User Interface and Usability Changes
The fi rst thing you’ll notice when you fi re up Vista is the new user interface (UI), but many portions of the
next-gen OS were redesigned from the ground up to make it easier to use and more powerfulThe new Aero Glass interface treats each window as a ren-
dered object. It can do thumbnail previews in real time, or
simply scroll through windows.These image-preview images will smoothly scale from miniscule to
humongous at the nudge of a slider. In Vista you’ll get fancy previews
for more types of files too, including Word documents and Excel
spreadsheets.2 MAMAMAXIMXIMXIMXIMUUUUMMPPPCC JUNE 2006
Aero Glass
We’ve already talked about Vista’s 3D-rendered interface ad nau-
seum, but we’ll touch on it again here. In Vista, Microsoft chucks
the last 20 years of 2D GDI-based rendering in favor of a new
graphics model—Windows Graphics Foundation. Aero Glass
leverages the power of your DirectX 9 (or higher) graphics card to
render windows on your desktop.
That sounds neat, but what’s the benefi t? Aside from the
obvious whiz-bang transparency effect around all your windows,
the biggest improvement is that everything on your display will
scale up or down in size. So if you use an ultra-high resolution
display, but can’t read the resulting tiny fonts, you can scale
everything—the size of the text, windows, and even elements
of Windows—without any jagged edges appearing anywhere.
You’ll also be able to resize your document icons on the fl y, dis-
play advanced thumbnails (even those including live video), and
arrange and redraw windows quickly. So instead of Alt-Tabbing
through icons of the open applications, you can Alt-Tab through
thumbnails of the windows’ contents, or even fl ip through the win-
dows themselves!
In order to run Aero Glass, your machine must have a Shader
Model 2.0-compatible videocard. For all intents and purposes, thismeans any Radeon 9500 (or faster) card or any of the GeForce
6000-series boards, as well as GeForce 5000-series boards faster
than the 5700.Search
For a long time, we didn’t see the need for a more
advanced search routine. Then we spent a little time with
the new desktop search engines that have more in com-
mon with Google’s web search than with that fl ea-infested
old dog of a Windows solution. A high-speed desktop
search indexes the contents of every document, email,
instant message, and fi le on your system, so your search
is no longer restricted to the (often arbitrary) fi lename.
Sure, if you’re like us, you’ll still keep your
Documents directory hyper-organized. We’re not
about to start storing all our Word documents, photos,
and MP3s on our Desktop, and we don’t expect you
to either. But should you need to perform a desktop
search—whether it’s for your Aunt Mildred’s birthday
buried in an email, or the number of times the word
“asstastic” has appeared in Maximum PC (three total,
including this one) , the info is there for you.
Vista’s new built-in search delivers an experience that’s
virtually identical to the third-party desktop search utilities.
But unlike some of the third-party desktop searches, Vista’s
indexing process is intelligent. Instead of simply watching
for keyboard or mouse activity, Vista actually looks at CPU
usage by applications and services before it determines
that it’s safe to index. That means you won’t ever notice a
slowdown in, say, your video encode because the indexing
process starts unexpectedly.Vista Preview
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