How Windows Vista Affects You

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Road Warriors

The legion of mobile users who take their notebooks on the road will find a lot to like in Vista. The new Mobility Center makes it easy to quickly monitor and change important settings such as the screen brightness, speaker volume, and battery. Vista also comes with a new Mobile PC icon in the Control Panel that gives notebook users easy access to other settings related to notebooks, such as the display and audio devices.

Users who lug their notebooks with them to give presentations will make good use of the Vista Presentation Settings. This new feature enables you to specify several different notebook settings relating to giving a presentation, including turning off the screen saver, deactivating system alerts (such as incoming email messages), setting the speaker volume, and choosing a desktop background. When you're about to give a presentation, you can apply all of these settings with just a few clicks of the mouse.

In the long run, perhaps the most useful of Vista's new mobility features will be Windows SideShow, which enables a notebook manufacturer to add a small, secondary display to the outside of a notebook case, and enables Vista to display information on that secondary display such as calendar data, email messages, and Media Player "now playing" data and playback control seven if the computer is in sleep mode or turned off.

Small Business Owners

I mentioned earlier that Windows Vista is the closest that a Microsoft OS has come to being a complete system. If you're a small business owner on a budget, the addition of Windows Calendar, Windows Defender, and the bidirectional Windows Firewall should help your bottom line. Of course, you'll still likely need mainstream business tools such as a spreadsheet, database, and accounting package.

Most small businesses lack an IT department, so Vista's simple installation, easy network setups, new monitoring tools such as the Reliability Monitor, and myriad diagnostic tools should help most businesses reduce third-party IT costs.

Gamers

One of Microsoft's goals with Vista is to turn the PC into a viable gaming platform that can compete with or even exceed the capabilities of dedicated platforms such as the Xbox 360 and forthcoming PlayStation 3. To that end, Vista introduces a number of gaming features, including the Game Explorer and support for ESRB ratings that I mentioned earlier. Vista also supports a number of game-related metadataincluding the last date you played the game, the game version and release date, and the genre (such as Shooter or Strategy). Vista also comes with built-in support for peer-to-peer gaming, enabling you to play along with others on your network.

Microsoft is also making it easier for game developers to write games for the PC by giving programmers access to WinSAT metrics, implementing the powerful DirectX 10 API, defining game-definition files that enable the game to appear in the Game Explorer, and putting developer-friendly touches into the Game Explorer: links to the developer's community and support web pages, automatic update of games, and more.

Parents

When it comes to kids and computers, most parent want to know two things about a new operating system:

• Can it help protect my kids from others?

• Can it help protect my kids from themselves?

Windows Defender, Internet Explorer Protected mode, and the bidirectional Windows Firewall all work to ensure that kids can't download and install viruses, spyware, Trojan horses, and other malware. Also, Vista's support for ESRB and other game-rating systems will help you make decisions about which games your kids can play. Note, too, that it's important to set up younger kids with their own standard user account to ensure the full effects of User Account Control.

With accounts set up for the kids, you can also take full advantage of the new set of Parental Controls in Vista. This will enable you to restrict website content and games, block specific programs, and set time limits on computer usage.

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