Windows Vista in a Nutshell

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Microsoft spent far longer developing Windows Vista than it did any previous version of Windows, and the results show. Everything you see and use, from the desktop to networking, searching, using the Internet, and beyond, has been overhauled. The interface includes transparent windows and windows animations; the operating system includes a series of Centers, such as the Network and Sharing Center and the Mobility Center, that make it easy to perform your most common tasks and customize how your PC works; and the search function has been baked so deep into the operating system that you need to type only a few letters of what you're looking for and the results start to show up immediately—everything from files to programs to mail to web sites. And there are plenty of other major changes as well, such as a Sidebar brimming with Gadgets that perform common tasks for you.

But it's not just what you see that has been altered, and that's not what took up most of Microsoft's time in developing this new version of Windows. Under the hood, the changes are even more dramatic, mostly having to do with security. In the years leading up to the release of Windows Vista, security had become one of the top, if not the top, concerns of most PC users. Spyware, worms, viruses, scammers, crackers, and snoopers had become ubiquitous, and because Windows is by far the most dominant operating system on the planet, it was Windows that they targeted. So Microsoft spent a great deal of effort hardening the operating system against threats. Some of this effort is visible, such as the new Windows Defender antispyware tool, the more powerful firewall, and the phishing filter built into Internet Explorer. But much of it is invisible to you, such as Windows Service Hardening, which stops background Windows services from being used by malware to damage the filesystem, Registry, or network to which the PC is connected.

The result is a new operating system that is more secure than previous versions of Windows, with a more sophisticated interface (some call it more Mac-like) and easier ways to find files and data.

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The first few releases of Microsoft Windows in the early 1980s were little more than clunky graphical application launchers that ran on top of the Disk Operating System (DOS) (see Chapter 14 for details). Version 3.x, released in the late 1980s, gained popularity due to its improved interface (awful by today's standards) and capability to access all of a computer's memory. Being based on DOS, however, it was not terribly stable, crashed frequently, and had very limited support for networking and no support for multiple user accounts.

Soon thereafter, Windows NT 3.1 ("NT" for New Technology) was released. Although it shared the same interface as Windows 3.1, it was based on a more robust and more secure kernel, the underlying code on which the interface and all of the applications run. Among other things, it didn't rely on DOS and was capable of running 32-bit applications (Windows 3.1 could run only more feeble 16-bit applications). Unfortunately, it was a white elephant of sorts, enjoying limited commercial appeal due to its stiff hardware requirements and scant industry support.

In 1995, Microsoft released Windows 95. Although based on DOS, like Windows 3.x (it was known internally as Windows 4.0), it was a 32-bit operating system with a new interface. It was the first step toward bringing the enhanced capability of the Windows NT architecture to the more commercially accepted, albeit less capable, DOS-based Windows line. Soon thereafter, Windows NT 4.0 was released, which brought the new Windows 95-style interface to the NT line. Both of these grand gestures were engineered to further blur the line between these two different Microsoft platforms. Although both operating systems sported the same interface, Windows NT still never garnered the consumer support and commercial success of Windows 95, but it did become popular for use with servers.

As time progressed, the lineage of Microsoft Windows became even less linear. Despite its name, Windows 2000 was not the successor to Windows 98 and Windows 95; Windows Me, released at the same time, had that distinction. Instead, Windows 2000 was the next installment of the NT line; it was actually known internally as Windows NT 5.0. Windows 2000 was particularly notable for being the first version of Windows NT to support Plug and Play, which was yet another move to combine the two platforms.

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Windows Vista is a significant rework of Windows, and although the basics of Windows are the same, much has changed. Here are the most significant additions and changes in Windows Vista compared to Windows XP:

Windows Aero interface: The new interface is the first thing people will notice when they run Windows Vista. It sports customizable, translucent windows (called Aero Glass); live Taskbar thumbnails that show a live preview of an underlying window when a mouse is held over the tile; and Windows Flip and Windows Flip 3D, which show thumbnails of open windows as you flip through them. As the name implies, Windows Flip 3D, shown in Figure 1-1, shows the thumbnails in three dimensions. Note that Windows Aero is not available on the least expensive versions of Windows Vista, and that it has special hardware requirements. There are three other levels of the interface that are less sophisticated than Windows Aero: Windows Classic, Basic, and Standard.

