Windows Media Player 11
Though WMP11 has been out for some time now, under Vista it really looks at home. It adds a few interesting visual styles, a far more intuitive user interface and is a lot less cluttered as compared to the previous versions. The cover art which is retrieved when you make a play-list looks pretty nifty and adds to the visual appeal of Windows Media Player.
Windows Photo Gallery
Taking a leaf out of Apple’s book Microsoft has introduced a new application for photo management. Appropriately called Windows Photo Gallery, it is a comprehensive tool for not only viewing your photographs but also offers file management and editing options.
As Windows Vista now supports meta-tags, locating files has gotten a whole lot easier. When the Photo gallery application is launched, it automatically shows you your collection of digital pictures in a thumbnail. These thumbnails can be manipulated in many ways, by filtering them by date, by tags and even by ratings. Unlike its previous Windows Photo Gallery offers quite a few editing options. You can adjust the color rations, reduce or increase gamma balance, manipulate the size and exposure of a picture and crop it too. There is of course a red-eye tool present too.
The Photo gallery has an interesting slides-show functionality which makes photo viewing a pleasure. It is triggered by pressing F11 and offers various on-screen options. These h allow you to control the speed of the show, set a theme for your photo (i.e. a frame or a collage or a glass like aspect to the photo) and manipulate the size.
Windows DVD Maker.
This is an updated tool, the successor to Windows CD maker which was a part of Windows XP.It is a very basic DVD-authoring tool that supports burning files and making basic DVD movies. For any other kind of DVD authoring you are better of getting a more established tool like Nero.
This ends the second part of our review. In our final part we will explore Vista’s system performance enhancements and Vista's performance in real-life conditions.



