The Windows of My Dreams (and Yours?)

Four little things that could add up to a lot--if Microsoft gets them right.

Harry McCracken is the editor in chief of PC World.

Windows Vista: There's something about the moniker of Microsoft's next operating system that brings automobile metaphors to mind. In his Full Disclosure column this month, Contributing Editor Stephen Manes says it makes him think of ancient Oldsmobiles and Dodges. For me, "Vista" summons one of those car commercials in which an SUV glides confidently to the rim of some picture-perfect canyon. Ads like that aim to exhilarate, but ultimately they're irrelevant for 97.62 percent of us.

With cars, the things that matter most are prosaic-but-practical details, from the quantity of the air bags to the quality of the cup holders. It's the same way with operating systems. Whether Vista is better than XP will depend largely on whether Microsoft adds touches that result in a more secure and convenient piece of software.

As Senior Editor Yardena Arar explains in "Windows Vista Looks Slicker, Safer," it's way too early to render a verdict on the OS. The Beta 1 test version--which is now in the hands of more than half a million developers and other techies--is mostly about technical underpinnings; the final, polished product isn't due until late next year. That means it's not too late to chime in with ideas for this upgrade. (PC World has been doing this for a while; see "Your Take on Windows' Worst Irritations" and "Wipe Out Windows Annoyances" for some of our past requests.)

The following four pleas may be mundane, but they rank high on my WinVista wish list. Microsoft, are you listening?

Button down the Start button: The world needs a better way to wrangle today's profusion of programs, files, and settings than the Start menu, which dates from an era when hard drives were measured in mere megabytes. (The Mac OS X Dock looks cooler but can be even clunkier.) Judging from Beta 1, Microsoft is at least wrestling with this issue. The Vista Start menu's default mode opens folders in place, rather than splaying menus, submenus, and submenus of submenus.

That leaves numerous Start menu puzzlements yet to be solved. F'rinstance, why does it highlight recently installed programs--but only some of the time?

Tame the system tray: Depressing factoid: My new notebook came with two dozen icons crammed into the bottom-right corner of the screen...before I installed any software myself. Even more depressing factoid: Few of the icons tell me anything I truly need to know. Vista should prevent a program from depositing anything in my system tray without my explicit permission. It also needs brain-dead-simple "Hide All" and "Show All" options. And a truly hospitable tray would roll up related items into tidy groupings, the way the taskbar already does with multiple open documents.

Make code reveal its identity: As long as spyware can jimmy its way into seemingly well-protected PCs, we'll need to use Windows' Task Manager to keep tabs on programs and processes. But Task Manager often raises more questions than it answers: A typical machine's process list may include such less-than-informative names as Ivpsvmgr.exe and ccEvtMgr.exe. Could Windows do a better job of identifying which process relates to what application? Um, yeah: Sysinternals' invaluable Process Explorer already does. For free.

Be consistently...consistent: If all Vista did was organize tools rationally and eradicate instances where the same function works differently in different parts of the OS, it would be a giant leap for Windowskind. Just installing the beta version reminded me of how much work remains undone. To get a PC on a corporate network, for instance, you'll likely need to make it a member of a domain. A sensible person (or at least, I) might assume that this setting resides in the Control Panel's Network and Internet area. But in Beta 1, it's still in the System Properties dialog box, which is filed under Hardware.

Got any last-moment to-do items for Microsoft's Windows Vista team? Drop me a line at mageditor@pcworld.com. I'll report back on my Techlog blog.