Figure 1-1: Using Flip 3D to flip through live previews of open windows
Security: Security has been enhanced at every level of the operating system, in both visible and invisible ways. Windows Defender protects against spyware, and the Windows Firewall now includes outbound as well as inbound protection. Internet Explorer runs by default in Protected Mode, which protects the operating system from assault via the browser, and it includes a phishing filter. Windows Service Hardening stops background Windows services from being used by malware to damage the filesystem, Registry, or network to which the PC is connected. Windows Vista also gives network administrators more control over network and PC security, such as the ability to restrict access to removable storage devices such as Universal Serial Bus (USB) flash drives. Parental Controls allow parents to determine how their children can use the computer and what content they can access. BitLocker Drive Encryption, when used with compatible hardware, locks down a hard disk so that it cannot be accessed if the computer is stolen. Windows Vista also includes User Account Control (UAC), which pops up warnings and asks for passwords when certain setup or customization screens or features are accessed. This enhances security, but it can also mean that you will have to type in a password or click an approval button before you can change certain system features.

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Those who were slightly confused by the two different versions of Windows XP—the Home Edition and the Professional Edition—will be flummoxed by the dizzying array of different Windows Vista versions. There are five different core Vista versions, for everyone from users with bare-bones PCs, to home users interested in multimedia, to users who work in large enterprises. As a practical matter, though, most home users will end up with Windows Vista Home Premium; those in many businesses will end up with Windows Vista Business; and those in very large corporations will run Windows Vista Enterprise Edition. Here's the rundown on the five core versions and how they differ:

Windows Vista Home Basic: As the name implies, this edition offers only bare-bones features. It's designed to run on entry-level PCs and doesn't have the Windows Aero interface, doesn't support creating video DVDs, and lacks Media Center features. It is missing more as well, such as mobility features, and it doesn't support Tablet PCs. Most likely, few people will opt for this version of Windows Vista.
Windows Vista Business: This version is aimed at users in small to medium-size businesses. It includes Windows Aero, supports Tablet PCs, and has most other Vista features. But it doesn't have a variety of multimedia features, such as the capability to create and burn video DVDs. It does, though, have a variety of features aimed at IT staff, such as wireless network provisioning capabilities, Remote Desktop connections, image-based backup, and other network administration features.
Windows Vista Home Premium: This has Aero and supports all of the multimedia Vista features, such as creating video DVDs, slide show creation, and the Windows Media Center. It supports basic networking and wireless networking, but it doesn't have network administration tools, wireless network provisioning, or the capability to connect to a domain. It also doesn't have the Encrypting File System (EFS) or image-based backup.

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Windows Vista requires considerable hardware—significantly more than previous versions of Windows. It needs a lot of graphics horsepower to support the full Aero interface, but it is possible to run Windows Vista without running Aero.

Because there are so many different versions of Windows Vista, and because it is possible to run Windows Vista without the Windows Aero interface, the exact hardware requirements are somewhat confusing. To help make things a little less confusing, Microsoft has set two levels of hardware: Windows Vista Capable and Windows Vista Premium Ready. A Windows Vista Capable PC will not be able to run all of the Windows Vista features, notably Windows Aero.

If you want to run the full Aero interface, make sure you buy a Windows Vista Premium Ready PC, because Windows Vista Capable PCs will not be able to run Aero.

A Windows Vista Capable PC has these minimum hardware requirements:

An 800 MHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
512 MB of RAM
DirectX 9-capable graphics processor (Windows Display Driver Model [WDDM] driver support recommended) with a minimum of 64 MB of memory, and preferably 128 MB
20 GB hard disk, with at least 15 GB free

A Windows Vista Premium Ready PC has these minimum hardware requirements:

A 1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
1 GB of RAM
DirectX 9-capable graphics processor that supports WDDM driver support, Pixel Shader 2.0, 32 bits per pixel, and a minimum of 128 MB of memory
40 GB hard disk, with at least 15 GB free

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When you buy Windows Vista, you buy either a full version of the operating system or an upgrade. Ideally, you'd like to upgrade, because an upgrade is less expensive than buying the full version. Only PCs with Windows XP or Windows 2000 qualify for upgrades; users with PCs running earlier versions of Windows will have to buy the full version.

