As Microsoft approaches a major milestone in the development of Longhorn, company executives are talking more about the features of the Windows XP successor, which they say will be easier to use, more secure and less costly to manage than earlier versions of Windows.

Microsoft unveiled the Longhorn operating system in late 2003 at a conference for developers but then reigned in its ambitions for the operating system last year, aiming to make possible a release in late 2006.

To meet that shipment date, Microsoft clipped some of Longhorn's key features, most notably the unified storage system called WinFS that Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates had called the "Holy Grail."

Now after several months of relative silence on the Longhorn front, Microsoft executives have once again started to talk up the operating system's features.

Sitting in a suite with a postcard view of Alcatraz in a posh San Francisco hotel on Thursday, Jim Allchin, Microsoft's group vice president in charge of Windows, said that with Longhorn, Microsoft wants to deliver an operating system that is user friendly, secure, and easy to install and manage. And despite the features cut from Longhorn made last year, the operating system will be worth the upgrade, he said.

Users will not have to worry if they will be successful when plugging a projector into a Longhorn-based laptop for a presentation, Allchin said. Also, Longhorn-based computers will instantly connect to a home network and recognize peripherals, such as printers. "It takes magic to figure that out today," he said.

When it comes to security and safety, Microsoft will give users features like parental controls for Web surfing, Allchin said. And when browsing the Web, Internet Explorer will run in a "protected space" so it can't impact the rest of the system, while those guards can be dropped when connected to a corporate intranet, he said.

"We want to make the system as invulnerable as possible," Allchin said.

Longhorn will also have a feature designed to protect data on a PC. "We will have something called secure start-up where if you lose your laptop it won't make a difference because somebody can't load another system on there to analyze your hard disk," Allchin said.

For IT professionals, Longhorn will end the nightmare of creating and updating system software images, according to Allchin. Today, Windows typically requires separate images for each language and for each type of PC, and these images have to be rebuilt from scratch when a computer is updated with a security patch.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.