What possible reason can there be for this bizarre and illogical behavior? Microsoft is silent on the matter, so we may never know.

Bundled applications

An operating system by itself is a lonely thing -- simply opening and closing windows and tweaking your system gets old after a while. And so Windows Vista includes a slew of built-in applications, more than Windows XP. You'll find the old standbys, such as Notepad, WordPad, and Paint, and they're pretty much unchanged. If you've seen them in Windows XP, you've seen them in Windows Vista. But there are plenty of new ones as well. Following are the high (and low) points of the most notable apps.

Sidebar and gadgets

Either you're a software gadget person or you're not, and that distinction will go a long way toward determining whether you think Windows Vista's Sidebar and its accompanying gadgets are exceedingly cool and useful, or simply a waste of screen real estate. We fall into the pro-gadget side, and we use them all day long.