Users who have Windows XP or Windows 2000 and can upgrade will have one of two choices when they do the Windows Vista installation. They can either perform an in-place upgrade or do a clean install. With an in-place upgrade, you install Windows Vista directly over your previous version of Windows, and you'll keep all of your applications, files, and settings just as they were with your earlier Windows version.

If you can't perform an in-place upgrade, you'll have to back up your files and then do a clean install of Vista—when you do that, you'll wipe out your previous operating system, files, and so on. You will then have to reinstall your applications and copy your files to the PC after the Windows Vista installation is complete.

Whether you're able to do an in-place upgrade depends on your version of Windows XP and Windows 2000, and the version of Windows Vista to which you want to upgrade. Table 1-2 details your upgrade options.

Table 1-2: Upgrade options for Windows Vista
	Home Basic	Home Premium	Business	Ultimate
Windows XP Professional	Clean install

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This chapter provides a quick overview of the features of the Windows Vista user interface, which should be sufficient to help you become oriented and make the most of the system fairly quickly. Even if you're already familiar with the basic Windows interface, you will learn about the differences between Windows Vista and previous versions, making this chapter worth a read. If you're fairly new to Windows, you should certainly take the time to read this chapter. Concepts that advanced users might consider elementary should prove enlightening. The most important thing is to get a sense of the consistency (or occasionally the lack thereof) in the Windows Vista interface so that you can tackle any new Windows application with ease.

Like most modern operating systems that use graphical user interfaces or GUIs (such as Mac OS X, Unix, and earlier versions of Windows), Windows Vista uses the metaphor of a Desktop with windows and file folders laid out on it. A program called Windows Explorer (explorer.exe) provides this Desktop metaphor.

Figure 2-1 shows the main features of the Windows Vista Desktop. The callouts in the figure highlight some of the special-purpose icons and buttons that may appear on the Desktop.

Figure 2-1: Windows Vista Desktop features

Windows Vista offers several settings that affect the way the interface responds to mouse clicks. The default setting (the way it works when you first install Windows Vista) will also be familiar to most users, as it is consistent with the way most operating systems work.

Depending on your current settings, however, Windows may respond to mouse clicks differently. See the upcoming "Alternate Behavior" section for differences. Later on, you'll see how to choose between the classic behavior and the alternate behavior.

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Like most modern operating systems that use graphical user interfaces or GUIs (such as Mac OS X, Unix, and earlier versions of Windows), Windows Vista uses the metaphor of a Desktop with windows and file folders laid out on it. A program called Windows Explorer (explorer.exe) provides this Desktop metaphor.

Figure 2-1 shows the main features of the Windows Vista Desktop. The callouts in the figure highlight some of the special-purpose icons and buttons that may appear on the Desktop.

Figure 2-1: Windows Vista Desktop features

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Windows Vista offers several settings that affect the way the interface responds to mouse clicks. The default setting (the way it works when you first install Windows Vista) will also be familiar to most users, as it is consistent with the way most operating systems work.

Depending on your current settings, however, Windows may respond to mouse clicks differently. See the upcoming "Alternate Behavior" section for differences. Later on, you'll see how to choose between the classic behavior and the alternate behavior.

If you are a new computer user who hasn't used a GUI before, here are some things you need to know:

PCs usually come with a two- or three-button mouse, although there are a variety of alternatives, such as touchpads (common on laptops), trackballs, and styluses. Many mice also include a scroll wheel which, as its name implies, you use to scroll through pages and screens.
To click an object means to move the pointer to the desired screen object and press and release the left mouse button.
Double-click means to click twice in rapid succession with the button on the left. (Clicking twice slowly doesn't accomplish the same thing.)
Right-click means to click with the button on the right.
If your pointing device has three or more buttons, you should use just the primary buttons on the left and the right, and read the documentation that comes with your pointing device to find out what you can do with the others. (You can often configure the middle button to take over functions such as double-clicking, cut and paste, inserting inflammatory language into emails, and so on.)

