Supposedly named after a saloon bar at the foot of the Whistler mountains, Longhorn will be the next desktop release of Windows.

This month's Personal Computer World includes the UK's first extensive review of the operating system we will all be running come 2005.

It requires 3GB of hard disk space to install and, of course, activation.

The first thing you notice about the Longhorn interface is the task pane, called the Sidebar, which runs down the right-hand side of the screen.

This is not merely an activity centre; it is an information portal which could in the future act as a news ticker or weather tracker just as effectively as it can emulate a computer navigation tool.

In a similar way to Office XP's and 2003's sidebar, Longhorn offers immediate access to Windows' search engine, be it for online resources or files available on your PC or network.

Perhaps the two most revolutionary changes in this operating system are Palladium, which gives the originators of digital content the ability to control how those products can be used, and WinFS, a database-driven, centralised repository of information which will change the way we think about our files and how they are organised.

Longhorn was initially rumoured to be arriving in 2002 but has since been pushed back several times.

Nobody knows the exact date when we're likely to be junking our XP installations in favour of this new release, but all we can say for sure is that it won't be called Longhorn, it will be desktop-only, and it'll be in the shops some time in 2005.

Longhorn is a big deal for Microsoft. It claimed it was betting the ranch on XP but in reality its advice to corporates was to stick with 2000 until they felt ready to make the switch.

The strategy with Longhorn is more likely to be one of pushing for a global upgrade as soon as possible, and as such it is perhaps the most important version of Windows ever.

Read the entire five page sneak preview in the August edition of PCW.

Price: TBA

Contact: Microsoft
www.microsoft.com/uk