse over a navigation button and the button will glow and spill light onto neighbouring windows or onto the background. New windows slowly materialise into existence and, when minimised, they fade and shrink downward.

To accommodate for no-frills power users, Microsoft will include a classic Windows theme that closely resembles desktop elements found in Windows 2000. However, in our hands-on testing with Beta 1 we noticed that the austere theme doesn't feel as snappy as the Aero interface, which is strange considering that the Aero theme has a lot more visual complexity. We'll chalk that up to the beta status of the product - performance tweaks will likely wait until the end.

3D performance

Graphics card requirements
Windows Vista doesn't have official minimum system requirements yet but Microsoft has recommended at least 512MB of memory, a "modern" Intel or AMD processor and a DirectX 9.0 graphics card for the current Windows Vista Beta 1. You'll need to have the right hardware to get the full Windows Vista experience. Yes, your system can run Vista if you don't have a DirectX 9.0 card but you won't be able to enjoy the full Aero desktop effect because the system will default back to 2D mode.

You can't have just any DX9-compatible card either. According to Andrew Dodd, product manager for ATI's software group, the quality of the graphics card can impact the performance of the Aero desktop because it's now just like any other 3D application. Using a new Windows Vista driver from ATI, we tested a handful of ATI DX9 video cards on Windows Vista to see if we could get the system to lag on the desktop. Our 256MB Radeon X1900 XTX and Radeon X850PE cards performed flawlessly when we dragged a window over 10 open Internet Explorer windows. Our 128MB Radeon X300 SE showed some slight hitching when we got up over seven windows but we had to frantically whip around the mouse to make it noticeable -- we wouldn't have seen any signs of strain with normal usage. Current discrete DirectX 9.0 video cards should be able to handle Aero without a problem.

Navigation and organisation

Search
Using Windows file search has long been the operating system equivalent to searching for your car keys in the morning - you have a hazy idea of where they should be but it'll take longer than you think it should to find them. As anyone who has ever used Windows search will tell you, if you forget the exact name or location of the file or folder you want, count on wasting an intolerable amount of time waiting for Windows to return your search results and then even more time wading through the barely organised result list.

Being able to find your data quickly is almost as important as having the data itself, and Windows' failings in file navigation have left the door wide open for competitors willing to provide a service the OS can't provide. Last year, search giant Google released a desktop search program that offered lightning-quick desktop search results for finding e-mails, files and even websites stored in your web history.

Microsoft improved its file search system in Windows XP by using indexing to speed up searches but Windows Vista has evolved file navigation and organisation to an entirely new level. Finding your documents, programs and media files is much easier in Windows Vista. Yes, it's difficult to get excited about a new navigation system but the change is significant since it impacts how we work and play on the desktop every single day.

Microsoft isn't delivering the whole pie just yet, however. Windows Vista was supposed to come with WinFS, a system-wide relational database designed to improve file navigation. Microsoft had to cut WinFS out of the release in order to meet the launch schedule but it should be available as a download for both Windows Vista and Windows XP once it's released. A pervasive database lets users and programmers create deep relationships between files. Imagine instead of just finding a folder full of pictures, you could easily find pictures with only you in them, from specific dates and even certain events -- all at the same time. That's what WinFS is supposed to do.

Windows Vista has a new quick-search bar integrated into the start menu and folder-explorer views. The search tool automatically starts returning results as soon as you type in the first letter and narrows down the results as you add more letters. Start typing, and the results will appear and dynamically change on the fly. Did you narrow down your results field to zero? No worries -- delete a few letters to rebuild the results list instead of running the search all over again. The search returns everything, including programs, files and folders. Vista even includes the ability to search through data stores, such as email archives, Word documents and a host of other file types. You're still likely to need to wait for regular, full-system searches when trying to find obscure, seldom-used files not included in the indexing service -- you can choose to include them but we imagine that adding needless files could end up slowing down the quick search.

The quick search will highlight your best match as it narrows down the results, and pressing the Enter key will open the best-match file or launch the best-match program. It was confusing at first, since years of using web search has taught us to press Enter immediately after typing in text to get a results page. Now, pressing Enter automatically opens or launches the best-match selection. We accidentally launched 3DMark06, a benchmarking program, a couple of times while we were using quick search to look for the application folder.