The default setting is consistent with most operating systems, including previous versions of Windows. You can tell whether you have the default style if the captions under the icons on your Desktop are

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Windows Vista has more ways to launch a program than just about any other operating system:

Double-click on a program icon in Explorer, on the Desktop.
Double-click on a file associated with an application to launch that application and open the file.
Pick the name of a program from the Start menu. (See "Start Menu," in Chapter 3, for details.)
Click on a program's icon in the Quick Launch Toolbar to start it. This toolbar can include icons for any programs, although by default, it often has icons only for Internet Explorer, the Desktop (click it to go to the Desktop), Switch Between Windows, and Windows Mail after you set up Windows Mail the first time.

The default icons that appear on the Quick Launch Toolbar often vary from system to system. Computer manufacturers may change what icons appear there or whether Quick Launch even appears at all.
Right-click on a file, executable, or application icon and choose Open.
Select (highlight) an icon and press the Enter key.
Type the filename of a program in the Address Bar, which is displayed above the toolbar in any folder window, in Explorer, in Internet Explorer, or even as part of the Taskbar. You may also have to include the path (the folder and drive names) for some items.
Type in the filename of a program from the Start Search box and press Enter. You may also have to include the path (the folder and drive names) for some items.
Type in the first few letters or the entire name of a program (not necessarily the filename) in the Start Search box, choose the program you want to run from the list that appears, and press Enter. For example, if you wanted to run Microsoft Word, you could type

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Any open window contains a frame with a series of standard decorations and tools, as shown in Figure 2-4. To move a window from one place to another, click on the title bar and drag. The exact tools and functions available in any window vary according to the application or tool that launches it. Figure 2-4 shows a folder window, which is perhaps the most complicated window in Windows Vista.

Figure 2-4: The decorations of a standard window: a title bar, title buttons, a menu, and a scrollable client area

Most types of windows are resizable, meaning that you can stretch them horizontally and vertically to make them smaller or larger. Just grab an edge or a corner and start dragging. There are two shortcuts that come in quite handy: maximize and minimize. If you click the maximize button (the middle button in the cluster in the upper right of most windows), the window will be resized to fill the screen. You can't move or resize maximized windows. If you minimize a window (the leftmost button in the cluster), it is shrunk out of sight and appears only as a button on the Taskbar. Minimizing is handy to get windows out of the way without closing them.

If you hover your mouse over a window that has been minimized to the Taskbar, a preview of the window's content will show up as a thumbnail on top of the Taskbar. (Note that this feature is only available on premium systems with the Aero interface enabled.)

Under certain circumstances, one or two scroll bars might appear along the bottom and far right of a window. These allow you to move the window's view so that you can see all of its contents. This behavior can be counterintuitive for new users because moving the scroll bar in one direction will cause the window's contents to move in the opposite direction. Look at it this way: the scroll bar doesn't move the contents; it moves the

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Windows' primary interface is graphical, meaning that you point and click to interact with it. The problem is that repeated clicking can become very cumbersome, especially for repetitive tasks. Luckily, Windows has an extensive array of keyboard accelerators (sometimes called keyboard shortcuts or hot keys), which provide a simple keyboard alternative to almost every feature normally accessible with the mouse. Some of these keyboard accelerators (such as F1 for help, Ctrl-C to copy, and Ctrl-V to paste) date back more than 20 years and are nearly universal, and others are specific to Windows Vista or a given application.

Appendix B gives a complete list of keyboard accelerators. Some of the most important ones are as follows:

Menu navigation: In any window that has a menu, press the Alt key or the F10 key to activate the menu bar, and use the cursor (arrow) keys to move around. Press Enter to activate the currently selected item or Esc to cancel. (Note: use the Alt or F10 key to turn on the menu in Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer.)

You can also activate specific menus with the keyboard. When you press Alt or F10, each menu item will have a single character that is underlined (such as the V in View); when you see this character, it means you can press Alt-V (for example) to go directly to that menu. Once that menu has opened, you can activate any specific item by pressing the corresponding key (such as D for Details); you don't even need to press Alt this time. The abbreviated notation for this is Alt-V+D (which means press Alt and V together, and then press D). You'll notice that it's much faster than using the mouse.

The other way to activate specific menu items is to use the special keyboard shortcuts shown to the right of each menu item (where applicable). For example, open the Edit menu in most windows, and you'll see that Ctrl-Z is a shortcut for Undo, Ctrl-V is a shortcut for Paste, and Ctrl-A is a shortcut for Select All. These are even faster than the navigation hot keys described earlier. Two notes: not all menu items have this type of keyboard shortcut, and these shortcuts work only from within the application that "owns" the menu.

