Talking about Windows Vista, we cannot pass by Internet Explorer 7. The new version of Microsoft’s browser leaves largely positive impressions, although there’s nothing very innovative in it. Most of the new features, like support for tabs, plug-ins, RSS feeds, several search engines, have been borrowed from Opera or Firefox where you could have used them for long. So, the new Internet Explorer has finally caught up with the competing browsers in functionality and even left them behind in terms of security. We mean the option of using it in protected mode and the so-called phishing filter that cuts off websites that try to access your private information (passwords, credit card numbers, etc) without your permission.

As for the protected mode, it means that all scripts and other Web content will be launched in isolation from the rest of the system to increase the overall security of the OS because malicious scripts won’t be able to access anything outside the browser to harm your computer. Among the disadvantages of Internet Explorer 7 there is the lack of a download manager. You still have to download files in the old way, without an option of continuing a download if the connection is broken or pausing a download.

Overall, the new browser is good, but might be better if it were not for certain small things that would make life easier for the user. For example, when you press Ctrl+T to open a new tab, the cursor doesn’t jump into the address bar, like in Mozilla Firefox, and you have to put it in there manually. Perhaps most of such things will be corrected in the final release of IE 7 for Windows Vista.

Speaking in general, Windows Vista doesn’t bring any dramatic changes over Windows XP for an ordinary user. The new OS just contains a lot of improvements here and there: the menus and panels are redesigned and rearranged in many places; the Search option is now more deeply integrated with the Explorer and is available everywhere; the design of all system components has been improved, etc. It’s impossible to enumerate all the changes, and that’s not our goal, after all. But we can assure you that a Windows XP user won’t take long to get used to the Windows Vista environment.

Since we’re discussed a Beta 2 version of Windows Vista, it is natural that the system performance is far from perfect, its requirements to the hardware resources are too high, and its stability is lacking. These are things unavoidable in any beta software, and they will be unavoidably corrected in the final version of the OS. It’s only after the official release that we’ll be able to make our evaluation of Windows Vista and judge its perspectives. Everything written and published before that moment should only be regarded as very preliminary information so that you could have at least a vague notion of what to expect from Microsoft’s new OS.

And now we’ve come to the goal of this review, a practical test of today’s graphics cards in Windows Vista Beta 2.