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The Windows Media Player has been part of Microsoft’s digital media capability for quite some time; it’s always cited as one of the main players (no pun intended) in the digital content-processing arena. Version 11, shipping as a core component of all the Vista editions, delivers a total facelift for Media Player, with new capabilities for supporting the latest video and audio formats as well as a much-improved interface and a whole set of new metadata search and organizational features.

This latest version of Windows Movie Maker (version 6.0) has a multitude of interface and capability enhancements, such as an improved Preview pane and enhanced transitions and effects, but more important, the inherent support for the high-definition video (HDV) format coupled with the integration of DVD-burning facilities (Windows DVD Maker) has elevated the package from a low-ranking amateur to a fully fledged movie production and publishing facility.

Windows Photo Gallery is a great addition to the Vista family; it integrates well with other digital media products, such as Windows Movie Maker and Windows DVD Maker, and it offers a great range of capabilities for manipulating digital photographs and home movies.

Previously, because of licensing restrictions, the Windows operating system family contained no inherent support for creating your own MPEG-2 formatted DVDs—the only way to author such creations was to purchase an additional authoring package that included the necessary MPEG-2 encoder.

Media Center is a software extension to Vista that offers a central controlling function for all your home theater and multimedia entertainment needs. Media Center provides the following:

Windows Vista’s general level of security is light years ahead of Windows XP. Put another way, the five long years along the road to the gold version of Windows Vista gave Microsoft time to incorporate the best of the security feedback it received and to put into place mechanisms to protect users from threats and themselves.

As you are probably aware, the Windows Firewall was introduced in Windows XP Service Pack 2 and was a great improvement to overall client security. With Vista, the Windows Firewall is further improved, with better security features built into the standard product that cover many users’ most common complaints. For example, Microsoft has fixed the age-old concern that the previous version protected computers only from unsolicited inbound connections and not from unsolicited outbound ones—now you can do both, although you’ll have to dig into the advanced firewall to make this happen.

Spyware, malware, viruses, and annoyware (our term) are an increasingly prevalent problem these days. Traditionally, Microsoft has relied on the third-party vendor ecosystem to produce products that counteract these inconveniences and threats, but Microsoft has now determined that it’s in its best interest to address the problems itself.

Security is a large and complex topic, and it changes every time Windows is revised. In this Chapter, we’ll present six very effective steps you can take to increase security on your Windows Vista system.

The registry has become this mythical place where data crusts over and pops up in the most unexpected places. If you have ever misspelled your name when installing an application, you know exactly what we mean.