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Many application and system windows use a common set of controls in addition to the ubiquitous title bar, menu bar, Control menu, and scroll bars. This section describes a few of these common controls.

Figure 2-7 shows some of the common controls in Control Panel → Appearance and Personalization → Change screen saver, and some other dialog boxes.

Figure 2-7: Common controls in Windows applications and dialogs

Some of these controls include:

(1) Tabbed dialogs: You can group settings into separate tabbed dialog pages. For example, right-click the Taskbar and choose Properties. Click on any tab to bring that page to the front.
(2) Input boxes: Type text or numbers into these boxes to change their values—for example, to change the date or time.
(3) Radio buttons: You use radio buttons for mutually exclusive settings. Clicking on one causes any other that has been pressed to pop up, just like on an old car radio. The button with the dot in the middle is the one that has been selected. Sometimes you'll see more than one group of buttons, with a separate outline around each group. In this case, you can select one radio button from each group.
(4) Button

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Files are the basic unit of long-term storage on a computer. Files are organized into folders, which are stored on disks. (In DOS, Unix, and earlier versions of Windows, folders were more often referred to as directories, but both terms are still used.) This section reviews fundamental filesystem concepts, including file-and disk-naming conventions and file types.

Like every version of Windows that preceded it, Windows Vista retains the basic DOS disk-naming conventions. Drives are differentiated by a single letter of the alphabet followed by a colon:

A:: Represents the first "floppy" (usually 3.5-inch) disk drive on the system
B:: Represents the second floppy disk drive, if present
C:: Represents the first hard disk drive or the first partition of the first hard disk drive
D:: Often represents a DVD-ROM or CD-ROM drive, but can represent an additional hard disk drive or other removable drive
E: through Z:: Represent additional hard disk drives, DVD-ROM or CD-ROM drives, Universal Serial Bus (USB) flash drives, removable cartridges such as ZIP or Jaz drives, or mapped network drives

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Many people who are new to computers will never have heard of the command line, also known as the command prompt, and sometimes (but incorrectly) called the DOS prompt. (DOS was the operating system used by most PCs before Windows became ubiquitous. The command line in DOS was the only way to start programs and manage files, and the command prompt in Windows borrows many of the command names from DOS but with vastly improved capabilities.) Users of older PCs may remember the command line, but they may be under the impression that it's purely a thing of the past. Advanced users, on the other hand—whether they remember the old days of the DOS command line or not—have probably learned the advantages of the command-line interface, even when using Windows Vista on a day-to-day basis.

You can perform many tasks faster by typing one or more commands into the Command Prompt window. In addition, some of the programs in Windows Vista are command-line-based tools, and you can run them from the command prompt as well as from the GUI. For full documentation on the command line and the Command Prompt application, see Chapter 14.

At the command prompt, you can get help on the available command-line options by typing:

commandname /?

You can see a list of all built-in command-line utilities by typing help and pressing Return.

When you run some command-line programs, such as openfiles, which displays all currently open files, you may get an error message similar to this: ERROR: Logged-on user does not have administrative privilege. You may get this message even if you are using an administrator account. There is a workaround: type cmd at the Start Search box on the Start menu (don't press Enter), right-click the "cmd" entry that appears at the top of the search results, and then choose Run as Administrator. You'll now be able to run any command-line program, such as openfiles, that gives you that error message.

Here are a few examples that show how you can use the command line as an alternative to the GUI:

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Many windows have some degree of online documentation in the form of a Help system that you can access by clicking the small question mark icon in the upper-righthand portion of the screen. The help is context-sensitive and will be relevant to the window from which you've accessed it.

In addition, you can press F1 at almost any time to display help. In some situations, pressing F1 will display only a tiny yellow message (known as a tool tip) with a brief description of the item with the focus; at other times, F1 will launch an online index of help topics. Sometimes F1 will have no effect whatsoever.

