You can also "stack" (or roll up hierarchically) search results graphically by an additional criterion, such as Kinds, Authors, Keywords, etc. But the differences between Stack By, Group By and Sort By -- all options available as you delve into this tool -- are still likely to elude most Windows users. When you work with your data in Saved Searches like this, it's very easy to lose track of the significance of what you're looking at. But for people who become proficient with this set of tools, spelunking their own data may become noticeably easier.

12. Windows Photo Gallery

There's a veritable bonanza of new applets, programs and utilities in Windows Vista. Of them all, the one I find the most useful is Windows Photo Gallery. It may sound like a whizzy consumer feature, and it will appeal to home users who are into digital photography. But Photo Gallery is more than just that. Any business that works with any type of screenshots, digital images or video files will find this tool to be a great image viewer that may relegate products like IrfanView and Thumbs+ to history.

What's so great about Photo Gallery? Vista's ability to rapidly scale images and its background search indexing both provide an excellent basic environment for managing, importing, previewing, sorting, recording to DVD, distributing, sharing and even performing basic edits on images and videos of most types. One of the best features is a mouse-hover, large-image preview, which helps you quickly examine pictures for content and quality.

One somewhat annoying aspect of Windows Photo Gallery is that, in order to add the search/indexing features, Microsoft opted to localize Photo Gallery's functionality to prescribed folders for storing images. The solution is the ability to virtually add a folder located elsewhere on your system to the prescribed image and videos area. Another surprising glitch is that Photo Gallery doesn't appear to support previews of .BMP files, although it can open and display them fine.