Most useful Vista feature

David Pogue, author of Windows Vista: The Missing Manual, says (in this podcast interview) that the new feature in Vista that people will use the most is the new instant search on the Start Menu, see the screen shot.

Scot Finnie and Preston Gralla were also impressed by Vista's Search Features, but were less impressed by the variety and inconsistency between them. There's Start --> Search, which shouldn't (but will) be confused with, the Search box that's right on the Start menu, and then there's also Advanced Search. And the results are not always the same in the normal and the advanced versions.  Another complaint they have is that indexing speeds up the searching, but not everything is indexed.

My guess is that Pogue is right about people using the box on the Search menu, but if there's better functionality elsewhere, why did MS bury it?

Pogue also thinks the days of runaway viruses are behind us. Did he drink the MS Koolaid or will all those security features on all of those Windows machines really make a difference? I think he's probably being a little naive ... cough understatement cough ... but if that were true, I'd elect the new security features the most useful.

Related Items:

Review:  Hands On: A Hard Look at Windows Vista
Book Excerpt:  Vista Search: A 'Star Feature' Of The New OS
Podcast: David Pogue's ideas about Vista in corporate environments, duration: 10 minutes