Software giant Microsoft releases Windows Vista to consumers on 30 January.

The new version of the venerable Windows operating system has been more than five years in development and much hangs on its success.

Below is a brief tour of Vista's new looks and a guide to some of the key features in the software.

A New Look

One of the biggest changes in Vista will be obvious as soon as users set eyes on the main display.

Gone are the flat Windows panes in favour of a 3D display called Aero. The flexibility of this will be familiar to anyone who has played a recent PC game. In this inteface the separate panes for each program you have running can be displayed in different ways and at different angles. They can even be stacked or staggered.

As the interface is hardware driven if users do not have a decent graphics card they may not see all the improvements. To get the most out of it Microsoft recommends a graphics card that works with DirectX9 and has a minimum 128MB of graphics memory.

Without this graphical ability, Windows Vista will look very like Windows XP does now.

Graphic effects

The improvements in technology behind the Vista interface makes possible all kinds of special effects that can be applied to the Windows you have open.
For instance, Windows no longer need to be solid and the edges of each pane can be made translucent to give a better idea of what lurks behind the program you are working on.

Other changes to the main interface include live thumbnails for each application on the main desktop taskbar. Hover over minimized applications and the thumbnails will pop up giving you an idea of what is happening with that program.

Helping hand

In some respects Windows Vista helps Microsoft catch up with many of the technologies that rivals, such as Apple and Google, have been touting long before now.

A case in point is the instant search tool found in Vista. Searching in Windows XP is an exercise in frustration and the only way to do it better was to download and install an add-on program.

With Vista the search tools are constantly running, logging what you are doing and what you are doing it with. The result is that, as you type in search terms, Vista starts populating a list of what you might be looking for.

Not only can you search for files you can look for applications too. No longer do you have to remember where something is on a menu, the search tool will take you there. It is an acknowledgement of how important searching has become.

The search tool can be refined to only look for applications, specific file types or just on the net.

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