Furthermore, if you hold the pointer over many screen objects (such as a window's toolbar), a tool tip may appear. A tool tip may display nothing more than the name of the object to which you're pointing, but in other cases, it may provide additional information. For example, placing the pointer on the system clock pops up the date. You can turn tool tips off in the Windows interface by going to Control Panel → Appearance and Personalization → Folder Options → View and turning off the option "Show pop-up description for folder and Desktop items." Note that this won't necessarily turn off tool tips in other applications—only Explorer.

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You shouldn't just turn off the power to a Windows Vista machine, because it caches a lot of data in memory and needs to write it out before shutting down. See the section "Shut Down," in Chapter 3, for additional details.

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One of the responsibilities of a graphical operating system such as Windows Vista is to provide a common set of interface controls not only for itself, but also for all the applications that run on it. This chapter provides an alphabetical reference to the elements of the Windows Vista user interface, how to use them, and what tricks you can perform with them. Also included are the building blocks of the Windows Vista shell (commonly known as Explorer), such as the Desktop and the various toolbars.

In addition to imposing a certain level of user interface consistency, these common elements allow programmers to quickly piece together the interfaces for their applications with a "toolbox" of parts. Although these interface elements are available to all applications, some application designers choose instead to implement their own custom controls and interface paradigms. Sometimes this can lead to an innovative and clever design, but more often than not, it just results in a mess. A poor result typically comes not so much from the choice not to use Windows common controls, but from a failure to follow the rules of good user interface design.

The following are a few guidelines that apply to all elements of the Windows interface, which should provide some understanding of why certain elements are designed the way they are in Windows Vista. Even if you're familiar with previous versions of Windows, you'd do well to review these elements, because Windows Vista's richer visual experience alters some basic ways that Windows previously ran.

Visual clues: One of the most basic advantages of a graphical operating system is that the elements of the interface contain visual clues on how they're used. For example, buttons have a 3D look, implying that you're supposed to click them. Folder icons look like actual yellow folders you'd see in a file cabinet, reinforcing the notion that they are containers that hold your documents. Folder icons in Windows Vista let you actually look inside those folders by showing a preview of the contents within—for example, so you can see that one folder holds photographs and another contains Word documents, as shown in Figure 3-1.

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This chapter doesn't cover only the building blocks of the interface, it also covers all the elements of the interface itself—including all the applets, controls, and features that make up the interface and let you customize it, such as the Control Panel, Windows Aero, the Windows Sidebar, and Gadgets. In addition, it discusses how to personalize your Desktop, the Taskbar, and the System Tray. Windows Vista offers a richer visual experience than previous versions of Windows, and its interface is far more open to customizing and tweaking. This chapter will show you all the ways you can control Windows Vista to your heart's content—everything from customizing the transparency of windows to changing the system font size to displaying Gadgets, and more.

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At the heart of Windows Vista are the filesystem and the files in it; without files, there's no reason to use a computer, after all. When Windows Vista was first announced, Microsoft had big plans for a completely redone filesystem, along with powerful search tools, all built on top of a new filesystem database.

Reality intruded, and those plans had to be curtailed. Still, despite that, the ways to navigate your hard disk and find files have been dramatically upgraded compared to previous versions of Windows. Windows Explorer has gotten a face-lift, along with new capabilities for filtering and viewing files. And the new Search is one of Windows Vista's best new features. Not only is it available almost everywhere, but it's also lightning fast and includes considerable new ways to search, including the ability to save searches for future use. This chapter covers that, along with all other aspects of the filesystem, Windows Explorer, and Search.

Here is an alphabetical reference of entries in this chapter:

Explorer	Folder and Search Options	OpenFiles
File Compare (comp)	Folder Properties	Search
File Compare (fc)	Indexing Options	Shadow Copies
File Expansion Utility	Label	Subst
File Properties	NTFS Compression Utility	Windows Explorer

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Internet Explorer has long been the most popular browser in the world, but before the launch of Windows Vista, it had became the most maligned browser in the world as well. There's good reason for that. Although newer browsers such as Firefox continually added new features such as tabbed browsing and security help, Internet Explorer changed little from version to version. It began to look down at the heels—and worse, it was becoming less useful than Firefox and other browsers.

The launch of Windows Vista changed all that. Microsoft took the opportunity to give Internet Explorer a thoroughgoing makeover, and it is a success. The Vista-based browser now includes tabbed browsing, plenty of security features, and a more modern, streamlined interface, making it easier than ever to use.

