On the face of it, Windows Vista looks as though it might be little more than its predecessor, Windows XP, with some extra double glazing on top, courtesy of fancy visual effects.

However, behind the scenes, Microsoft’s programmers have been hard at work creating new ways to find and organise files.

The result? A filing system that’s familiar enough to use almost immediately, but which also contains new features that make XP look like a forgetful old duffer.

Thanks to services such as Google, we’ve become used to finding the stuff we want with relative ease, whether it’s a document about Renaissance medicine, some clipart suitable for the local sports club website or a photo of a melting iceberg.

It’s not just Google either ­ these days everything falls over itself to help us find definitions (www.dictionary.com), people (www.facebook.com), photos (www.flickr.com) and pretty much whatever else we want.

So why shouldn’t the PC on our desk be able to do the same? With Windows Vista, it can straight out of the tin. That’s not to say there’s no effort involved, but thanks to several new features Vista is able to find and organise all kinds of files and documents better than before.

Searching
The new search feature is a vast improvement on the one offered by Windows XP. For a start, it can be used from the Start button and from individual folder windows. Second, it’s about a zillion times faster than previous versions. It also starts finding things as soon as the first character has been typed into a search box. Try it.

Click the Start button and then begin typing in the word ‘Autumn’ one character at a time. As the ‘A’ appears, Vista begins listing items such as ‘Autoplay’, but by the time ‘Autu’ has been typed in, you’ll see ‘Autumn Leaves’ ­ one of the photographs that’s included in Vista’s Sample Pictures folder ­ and in this example, the very thing we’re looking for.

The new Search feature will pick up items from anywhere in Vista’s index of files ­ and that’s the reason it’s so fast, because it looks through an index for matches, rather than rummaging through the actual files as XP does. Vista builds its index of a PC’s hard disk contents when it’s not doing other things, and chances are most people won’t even notice the process going on; it’s also possible to add or remove folders from the index, or store it elsewhere to increase performance even more.

As well as finding file names (like ‘Autumn Leaves’ above) Vista can also look inside documents and scan the contents. To see this in action, we’ll have to cheat a bit and either find a document that we know contains a particular word or phrase, or create one and then save it in the Documents folder (this is the default so there’s no need to change any settings).

Having done that, click the Start menu and then open the Documents folder. Click in the empty Search box at the top right and then type in the word or phrase and Vista will once again retrieve the right document (click the Organize button, Layout and then Preview Pane and it’ll display the contents of certain files as well). It’s not even necessary to add Google-style double quote marks in order to find the whole phrase rather than the individual words ­ Vista can sort it out unaided.