Sabarinath Nair reviews Guided Help, Vista

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Sabarinath had this to say about Guided Help:

Guided Help

While this feature is still under beta, I believe this would be an interesting feature to have. In addition to having descriptive help files, Guided Help teaches you visually how to do the tasks. It also allows you to record steps, from which you can build your own guided help for your application.

Thanks for reviewing Guided Help and thanks for your desire to have Guided Help move from beta to product.  Good news - Guided Help is no longer in beta.  Guided Help has shipped both as part of Windows Vista and as part of https://support.microsoft.com/.  There are lots of interesting next steps for Guided Help (it's not "done"), but we are out of beta and into customers hands.

Also, it's not generally intended for consumers to author your own guided help content (or even most ISVs - I talked about this in my first post about authoring guided help topics.).  Still, this is definitely an interesting direction.

As for the rest of Vista - I have difficulty articulating how many new features there really are.  Some of my favorites include Search, DVD Maker, Networking analysis, security improvements galore, ... really just tons of stuff.  Just start exploring - the photo gallery stuff is great.  Well, I'm a technology geek, but when my wife asked me to upgrade our other home computer to Vista it really showed me how much she appreciates that it's better (and not just the freecell game ;) ).  Unfortunately, I declined because it's a bit of a gutless machine (900mhtz) that trudges along on XP and is only upgradable to 512 meg of RAM - XP is snappier at that level of memory than Vista.  But Vista performs better in my experience above that threshold than XP.

Well thanks for taking the time to review Vista - I think it's a great product.  I understand your frustration with increasing software demands on hardware, but there are a lot of improvements particularly in the area of security, reliability and graphics that lead to this.  I would also like to see more work on improving the performance in the next version because I think that we can still do quite a bit better, but it's a complex problem.