Here are just a few of the new features Vista road warriors may encounter:
- HotStart: Just the touch of a button brings your laptop to life, instantly ready to play movies, television, music or PowerPlay presentations without waiting for the operating system to boot up.
- Meeting Space: Join in workgroup team meetings to collaborate on projects no matter where you are. Just click buttons to invite others to join, start a presentation or share handout material.
- Sideshow: Support for small secondary screens that some laptops and other devices will soon be sporting to display information about the system, or for playing music, all without the computer being switched on.
- Sidebar: Displays frequently accessed information and Gadgets — mini programs that show useful information such as currency conversion, weather forecasts or postcodes on the desktop. Microsoft is promising a range of business-oriented Gadgets in the near future.
- Sync Centre: A single space where you can speedily and easily synchronise data with another PC, a personal digital assistant or smart mobile phone.
- Better tablet technology: if you use a tablet PC, you’ll find it easier to enter information with a pen. Handwriting recognition is more reliable and a new feature called Pen Flicks allows you to navigate a screen or call up shortcuts with a few easy gestures of the pen.
- ShadowCopy: A system that lets you go back to earlier versions of files, even if you have accidentally deleted the latest, or have had second thoughts about changes.
- ReadyBoost: A tiny flash memory key drive in a USB port allows a laptop to use its memory, usually used for storing files, as extra system memory, boosting performance and enabling more apps to run at the same time
Vista will come in seven versions. Three are for consumers, two for small business and two for enterprise-level users. Pricing has yet to be revealed. Within those versions are four levels of what Microsoft calls visual experience: Classic (think Windows 2000), Basic, Standard and the colourful all-new Aero interface.
Aero looks a bit like Apple’s Mac OS X, with semi-transparent windows and lots of colourful three-dimension effects. Much of it is what the Yanks call eye-candy, but some is genuinely useful.
Windows Flip 3D, for example, displays all open applications as a stack of live windows, through which you navigate by turning the scroll wheel on your mouse. They roll past like cards on an old-fashioned Rotodex. It’s neat, efficient and compelling. Microsoft says a number of software developers are working on applications that will make much more intensive use of Aero.
The trouble for road warriors is that Aero makes hefty demands on system and video memory. Laptops are liable to run hot and battery life — at least with the beta versions of Vista — is drastically reduced.
Microsoft says it is working with notebook PC manufacturers to improve battery life, and it believes the final version of Vista may not be as demanding on power.
We’ll see, but Double Click reckons if you’re a road warrior thinking about a new machine to run Vista, you should give those Celeron-powered sub-$900 cheapies a miss. Go for a model with a Core Duo processor, or equivalent, at least 1GB of RAM and a top-quality video graphics processor. Prices for this type of machine start at about $1350.
Source: http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,19570577%5E15309%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html
Or just buy a Mac 
You know, there were times when I would never have imagined I would say that. And I never touched a M*c without gloves. Now here I am thinking hmmm… maybe it’d be good to have one. But then I remember I have too much expensive computer junk around the home already.
