London May 25 :

When Windows Vista arrives, will you get a first or business class seat, or will you be relegated to economy?

The next version of Microsoft (MS) Windows, due to reach consumers in January, comes in a variety of flavours, and the Starter and Home Basic editions don’t include the new Aero Glass interface, which provides extra features such as live thumbnail screens that pop up from the taskbar, and Flip 3D, a three-dimensional view.

Arvind Mishra, a senior product manager with MS in Redmond, says, “We think Aero is a higher value feature, so it should be in a higher value product.” Last week, MS finally provided more details of the kind of PC required to run Windows, and released a beta version of its Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor.

XP users can download and run this software to find out if their systems are up to scratch. The Basic version of Vista does not require a powerful PC.