What's New in Windows Vista?

New Ways to Search

One of the major overhauls in the Vista user interface is the ability to search for (and locate) information on your hard drive. Good thing. With hard drives commonly ranging in the 250GB to 1TB for personal storage, chances are pretty fair that you're now managing as much sheer data as many large companies, and indeed even entire governments, did a mere quarter century ago.

In this section, we'll look at some of the new Search capabilities built into the Vista operating system.

Using the Search on the Start Menu

For starters, there's the Start menu. This is certainly nothing new to Windows users - it's still there waiting to help you in the desktop's lower-lefthand corner by default, but it has been updated with some new features.

In general, the Start Menu is designed so that your searches for files and folders on your computer are less "mouse driven" than they were before. If you hold your mouse pointer over the All Programs folder, for example, the Programs submenu opens in the same navigation pane rather than in a cascading menu/submenu scheme. In other words, you'll spend less time (and aggravation) chasing submenus all over your monitor's screen.

But the biggest change is how Vista directs you to the new Search. Click the Start menu and the cursor blinks in the Search entry box, ready to help retrieve a program, a file, or just about anything stored on your computer. In other words, Search is Vista's mechanism to accomplish the goal of reducing "mouse-driven" ...