XP , it seems has been shown the door to promote Vista; which has been desperately seeking the limelight. People are obviously made to switch to Vista or given the option, if they feel reluctant to do so, they can downgrade to Windows which is integrated as an option by default with Vista.

So why should you to choose to step down to Vista ?

Lets understand.

There are many features that can be compelling for consumers to switch to Vista:

1. Aero Interface: As was debated from long, Windows interface are not so appealing. But ironically, this interface is the most beautiful interface Windows have ever had. This is the cleaner interface with appeasing effects and some bit a clone for Mac’s visual interface and surely shows some good work at Microsoft’s part. It is an eye candy with efficient menus, afresh Start menu, live thumbnails, icons and in built animated effects.

2. Live Thumbnails: Flipping across multiple sites is really a tedious job and often makes the users clinch his fists as the web speeds sometimes are very erratic. So if you are habitual of opening multiple sites simultaneously while working, Live Thumbnail will be much appreciated by you. The feature will allow your PC to display thumbnail of all the opened screens once you hover mouse on the taskbar. The thumbnail will show program, document name and web site name of that window.

3. Reinvented Search Feature: The search option in PC is a blessing for the users who work with multiple files and forget the location of the file after closing it. Windows Vista has further polished this feature to the extent that users can even fall in love with it. The new search technology integrated in Vista begins at Start within Windows Explorer, and probe every possible location of file storage; the one which is unexplored by you even. The search method uses the indexing algorithm to make the search faster and efficient. The powerful advanced search tool helps you to limit your search by date, file size, author, tags, and location. Even the new feature offers you the option to save searches for future reference.

4. Windows Photo Gallery: This is a killer application of Windows Vista which is very appealing and allows you to import photos from a digital camera. The feature is an improvement over the Apple's iPhoto and Google's Picasa; the tags like .jpeg or .tiff are are stored directly in the file as metadata, which you can use to search, sort, and filter images in Photo Gallery.

5. Windows Flip 3D: Flipping across the windows using Alt Tab is the common shortcut used by the users. But still it’s not sure which window will get opened as only icons are displayed in the pane. For instance if two word docs are open, it is not sure that the one you want to view gets displayed. The confusion is eradicated for ever by the amendment in Vista. Pressing Alt Tab will spring Windows Flip 3D into action and the thumbnails of all the open applications will be displayed.

It’s non-debatable that Vista is RAM eater but low costs for memory are not the bottlenecks; the operating system offers various killer applications which are unarguably the best bets for Windows Vista to make it trial worthy.

Renu Singh, ITVoir Network