First of all, a quick scheduling note. February’s meeting of MMOOS, our local Apple User Group, will be held on the second Tuesday, February 13th. Check out mmoos.net for more details. Now, to the business at hand.

Microsoft’s long-awaited ($6 billion and five years in the making) upgrade to the Windows operating system, named “Vista”, went on sale this Tuesday at retail stores and over the web. So, I felt it my sworn duty as your tech reporter to get the full Vista experience on an actual PC.

This week I visited my local office supply superstore. The saleswoman graciously logged me onto an Acer notebook, an Aspire model with a 1.6GHz Core Duo processor, 1GB of RAM, glossy display, and Intel GMA 950 integrated graphics. This configuration is about the minumum on which you can run Vista Home Premium Edition and get all the bells and whistles. Here’s my impressions, from a MacMaineiac perspective, of course.

I don’t want to dwell too much on Vista’s eye-candy “Aero” graphics interface. It is striking, initially, but after a short time the novelty wears off and you wonder whether the button to close a window really has to animate and pass through several layers of opacity in order to just close a window. More importantly, let’s focus on the new features in Vista that you use to actually get things done.

Both Windows Mail and Windows Calendar look and act uncannily like their Mac OS X counterparts, Mail and iCal. Internet Explorer 7 is, well, still Internet Explorer. Vista’s Gadgets are just like the Widgets in Mac OS X, although Gadgets can be displayed all the time on the Desktop or in the Sidebar. Vista’s Instant Search is fast, but doesn’t appear to be able to index documents to the depths of Apple’s Spotlight.

How do the digital media applications now included in Vista stack up against Apple’s bundled-with-every-Mac iLife suite? Not very well. Windows Photo Gallery, while a big improvement over the photo management tools (or lack thereof) in XP, is not even on a par with iPhoto 1.0 from five years ago. Windows DVD Maker offers only rudimentary DVD creation tools, still way behind the first version of Apple’s iDVD program introduced in 2001. Windows Movie Maker fares a little better against iMovie, but not much. Somehow Microsoft, when it comes to digital media, still doesn’t get it.