-- Microsoft gave the Parental Controls Control Panel and MeetingSpace ad hoc peer-collaboration program a dusting off and revised their settings and user interfaces.

-- Windows Photo Gallery, Movie Maker and DVD Maker have each received tweaks from the development team since Vista Beta 2. Photo Gallery may sound like eye candy, but in an increasingly image-rich business environment, it may be the most useful new applet in Vista.

-- Vista supports the HD-DVD and Blu-ray high-definition DVD formats.

Handling hardware

Vista RC1 does a better job than previous releases of automatically connecting to the Internet after initial setup to install drivers for hardware not included in the Vista driver pack. Two test machines used for this story had multiple devices that Vista's installation program wasn't able to configure properly. While the new operating system wasn't able to online-update the Linksys gigabit NICs in these machines, once those drivers were added manually, Vista was able to grab drivers for other devices.