Organisation
Windows Vista will also let you save searches as a virtual folder. When you open the folder, it runs the search to populate the folder with items. By running the search in real-time, the virtual folder will be able to catch and display all the new files that meet the search criteria. Virtual folders don't recopy your files, so you can safely delete the virtual folder without losing any data.

Microsoft's new metatag feature will help you better organise your files by allowing you to attach description "tags" to a file to make it easier to find and organise. Metatags provide a magnitude of improvement over the simple file/folder organisation scheme that hasn't changed much since the DOS days. You can tag any file with just about any word. For instance, you might have some videos, photos and planning documents all related to multiple projects. Under the traditional Windows file system, all these files might go into one main folder, with subfolders for each different project. Then you have to deal with the conundrum of sharing the same file across multiple projects. Should I maintain one file, or drop copies of the file in each folder? What happens if I make changes?

With the new tagging features of Windows Vista, you can easily give files multiple attributes. When you search for, for example, "blue flame experiment", you're sure to get all the files associated with that project on the first try. If you have files that are relevant for more experiments, just tag them to make sure they also show up when you search or create a virtual folder for "red flame experiment". You can use the built-in tags, such as author or rating, or you can use your own custom keywords. As long as your files are tagged correctly, gathering your financial or legal files should take no more than a single search even if the actual files are spread throughout the system.

Explorer
Microsoft has overhauled the Windows Start Menu to make it easier to find and access programs. The left side of the menu displays the most recently used programs, and the All Programs menu selection at the bottom now transforms the entire left menu area into a program-navigation menu, instead of opening an unwieldy navigation menu that expands rightward. Clicking on a folder in the new program-view menu expands it downward to reveal executable programs contained inside, making it easier for those using a laptop touch pad to find and run programs from the Start Menu.

Windows Vista also features explorer shells that are customised to provide more useful displays for specific file types, including media files, such as pictures, music and videos. The explorer will display a preview of the currently selected item in the bottom part of the window, and the toolbar displays actions specific to the file type. The music explorer window, for example, offers the basic window layout, views and file organisation menus but it also offers a Play All option and a Public Settings menu, which lets you set network sharing from right inside the music explorer.

Security and networking

Security
If you've used Windows XP in the last few years, you know security hasn't exactly been its strong suit. Numerous people have shown that an unprotected PC with a fresh install of Windows XP can be compromised within minutes of being connected to the Internet. Microsoft has released a series of security updates and service pack releases over the years but it has been tough keeping up when all the black hats are gunning for you. You can find a plethora of antivirus, anti-spyware and malware companies hawking their wares to make up for the inadequacies of the PC operating system.

Microsoft hopes to walk down a more secure path with Windows Vista. Jim Allchin, co-president of the Platforms Products and Services Division at Microsoft, stated that security will be one of the top reasons to upgrade to Vista. The new OS comes with an upgraded, built-in firewall, new user-access protocols, a more secure version of Internet Explorer, a new version of Windows Defender and sports new features such as parental controls, full-drive encryption and device-driver blocking.

User Account Protection, originally called Least Privileged User Account, helps users safely operate their computers by making non-administrator logins more appealing. Similar features existed in Windows XP but they didn't offer enough power to wean users off logging in as an administrator, since many programs required the use of an administrator account, and simple things such as adding a WEP code or a printer required full access to the computer. As a result, most users opted to log in as the administrator to get their work done. Logging in as the administrator is a double-edged sword. The user has total access to the OS but it also gives spyware and malware programs unfettered access to core system files, which makes it all too easy for them to gain a foothold in the system.

For Windows Vista, Microsoft tweaked the user accounts to offer extra privileges, while reserving critical privileges for special use on the administrator account. Users should now be able to run all programs and change minor settings without being logged in as the administrator. To enhance security further, even if you log in as an administrator, Vista will automatically prompt the user for the proper credentials before continuing with a program's request.

