Vista: Out of the box

by Ross Burridge on Jan 29, 2007

Tags: Windows | Vista

Microsoft has always included a number of bundled applications with Windows, but Vista takes it further than ever. Here’s a look at the main attractions.

Photo gallery
Available in: Vista Home, Vista Home Premium, Vista Ultimate (TBC)
While Windows XP has basic photo-management tools built in, Vista goes a step further by bringing in a dedicated application. It’s a slightly awkward split into three modules (a gallery, preview and editor), but it does add significant new features.

The main gallery screen provides an Explorer-style tree view on the left, allowing you to sort photos in a variety of different ways, with the ever-present Vista search box available at the top. The middle section shows scalable thumbnails of your photo library, while the optional detail pane on the right displays the file’s key metadata, such as when the picture was taken. You can also add captions and metadata tags to pictures here, all of which are indexed in Vista’s search engine, as well as shown in the Gallery’s tree view.

Double clicking on any picture will take you to a larger preview screen (essentially the same as the one in XP), but click on the Fix button and you’ll be taken to an editor, where you can auto-fix the colour balance and brightness/contrast (with mixed results), or make a series of finer, manual adjustments. Most useful of all, though, is the effective, red-eye removal tool, which will suffice for the needs of most casual photographers.

Windows Media Player 11
Available in: All versions (TBC), except ‘N’ editions.
Though the European Union has forced Microsoft to produce a Media Player free version of Vista, it’s still bundled in all the regular versions of the operating system. Version 11 brings some major changes, both visually and behind the scenes, primarily aimed at ease of use. The most obvious change is the generous use of album art throughout the program, rather than the text-based tree view found in previous versions.

You can now browse by artist, album title, song, genre, year, rating or folder, and the search box once again makes an appearance. It’s much, much faster too, with both keyword searches and scrolling through even large collections feeling responsive.

As before, you can rip music from CDs, burn your own compilations and synchronise with media players, and there’s also the promise of new online music stores integrated into the interface — including MTV and Microsoft’s fledging Urge. Windows Media Connect server is also now built in, making light work of sharing your library with other computers or Universal Plug ‘n’ Play devices across a network.

Windows Media Center
Available in: Vista Home Premium, Vista Ultimate (TBC)
Until Vista, you had to get the specific Media Center Edition to take advantage of Microsoft’s home entertainment suite. Even then, it was never officially sold without accompanying hardware, and still needed specific video codecs installed to work properly. But that’s all changed in Vista: not only is there an MPEGII codec installed (so it will play DVDs out of the box), but the Media Center interface will be included with both Home Premium and Ultimate versions.

The headline features remain the same — you can access photo, video and music galleries using a remote control (or your mouse and keyboard) — but the interface has been given a good polish. Configurable thumbnail previews are used throughout each section, and there are new ways of sorting through libraries — music can be organised by album artist, composer or year, for example, and the photo gallery supports Vista’s ability to add tags to your pictures.

The interface is now much more discreet: if you’re watching TV, most menus will be smoothly overlaid on top, including the electronic program guide, which now comes in a more compact version. The cable TV CableCARD format is also supported, although there’s currently no hardware around to take advantage of it. There’s support for up to four analog / DVB-T TV tuners (two of which can be HD), although you’ll still need the requisite hardware.