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By default Windows XP comes with virtually nothing to protect the system against malware -- save for the Windows Firewall, which is not really an anti-malware system anyway.  If you want to do something about malware in XP, you'll need to turn to a third-party product.

With Vista, this has changed, although it's still a subject of broad debate if it's changed for the better.  Microsoft's own anti-malware product, Windows Defender, comes installed with Vista and is on by default.  If you want to use it, this guide will walk you through the basics of Defender and how to make it work for you; if you'd rather do without it entirely (and substitute in another, Vista-compatible protection program), I'll of course talk about how to disable it.  (If you want to disable it now, skip ahead to section 2.1.5.)

One of the features touted in both Windows XP and Windows Vista is a set of power-conservation features that encompass both desktop and notebook PCs.  Saving power on a notebook PC is an obvious benefit, but reducing desktop power consumption has now become a much bigger deal than it might have seemed even five years ago.  With Intel and AMD rolling out CPUs that boast of less wattage, it makes sense for Microsoft to provide additional fine-grained control over power consumption on their end.

To a high degree, that's what they've done with Windows Vista, and XP users are going to want to know how to dig into all that and make use of it.

Two of the new file-organization concepts that Windows Vista has brought to the table are outgrowths of existing ideas that may be familiar to some people but not to others: tagging and stacking  (or stacks).  In this edition of the XP Guide to Vista I'll be exploring these two features in tandem.

As many of us know, Windows XP had its own indexed search system, but it was one of XP's most underused and badly-implemented idea.  Vista's systemwide search system takes the same basic idea -- crawl the most commonly-used directories of the user's PC for content which can be indexed for fast searching -- and gets it mostly right.

The bad news: if you're used to the way XP does searching, you're going to need to learn how to do this from scratch.  The good news: the new search system, while it does have its quirks, can be learned and modified relatively easily.  The best news: it works like magic.

Like many other key functions in Vista, the way users access networking and network resources has also been reworked.  The vast majority of networking functions are now consolidated in one place instead of being spread out over a number of different dialogs.  The new networking interface actually seems patterned after something we've seen in XP Service Packs 1 and 2: the Security Center.

However, I found a few gotchas that are worth noting -- mostly in the way Vista now handles certain kinds of file and folder sharing.  I'm hoping this is a RC1 issue and not something we see in the finished product.  But let's start with the good stuff, because the good stuff really is very good.