Features of Windows Vista.....

Well, I feel like typing...so here are some of the new features: * Windows Mail replaces Outlook Express, the well-known email client in previous Windows versions. It has the Phishing Filter like IE7 and a Bayesian junk mail filtering, which is enhanced through regular monthly updates via Windows Update. Also, e-mail messages are now stored as individual files rather than in a binary database to reduce frequent corruption and make messages searchable in real-time. Backing up and restoring account setup information, configuration and mail store is now made easier. * Windows Contacts, a new unified contact and personal information management application, replaces Windows Address Book (WAB). It is based on a new XML based file format where each contact appears as an individual .contact file, and features extensibility APIs for integration with other applications. It can store custom information related to contacts, including display pictures. The legacy *.wab, *.vcf (vCard) and *.csv (Comma separated values) file formats are also supported. * Windows Calendar is the new calendar application that is included in Windows Vista. It supports the popular iCalendar format as well as sharing, subscribing and publishing of calendars on WebDAV-enabled web servers and network shares. * Windows Fax and Scan is an integrated faxing and scanning application. With this users can send and receive faxes, fax or email scanned documents and forward faxes as email attachments from the computer. It replaces (or enhances) the 'Fax Services' component which was available as an optional component in Windows XP. It is available by default in the Ultimate edition and is also available in the Business and Enterprise editions. By connecting a scanner and a fax-capable modem to the computer, users can preview documents before scanning them and can choose to directly fax or email the scanned the documents. The user interface resembles that of 'Windows Mail' with preview pane, tree views etc. * Windows Meeting Space, the replacement for NetMeeting, is a peer-to-peer (p2p) collaboration application. Users can share applications (or their entire desktop) with other users on the local network, or over the Internet. Windows Meeting Space allows sharing of the desktop with other coworkers, distribution and collaborative editing of documents, and passing notes to other participants. Windows Meeting Space automatically finds other users using People Near Me, a technology that uses WS-Discovery to see other users on a local network. * Paint features updated toolbar icons and default color palette. Also, unlimited undo levels and a crop function have been added. * WordPad now supports the Text Services Framework, on which Windows Speech Recognition is implemented. Therefore, it is possible to dictate text in WordPad, and many other applications. * Sound Recorder has been rewritten and now supports recording clips of any length and saving them as WMA. Snipping Tool in Windows Vista Snipping Tool in Windows Vista * Snipping Tool, first introduced in Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, is a screen-capture tool, also included with Windows Vista that allows for taking screen shots (known as snips) of windows, rectangular areas, windows, or a free-form area. Snips can then be annotated, saved (as an image file or as an HTML page), or emailed. * The Magnifier accessibility tool uses WPF and as a result, the rendered magnified image is sharp and not pixelated. [4] * Windows Photo Gallery, a photo and video library management application. It can import from digital cameras, tag and rate individual pictures including custom metadata. It also allows basic editing of images, such as adjusting color and exposure, resizing, cropping, red-eye reduction and printing. Slideshows, with pan, fade and other effects, can also be created, and burnt to DVD. It allows custom metadata to be added to images and videos, and enables searching by the attributes. It also supports raw images natively and can open or export to any file format for which codecs are installed in the Windows Imaging Component. * Windows Movie Maker now supports editing and outputting HD video, as well as burning the output movie on a DVD. * Windows DVD Maker, a DVD creation application. Applications can also pass an XML file to DVD maker for authoring and burning. * Games: Minesweeper, Solitaire, Hearts, FreeCell and Spider Solitaire have been updated and rewritten to take advantage of Windows Vista's new graphics capabilities. Also included are entirely new games like Purble Place, as well as popular games such as Chess Titans and Mahjong Titans. InkBall, a game previously available only with Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, has also been made available in Windows Vista, while Pinball has been dropped.

Nice getting back to you shilpa. The features are: 1)Easy upgrade from windows XP to Vista 2)It was code named as longhorn before release 3)It has a great media player. 4)It has a great Office suite called Office 12 5)It comes for the 32bit and64bit processors. 6)It has scalable vector graphics which means no aliasing of the images.

Really useful information!

Windows Vista clearly is not a great new performer when it comes to executing single applications at maximum speed. Although we only looked at the 32-bit version of Windows Vista Enterprise, we do not expect the 64-bit edition to be faster (at least not with 32-bit applications). Overall, applications performed as expected, or executed slightly slower than under Windows XP. The synthetic benchmarks such as Everest, PCMark05 or Sandra 2007 show that differences are non-existent on a component level. We also found some programs that refused to work, and others that seem to cause problems at first but eventually ran properly. In any case, we recommend watching for Vista-related software upgrades from your software vendors. There are some programs that showed deeply disappointing performance. Unreal Tournament 2004 and the professional graphics benchmarking suite SPECviewperf 9.03 suffered heavily from the lack of support for the OpenGL graphics library under Windows Vista. This is something we expected, and we clearly advise against replacing Windows XP with Windows Vista if you need to run professional graphics applications. Both ATI and Nvidia will offer OpenGL support in upcoming driver releases, but it remains to be seen if and how other graphics vendors or Microsoft may offer it. We are disappointed that CPU-intensive applications such as video transcoding with XviD (DVD to XviD MPEG4) or the MainConcept H.264 Encoder performed 18% to nearly 24% slower in our standard benchmark scenarios. Both benchmarks finished much quicker under Windows XP. There aren't newer versions available, and we don't see immediate solutions to this issue. There is good news as well: we did not find evidence that Windows Vista's new and fancy AeroGlass interface consumes more energy than Windows XP's 2D desktop. Although our measurements indicate a 1 W increase in power draw at the plug, this is too little of a difference to draw any conclusions. Obviously, the requirements for displaying all elements in 3D, rotating and moving them aren't enough to heat up graphics processors. This might also be a result of Windows Vista's more advanced implementation of ACPI 2.0 (and parts of 3.0), which allows the control of power of system components separately. Our hopes that Vista might be able to speed up applications are gone. First tests with 64-bit editions result in numbers similar to our 32-bit results, and we believe it's safe to say that users looking for more raw performance will be disappointed with Vista. Vista is the better Windows, because it behaves better, because it looks better and because it feels better. But it cannot perform better than Windows XP. Is this a K.O. for Windows Vista in the enthusiast space? If you really need your PC to finish huge encoding, transcoding or rendering workloads within a defined time frame, yes, it is. Don't do it; stay with XP. But as long as you don't need to finish workloads in record time, we believe it makes sense to consider these three bullet points: * Vista runs considerably more services and thus has to spend somewhat more resources on itself. Indexing, connectivity and usability don't come for free. * There is a lot of CPU performance available today! We've got really fast dual core processors, and even faster quad cores will hit the market by the middle of the year. Even though you will lose application performance by upgrading to Vista, today's hardware is much faster than yesterday's, and tomorrow's processors will clearly leap even further ahead. * No new Windows release has been able to offer more application performance than its predecessor. Although application performance has had this drawback, the new Windows Vista performance features SuperFetch and ReadyDrive help to make Vista feel faster and smoother than Windows XP.

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