breakthrough Windows Vista by Joli Ballew and S.E. Slack is a little different to most of the Vista books that have been published so far in that it primarily concentrates on Vista's media facilities from music to photos and movie making. It is also aimed squarely at beginners with lots of big clear screen shots and simple step by step instructions.

The book begins however with a quick chapter on orientation. Here it shows how to add users, set up your Internet connection and navigate around the new look Start Menu. It also gets in some quick plugs for various Microsoft extras such Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Onecare (surely Microsoft tested that word in the UK first? Shades of Wang Care from a few years back) and Windows Live Mail Desktop. It also covers adding gadgets to the Vista Sidebar tool and enabling the Aero interface if it's not already on.

Product	breakthrough Windows Vista
From	www.microsoft.com/mspress
	Good for beginners, cheap
	Too pushy of Microsoft products and very lightweight in its explanations

With the reader suitably primed with the essential basics, the book proper starts with Vista's photo handling features. Vista supports reading photos from various media and adding tags to help search for images later. Anyone who is serious with their photography really needs to start getting in to tags so coverage of Vista's tagging support is very welcome.

Next up is guidance on sharing photos, either by emailing or creating CDs and DVDs of slide shows. Whilst there are some useful pointers to websites that will be of interest to people wanting to print their images, we did start to feel that the book's treatment of the subject matter was extremely superficial and didn't really add much beyond a series of steps to achieve a certain goal. There is very little in the way of explanations as to why you were doing things a certain way or any of the options and as such, unless you are an absolute beginner, you'll probably be left with a great many questions after reading most of this book.

Music handling came next with coverage of Media Player 11. Ripping CDs and cataloguing them along with creating playlists was covered reasonably well and the inclusion of online music stores and Urge in particular was welcome. Surprisingly it also covered streaming music to other devices in the house although naturally the emphasis is on using an Xbox 360.

One somewhat under rated part of XP and no doubt Vista is the bundled Movie Maker application. Sure, it's basic but it does enough for many people and it's free so we were happy to see this getting a reasonable amount of space devoted to it. The book walks you through importing video, making basic edits and transitions and finally burning the results to DVD or if your brave, emailing them. A small section covers converting analog sources such as VHS tapes and the sort of hardware needed.

The last section that focuses on media describes the Media Center Interface and how to record from TV, organise the results and stream them to different devices around the house (quick! mention the Xbox 360 again!). Some of the coverage isn't of use outside the US so some readers can skip the coverage of downloading movies from official sources but this section does cover radio, TV and copying various things to DVD as well as the parental controls and as such covers all the bases nicely.

The last sections covers the new bundled applications such as Windows Calendar, Sidebar, the games, Windows Defender and a smattering of Office 2007's integration features. Internet Explorer 7 gets a section to itself which does include some good notes on Phishing and using the RSS feeds features.

Finally, Windows Mail, Windows Contacts and Remote Desktop usage round things off.

By the end of the 250 odd pages, we were left feeling as if we'd read a giant Microsoft advert. All too often the book pushed Microsoft products and services with scant mention of anything else no matter how market leading they might be. Even though this is a Microsoft Press book, we'd have expected a little more balance.

The book does cover the basics nicely though and with the big screen shots and large print, it would be a great introduction for a nervous beginner and show them the various possibilities in easy to handle steps. Each section also includes an estimated time to complete the task so the reader can gauge what to tackle next which is commendable.

However, anyone else would probably be left wondering about all the different options that went unmentioned or what to do for instance when cryptic error messages appeared when trying to convert certain types of video file (although it does note some errors you might get from the DRM handling). Overall an adequate book but nothing great.