VistaKnowledge.com

Pop open a new Dell Studio laptop and you won’t see that familiar row of icons on the left side of the screen. Instead Dell populates common apps into a Mac-like “dock” (though at the top of the screen, not the bottom), with the goal of making things easier to find.

Why’d they do it? According to a story in the Wall Street Journal and an interview with Dell’s director of software marketing, because consumers said they were having trouble finding what they needed in off-the-shelf Vista. Dell has also created its own video chat software and plans to add a homegrown music and movie software application later in the year. All are responses to frustrations with the existing suite of standard apps you get on a PC, most of which come bundled with Windows.

Dell isn’t alone in trying to spiffy up Vista to make it faster, easier, or more attractive. Sony has long been adept at cramming PCs full of its own media apps, and some HP machines, like the TouchSmart, have introduced radically different ways of navigating applications and accessing your files.

It’s an interesting time for such endeavors, as customers are frustrated both with Vista and with the shovelware that vendors have been loading onto their machines in order to increase profits. But vendors say there’s a difference between adding three AOL icons to your home screen and trying to enhance the user experience by tweaking the way the OS works.

For its part, Microsoft is quoted as saying it encourages the tweaks, and in fact it has a long history of doing so. Many features that have ultimately become part of the standard Windows experience (System Restore, Windows Defender, even the web browser) got their start as third-party apps, a number of which had long been bundled with new PCs.

Of course, not everyone’s convinced: I’ll admit that the first thing I do when I get a new PC is wipe it clean of frivolous extras. I’m just too accustomed to doing things the Windows way that “helping hands” like the Dell Dock end up getting in the way. But for newer PC users who find Vista’s organization system too convoluted, apps like this can be a big help.

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