Microsoft has deliberately nuked any ability to index non-local drives. Right now, that's because booting the first time would require every workstation to scan every attached network file system, and the network would die. It's good reasoning, but I also haven't been able to figure a way to add a specific network drive to my search index. I think that should be a quick upgrade and would make Search far more meaningful to corporate users -- especially if it's also an attribute I can control via Group Policy.

As stated in last week's column, I think Vista's display technologies will be the initial thorn in most desktop administrator's sides. The Aero interface is cool, but it's still flaky and requires tweaking. Plus it's guaranteed to weird out your older users. Fortunately, you can click back to an earlier XP-like display model, which is what I'd suggest for all but your most advanced users out of the gate.

Another display feature that will ding you is Sidebar. This is Vista's answer to Yahoo's Widget Engine (http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file_description/0,fid,25097,00.asp) (formerly Konfabulator). It's a place off to the side of the desktop where Vista can hold and monitor any number of desktop gadgets. This includes goodies like clocks, CPU meters, notes, calendars with active schedules, stock tickers, weather reporters -- stuff like that. Right now, performance overhead is minor: only about 50MB of RAM on average in our test box.

But that's using only the basic set of gadgets included with the beta. Microsoft is promising all kinds of new gadgets plus a public gadget-sharing site for privately developed ones. You get a whole bunch of these on many desktops, with some of those possibly shoddily developed from private programmers. There's a good chance you'll increase the call volume of your desktop support because of this. Nothing critical, but it's something to watch.

So is all this revolutionary, rather than just another rung up on the Windows product ladder? I guess that depends on how you define revolutionary. For a few Windows releases in the past -- notably 2000 to XP -- I thought evolutionary was the proper term; really just tweaking and bug fixing with relatively few new features. Not so with this release. Vista by itself is a big change from XP. In conjunction with Longhorn server, it can literally change (mostly for the better) most ways that users touch their desktops as well as the network. Revolutionary enough for me.