Please read the headline of this article correctly – it does not say, "Reasons why you should upgrade to Windows Vista." Windows Vista is still a nasty operating system that hogs resources and hides or eliminates important features, but there are some cool features hidden within and I feel that I must list them here so that I can be fair to Microsoft.
If Microsoft had added any or all of these features to XP, it would have been an upgrade worth the price. Instead they had to add all of the other junk to confuse users too.
1. Search on the START BUTTON (orb) – While I no longer have any machines running Vista, in the few months I spent with Vista, I came to depend on the search box. While Google Desktop and the Windows Live Search, or whatever they call it, offer similar function, none of them work as well as the instant search found on the Vista Start menu.
2. The abililty to copy and replace – If you are copying a large folder into another folder with Windows XP and a duplicate file exists or it can’t copy the file at all, XP crashes and says that it can’t copy the file. You are left not knowing exactly where the process left off. In Vista you are given options: copy, copy and replace, copy and leave both files or skip the file. Man! That is a great feature! I would pay $50 for an XP upgrade that just added that single feature.
3. Windows Explorer in every window – Every window you open from My Computer (now just called "Computer") opens with the ability to drag the files to any other location on the computer. This is much better than having to open two windows and drag between them.
4. Excellent Monitor Scale-ability – I know scale-ability may not be a real word, but here’s what it means. In XP, switching to a higher resolution monitor meant making everything smaller. Vista does a great job at scaling the fonts and icons to the resolution of the screen. In other words, this means big solitaire cards and larger text in the title bar.
5. Adjust partitions without extra software – This is much more of a geek thing, but if you have a Windows disk and you want to get rid of the recovery partition on your new computer, you can do it easily in the Adminitrative tools under the control panel.
That’s about it. Five new features that really are cool in Windows Vista. While these features are excellent improvements to the Windows Operating system, they do not in any way offset the dozens of annoyances that the system has.