This chapter offers a guide to all of Internet Explorer's most valuable features and shows you how to customize them. It doesn't, however, cover general Internet features, such as adding a new connection or troubleshooting connections. For that, turn to Chapter 7.

Here is an alphabetical reference of entries in this chapter:

Add-On Manager	Internet Options	Pop-Up Blocker
Alt Menu	Internet Options Privacy Tab	Print Preview
Content Tab and Content Adviser	Internet Options Security Tab	RSS Feeds
Delete Browsing History	Page Menu	Search Bar
Favorites Center

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Internet Explorer has long been one of the most insecure parts of Windows, but with Windows Vista, Microsoft finally turned its attention to plugging many of those security holes. New to Vista are a phishing filter that can cut down on Internet scams, and Protected Mode, in which Internet Explorer is segregated from the rest of the operating system. Vista also includes previous security features such as cookie handling, and a Pop-Up Blocker tool as well.

As you'll see in this section, there is no single location in Internet Explorer that lets you handle security, so you'll have to try the various locations listed here. This chapter covers security-related features found directly inside Internet Explorer. In addition to what's here, Vista has other Internet-related security and privacy tools, such as Windows Defender, Parental Controls, and the Windows Firewall. Turn to Chapter 8 for details about these and other security features.

See what ActiveX controls and add-ons are running in Internet Explorer, and disable or enable them.

To open

Internet Explorer → Tools → Manage Add-ons

Description

Internet Explorer allows a variety of add-ons and ActiveX controls to run inside it. Many of these are required for the basic operation of the browser, but many others add extra functions, such as the Google Toolbar, which lets you search Google from directly within Internet Explorer. Unfortunately, spyware and other malware may also run as add-ons. In addition, sometimes add-ons conflict with one another.

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Windows Mail, the mail reader built into Windows Vista, is the successor to Outlook Express, which was built into previous versions of Windows. There have been some cosmetic and feature changes between Outlook Express and Windows Mail, but to a great extent, the basic operations of the mail program have remained the same.

Microsoft may have named the mail client Windows Mail because of the confusion between Outlook and Outlook Express. Outlook, shipped with Microsoft Office, is a more full-featured mail reader and includes a built-in calendar, task list, and other tools, so it's possible that Microsoft renamed Outlook Express to better differentiate the two programs. This is somewhat ironic, because Microsoft decided to name the email program Outlook Express in the first place to imply that it was a "lite" version of Outlook, even though there was really no relationship between the programs.

Even though Outlook offers more features, Windows Mail is a powerful email program. It includes spam filtering, good searching features, the capability to create rules to automatically handle incoming mail, and more.

Although Windows Mail is much like Outlook Express, there have been a number of changes, deletions, and additions to the program:

New toolbar: A new toolbar has been added, just below the menu, that gives access to Windows Mail's most commonly used features, such as creating, replying to, and forwarding mail; sending mail; printing mail; deleting mail; and searching.
Junk email filtering: Windows Mail includes what Microsoft calls SmartScreen technology to filter out spam; Outlook Express didn't include built-in junk mail filtering.
Quick search: In the upper-right corner of the main screen in Windows Mail is a Search box, much like the one in Internet Explorer, that lets you do a quick search through all of your messages.

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Windows Vista is the first version of Windows developed at a time when networking, via home networks, corporate networks, and the Internet, has become truly ubiquitous. Because of that, it was designed from the ground up with networking in mind. In addition, Windows Vista has many built-in features designed for mobile computing, which is particularly important because laptop computers have become as common as desktops.

This chapter covers all aspects of networking and mobility, from basic networking terminology and setup to configuring and managing wired and wireless networks, sharing files and resources, using Windows Vista's built-in networking applications such as Windows Meeting Space, using mobile features, and finally, using Windows Vista's many useful command-line networking tools.

Here is an alphabetical reference of entries in this chapter:

Change Workgroup or Domain	Network and Sharing Center	Presentation Settings
Connect to a Network	Network Connection Properties (Includes Wired and Wireless Connections)	Remote Desktop Connection
Connection Manager Profile Installer	Network Connection Status	Route
Create Shared Folder	Network Map	Set Up a Connection or Network
Finger	Network Projector	Sync Center
FTP

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