How dare Hewlett-Packard not spy on me?!

Okay, Patricia Dunn, now it’s my turn. I’m going to put you in your place. I could write a scathing satire on your products and tech support. I could put my hardboiled consultant, Mac Rowe, on your trail for yet another Gigglebytes film noir parody. I could even call your company Youwett-Laggard.

But no. You ignored me, so I’m going to ignore you. I’m going to spend this column making fun of Microsoft!

Larger than Vista

Just this week I received and installed Release Candidate 13 of Redmond’s next big operating system upgrade, Windows Vasta. It lives up to its name.

The first thing you notice when you boot Vasta is the astonishingly lovely, multicolored, three-dimension screen. You could easily spend the whole day just looking at this magnificent user interface. In fact, if you don’t have the fastest, most powerful computer now available, you probably will.

I’m not just talking about glorious wallpaper (now renamed That Picture on Your Desktop). Everything has changed. The right side of the desktop is now taken up by three (or more) gadgets: boxes too small to be called windows but too big to be called icons. There is, for instance, an analog clock, which is really useful if you remember how to read one. There’s a slide show, in case you want to be distracted by random postage stamp-sized pictures, and something called “View Headlines” that allows you to read a title that says “View headlines.”

Bring up a window and you’ll see another amazing Vasta feature: transparency. No, Microsoft isn’t sharing its code. Transparency means that you can see what’s behind a window’s edges and title bar as if you were looking through a piece of tinted, dirty transparent plastic. This is extremely useful if you forget what a tiny sliver of your wallpaper--excuse me, your That Picture on Your Desktop--looks like.

The user interface has been vastly improved. Consider the Start button, which has been causing confusion since Windows 95. Now Microsoft has brilliantly solved the classic “Why must we click Start to stop Windows?” problem; the button no longer contains the word Start. Of course, it’s still called the Start Button in all official documentation; Microsoft doesn’t want to confuse anyone.

Secure All Batches

From the start, Microsoft wanted to make Vasta the most secure and least vulnerable version of Windows ever, a goal that most experts agree shouldn’t be all that difficult. So it isn’t surprising that Vasta’s designers have chosen other options. Consider how Vasta treats non-administrator, regular users. As every XP owner knows, logging on as a limited user rather than an administrator protects Windows by blocking viruses, spyware, and useful programs. Vasta turns limited accounts into a useful working environment via a new name: normal accounts.

Another new security feature is Data Space Layout Randomization. In order to keep hackers from infecting and accessing your information, Vasta randomizes everything. After all, even the most talented cyber-criminal can’t access your sensitive data if it’s completely beyond your own reach.

Windows Firewall has also been vastly improved. In fact, Microsoft has increased its power and capabilities to the point where it can be accurately described as a “firewall.”

Once you feel secure, you can open and work with your photos and documents without worry. At least you can if you can find them. Which brings us to:

Needle in a Data Stack

Microsoft has improved Windows Vasta’s search capabilities almost to the point of competence. Search boxes are now all over the place. Click the Unnamed Start Button, and there’s a search box. Bring up Windows Explorer (still, for some reason, called “Windows Explorer”), and there’s a search box. Do the wrong thing and bring Windows to a crashing halt, and you’ll get the Blue Screen of Death--with a search box.

Vasta’s searches can go a long way in helping you organize photos, especially when combined with “tags.” (Tags are a wholly new metadata feature, identical to XP’s “keywords,” except that Microsoft hopes that people will discover their existence.) For instance, let’s assume that you’re examining the My Pictures folder, now called Someone’s Pictures,” looking for photos of your daughter, Bruce. You simply type “Bruce” into the search box, and get every photo with the word Bruce in the file name.

Of course, that’s not much help. Luckily, you’ve taken a few hours to assign every possible tag to each of your thousands of photos. That means a search for files tagged “Bruce” will bring them all up. So you click the “Advanced Search” button, type Bruce into the Tag field, and instantly get every picture tagged Bruce--or at least those tagged Bruce that also have that word in the file name. Since you want photos tagged Bruce regardless of their names, you delete the word from the file name search field. Vasta then assumes you’re no longer doing a search and returns you to Windows Explorer.

This is a whole new concept in file searching!

Still more features will be available in the Windows Vasta Ultimate Edition DVD. These include full drive encryption, an Extremely Remote Desktop, and a Bill Gates commentary track.

© Copyright 2006 by Lincoln Spector