After two years of rumors, delays, public betas, and release candidates, it seems as if we have been living with Vista for so long that the formal release of Microsoft's followup to Windows XP is anticlimactic. Who doesn't know by now that Microsoft is aiming for more Mac-like simplicity and user-friendliness? That so much attention has been placed on beefing up security? That the OS now tries to manage the thousands of images and videos we have accumulated? And that the Redmond wizards hope to use new memory management tricks and even flash memory add-ons to improve performance?
   
Microsoft began working on its new operating system in May 2001. Code-named "Longhorn," it promised hundreds of changes to Microsoft's ubiquitous OS, including an improved graphical interface, better search capabilities, and updated networking, security, multimedia, and display features. Developing Windows Vista took more than five years, and it's speculated to have cost roughly $7 billion. That's right, $7 billion-or equal to what it costs NASA to launch more than 15 space shuttles (at $450 million each). To cut to the chase, were all these promises and a monumental investment worth the wait? As you will see, our answer is "yes"-with only a few caveats along the way.
 
We had a month of everyday experiences with the final beta versions of Vista and also put the complete build that Microsoft released to manufacturers through its paces. For our evaluation we used the feature-rich Home Premium edition of the OS, which sports the graphically-rich Aero interface and Media Center functionality but without the remote desktop and encryption capabilities of the Ultimate edition. Our test notebook, an HP Pavilion dv9000t, was tricked out with an AMD Turion 64 X2 dual-core processor, 2GB of system memory, Nvidia GeForce Go 7600 graphics, and 120GB of disk space, so we were not wanting for power. On this system at least, Vista ran smoothly and with little evidence of excessive overhead.
 
To give the new OS a thorough evaluation, we concentrated on the ten features that we think have been most enhanced or are most integral for notebook owners. Since Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Media Player 11 are available to Windows XP users, we skipped those applications for this review, but based on our past reviews of each, both IE7 and WMP 11 are substantial and welcome upgrades that make the very good Vista all the better. How does the core of this ambitious OS stack up? Read on.