The Start Menu

Clicking on the black and white start button brings up the usual start up menu from Windows XP except the way it works now has changed. Firstly, there’s a small search box in case you have too many programs and don’t want to scroll through Windows. It finds as you type and is fairly responsive. This may sound fresh, but it can get a little irritating as you can no longer press the "Windows Key" (Winkey)+ "Shotcut" key to launch an application (except search and run). If you were to hit the Winkey and start typing, it searches through the list of installed programs that can be fairly helpful if you have too many of these installed and don’t want to scroll through the list all the time.

The next change is when you click on "All Programs" option, there is no new pane that slides out, instead the pane on the left simply switches to the entire list of programs and clicking on a folder opens it up in the Explorer style.

The other subtle change is that no longer do we have any more of "My" computer, etc. The "My" part is all gone and now there’s only Computer, Documents, Music and so on. The reason for the shift is that Microsoft had introduced it to make computers appear friendlier and with the growing adoption of computer as an everyday device, the "My" is not required anymore, so it was booted out.

The final change here is that on the right side of the Start Menu, the Log Off and Shutdown buttons have been improved. In fact, it doesn’t read Log Off anymore but Lock and Shutdown. Both the buttons have slide-out menus (lock has Lock and Log Off and Shutdown has the usual Stand By, Hibernate etc. along with a link to Power options, therefore, you’ll need not navigate through scores of menus to just enable hibernation.)

Windows Explorer

Windows Explorer has gone through a massive overhaul to incorporate and seamlessly merge all features of Virtual Folders, Searches etc. The layout is similar in the sense that you have the files directory tree on the left and the folder contents on the right but pretty much everything else has been revamped.

The address bar on top has been replaced by a new dynamic drop down menu bar of sorts. The way it works is that suppose you navigate to c:windowstempxyzabcdef. Now, at that location, you want to go back to another folder in c:windows. The earlier way to do it was to click on Windows on the left and then navigate to the appropriate folder on the right. But that has changed in Vista; you simply need to click on the "Windows" written in the title bar above and it will list all the folders inside the directory. After that, you can select the folder you want to go to.

The way you change your folder view from list to details has changed as well, there is now a new icon on top which, when clicked, gives you a slider that changes between the views as you slide it up or down.

Internet Explorer

The much-awaited IE7 has its beta version embedded into Vista Beta 1 as well. Interestingly enough, it really doesn’t do a terribly bad job of going head to head with Firefox. It has tabbed browsing, supports RSS and even extensions. The default interface looks ten times cooler than Firefox and is more on the lines of Safari.

A neat feature it has is the ability to launch without plugins, something akin to a safe mode in case of any virus/malware/adware attack. This feature would be especially helpful if IE continues to be the Secure Sieve it is.

So far, Windows Vista is an interesting OS. It does quite a lot of things much better than the previous versions but then it also requires way too many resources in order to work appropriately. There are also some slight glitches, but those are probably due to its beta status and nothing more. Besides, this is probably the most successful and productive Beta that ever came out of Microsoft.

These are our first impressions on the Beta release of the upcoming Windows OS. As we get more familiar with the interface, we will take this series forward with more information on what Windows has done well and what it has failed miserably at. Stay tuned…