Microsoft released Windows AntiSpyware to tackle the growing spyware and malware threat a of couple years ago. The system, now called Windows Defender, acts as an always-on monitoring service; it constantly checks for suspicious activity and prevents unwanted software from installing. You can install Windows Defender right now but expect to see a considerably more advanced version with the release of Windows Vista.

For the past few years, one of the largest weak spots in Windows XP's defences has been Internet Explorer. Competing browsers, such as Firefox, gained considerable market share simply because IE became a serious security risk with new IE exploits appearing seemingly every day. Microsoft has changed many of Internet Explorer's core functionalities with respect to security for Vista. IE will be "sand boxed", meaning it will have just enough privileges to wander the web but not enough to cause any real harm to the OS as a whole. Microsoft will also include new protective measures, such as constantly updated phishing filters and quick cache clearing.

Windows XP currently offers a built-in firewall but you'll get an improved version in Windows Vista that gives you more control over what gets in and out of the system. You'll be able to set which programs get access to the Internet. You can even block all IM and P2P applications across certain users. The firewall relies on rules set forth in the Windows Service Hardening platform. These rules limit how applications can access core system files, and whether they can access them at all. Windows Service Hardening acts to protect the core system in the event that a malicious program manages to get into the system.

Vista will also provide extra hard-disk security. BitLocker Drive Encryption, a hardware-based data-protection scheme provides full-drive encrypting. Enterprise editions of Vista will come with BitLocker and will require trusted platform modules for maximum effectiveness. Another feature that will excite enterprise IT security departments: Vista can block unauthorised device drivers on the system. This means you won't be able to use a USB storage device in a computer that has blocking enabled. The feature, while not particularly useful for home computers, will help companies prevent data theft.

Parental controls will receive a considerable boost in Vista. Parents will be able to monitor the actions of their children with detailed reports and control what Internet sites they can visit. Parents, or precocious administrators, can also limit access to the computer to certain hours of the day.

Networking
Windows Vista will come with a completely reworked networking stack. The next-generation TCP/IP stack will work with IPv4 and IPv6, and will also support auto-tuning and quality-of-service features. Wireless traffic will receive numerous boosts in technology to better accommodate for lost packets, bad signals and large amounts of electromagnetic interference. All these features boil down to better, more-consistent transfer rates for your existing Internet connection.

Compound TCP, or CTCP, helps to improve transfer rates by optimising how the sender and receiver handle data. The software has a built-in feedback mechanism that responds to delays and compensates for latency. As a result, Vista can automatically adjust how much data is sent at a time, even varying how often data is sent, providing for improved data-transfer rates.

Quality-of-service (QoS) features will provide for improved audio and video streaming from local and remote servers. A subset of the QoS modules called qWAVE (Quality Windows Audio/Video Experience) will give priority to audio and video packets, while at the same time monitoring the network's changing conditions to adjust bandwidth usage dynamically. Microsoft is also working on off-network media playback quality. If you launch a new program while playing a media file, Vista promises seamless playback without any video or audio hiccups thanks to smarter resource allocation.

Windows Peer-to-Peer Networking, introduced in the advanced networking pack for Windows XP, will get a makeover for Vista. The additional changes in Vista will enable users to run P2P applications easily, with overall better performance. People Near Me is a new feature within Peer-to-Peer Networking that enables users to share files locally with friends without having to go through multiple complex hurdles.

From a user standpoint, the average person won't notice the difference because things will just work the way they are supposed to. Connecting to other computers, locally or over the Internet, will be easier, faster and hopefully more secure.

Windows Vista and DirectX 10
It's been called DirectX 10, Windows Graphics Foundation 2.0, and most recently, Direct3D10. Microsoft had to rethink its display driver model now that the entire desktop is going 3D. The video card isn't just for games anymore. When you have a 3D desktop and give each application its own 3D window, the display driver has to be flexible and stable enough to handle the video card's increased role in the system. Microsoft split up the display driver to increase stability, to ensure that the 3D desktop stays up in the event that a game or another application crashes due to a graphics error. This change also means that Microsoft will not release DirectX 10 for Windows XP, because many of the Direct3D10 improvements will need the new Windows Vista Display Driver Model.

Sarju Shah and James Yu write for GameSpot.