Vista Wins on Looks. As for Lacks ...

After five years of starts, stops, executive shuffling, feature rethinks and delays, Windows Vista is finally complete. It's available to corporations already, and starting Jan. 30, it's what you'll get on any new PC. Its programmers, who probably haven't seen their families in months, will have an especially merry Christmas this year.

Skip to next paragraph Stuart Goldenberg

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Vista's Start menu doubles as a search tool. Words typed into the search field produce a list of all files, programs or messages with those words.

So after five years, how is Windows Vista? Microsoft's description, which you'll soon be seeing in millions of dollars' worth of advertising, is "Clear, Confident, Connected." But a more truthful motto would be "Looks, Locks, Lacks."

Looks

Windows Vista is beautiful. Microsoft has never taken elegance so seriously before. Discreet eye candy is partly responsible. Windows and menus cast subtle shadows. A new typeface gives the whole affair a fresh, modern feeling. Subtle animations liven up the proceedings.

If the description so far makes Vista sound a lot like the Macintosh, well, you're right. You get the feeling that Microsoft's managers put Mac OS X on an easel and told the programmers, "Copy that."

Here are some of the grace notes that will remind you of similar ones on the Mac: A list of favorite PC locations appears at the left side of every Explorer window, which you can customize just by dragging folders in or out. You now expand or collapse lists of folders by clicking little flippy triangles. When you're dragging icons to copy them, a cursor "badge" appears that indicates how many you're moving. The Minimize, Maximize and Close buttons glow when your cursor passes over them. There's now a keystroke (Alt+up arrow) to open the current folder's parent window, the one that contains it.

Some of the big-ticket Vista features and programs are eerily familiar, too. The biggest one is Instant Search, a text box at the bottom of the Start menu. As you type here, the Start menu turns into a list of every file, folder, program and e-mail message that contains your search phrase, regardless of names or folder locations. It's a powerful, routine-changing tool, especially when you seek a program that would otherwise require burrowing through nested folders in the All Programs menu.

A similar Search box appears at the top of every desktop (Explorer) window, for ease in plucking some document out of that more limited haystack.

New programs include the Sidebar, a floating layer of single-purpose programs called gadgets ( Apple called them widgets) like a weather reporter, stock tracker, currency converter, and so on; Photo Gallery, a deliciously simple shoebox for digital photos; the bare-bones DVD Maker, for designing scene-selection menus for home-burned video DVDs; and Chess Titans, whose photorealistic board can be rotated in three-dimensional space.

Flip 3-D, which presents all open windows in all programs as cards in a floating deck, seems to be modeled on Mac OS X's Exposé feature - minus the ability to see all the windows simultaneously. You have to flip through the "cards" to find the one you want.

Now, before the hate-mail tsunami begins, it's important to note that Apple has itself borrowed feature ideas on occasion, even from Windows. But never this broadly, boldly or blatantly. There must be enough steam coming out of Apple executives' ears to power the Polar Express.

Even so, brazen as it was, the heist was largely successful. Vista is infinitely more pleasant to use than its predecessors. There's more logic to its folder structure and naming scheme. Things are easier to find. Fewer steps are required to perform common tasks, especially when it comes to networking.

And besides, not all of the new goodies fell from the Apple tree. The new grouping, stacking and filtering options give you efficient new ways to parse the masses of files in a window. If you have a spare U.S.B. flash drive, your PC can use it as extra main memory for a tiny speed boost. Windows Speech Recognition isn't as accurate as, say, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, but it's beautifully designed and much better than previous Microsoft attempts.

Laptop luggers will love the clever new Sleep mode. It combines the best of the old Standby mode (everything stays in memory so it's ready to go when you reopen the lid) and the old Hibernate mode (after several hours, Windows commits all this to the hard drive to save battery power).

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E-Mail:Pogue@nytimes.com