The club received a copy of Vista Beta 2 version from Mindshare. Frank Myers and I installed it and it was an adventure. We both uninstalled it. An RC1 version of Vista for $10.00 was ordered and it works better, good enough to demo.

Frank Myers has a state of the art computer and he had to download many drivers to get his video card and display recognised. My scanner is almost new and there is no driver for it.

The RC1 version is still a testing version of Vista. Improvements will be made before it ships to users. Even when it is offered for sale to home users after January 30, 2007, there will be many fixes and improvements made.

Advice from the computer experts suggests we wait before installing Vista. Some say to wait for six months after January 2007. We will be discussing Vista and will keep the members advised on the progress.

There is a lot to learn. We are in learning mode, but we know some Vista basics, and can demo them. Frank Myers and I have installed it on our computers in a second partition. The partition must be formatted with Vista, as it is a special NTFS format.

Some of the highlights of the demo I gave were…

We navigated around the desktop, looking at the features that were different from Windows XP. On the right side there is a “Gadget sidebar”. There are many gadgets available and the sidebar had three showing, an analogue clock, a slide show and a Really Simple Syndication feed (RSSfeed) display.

The RSSfeed display shows headlines from websites that offer the service. For example with IE7 you can go to website cbc.ca and the RSSfeed indicator in IE7 will turn to an orange colour. This indicates that cbc.ca offers the RSSfeed service. You click on it, follow instructions, and now your sidebar gadget will have the cbc news headlines on your desktop.

Windows Live OneCare beta program is installed. It has anti- virus and firewall protection, anti-spyware functions, PC tune-ups, backup and restore functions. For the members with their first computer it may be a good offering. I installed it as a free 90 day trial for this demo. It schedules virus and spyware scans, defrags, data backup and windows updates for you. At this time it is difficult to see what is happening and what the results are. Over the next months the software critics will let us know.

We looked at Windows Photo Gallery. New, is the Tags feature. You can assign groups of photos to a specific tag name, making it easier to find photos. Members asked if that meant the photo was copied. I looked into it, and it looks like it is not copied to have then tagged. They have a feature called “Fix”. It can do some basic adjustments to exposure, colour and cropping. When you do any of these adjustments the original photo is saved for retrieval.

Windows Mail replaces Outlook Express, but it looks similar. A new feature is “Search”. You type in what you are looking for in an email and it finds matches. There is aggressive spam filtering. If your email contains a link it could connect you to an unwanted website. This is called phishing. When Windows Mail detects a possible phishing message, it allows you to see the message but blocks the links.

There is a Windows DVD maker but my video card is not up to Vista specs to use it. They want a minimum of 128 MB video card and mine is 96MB.

You can click on Start, and go to your programs as with XP, but Vista has much more to see. You can go to “User ID” and see where your files are stored. Contacts, documents, favourites, music, saved games, videos, desktop, downloads links, pictures and searches all default to an easy to find place. No more searching for lost files.

Windows Media center looked interesting but we should read the help information first. Windows Movie Maker required the 128MB video card.

In Accessories, many of the XP items were there. That is where you find “Run”. There is a Snipping Tool. It is similar to PrintKey. You can select a part of your screen to save as a jpeg or gif file.

Vista like other new versions of Windows will take some getting used to. It will take months before most of the bugs are fixed. The critics will comment, and we will have time to discuss their advice.

There are some choices we can make. Some of these are:

1. Do nothing now.
2. Upgrade our computer and install Vista after Jan 30, 2007.
3. Buy a new Vista capable computer now with a coupon to upgrade after Jan 30, 2007.
4. Buy a new computer with no Vista coupon and get Vista later.
5. Wait until after Jan 30, 2007 and buy a new computer with Vista installed.
6. Wait until much later than Jan 30, 2007 and buy a new computer with Vista installed.

Each one of the choices has risks and benefits. If your computer dies today then you are looking at # 3 or #4. For the rest of us I suggest #1. In future meetings we will discuss the options.