Windows vista and above required

Windows Vista

Version of the Windows NT operating system
Screenshot of Windows Vista Ultimate, showing its desktop, taskbar, start menu, Windows Sidebar, Welcome Center, and glass effects of Windows Aero
Developer	Microsoft
Source model	Closed-source Source-available (through Shared Source Initiative)[1]
Released to manufacturing	November 8, 2006; 16 years ago[2]
General availability	January 30, 2007; 16 years ago[3]
Final release	Service Pack 2 with security update rollup (6.0.6002)[4] / May 25, 2009; 14 years ago[5]
Marketing target	Consumer and Business
Update method	Windows Update Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM)
Platforms	IA-32 and x86-64
Kernel type	Hybrid (NT)
Userland	Windows API, NTVDM, SUA
License	Proprietary commercial software
Preceded by	Windows XP (2001)
Succeeded by	Windows 7 (2009)
Official website	Windows Vista (archived at Wayback Machine)
Support status
Mainstream support ended on April 10, 2012. Extended support ended on April 11, 2017.[6]

Windows Vista is a major release of Microsoft’s Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on November 8, 2006, and became generally available on January 30, 2007, on the Windows Marketplace, the first release of Windows to be made available through a digital distribution platform.^[7] Vista succeeded Windows XP (2001); at the time, the five-year gap between the two was the longest time span between successive Windows releases.

Microsoft began developing Vista under the codename «Longhorn» in 2001, shortly before the release of XP. It was intended as a small upgrade to bridge the gap between XP and the next major Windows version, codenamed Blackcomb. As development progressed, it assimilated many of Blackcomb’s features and was repositioned as a major Windows release. Vista introduced the updated graphical user interface and visual style Aero, Windows Search, redesigned networking, audio, print, and display sub-systems, and new multimedia tools such as Windows DVD Maker among other changes. Vista aimed to increase the level of communication between machines on a home network, using peer-to-peer technology to simplify sharing files and media between computers and devices. Vista included version 3.0 of the .NET Framework, allowing software developers to write applications without traditional Windows APIs. It removed support for Itanium and devices without ACPI.

While its new features and security improvements garnered praise, Vista was the target of significant criticism, such as its high system requirements, more restrictive licensing terms, lack of compatibility, longer boot time, and excessive authorization prompts from User Account Control. It saw lower adoption and satisfaction rates than XP, and it is generally considered a market failure.^[8][9] However, Vista usage did exceed Microsoft’s pre-launch two-year-out expectations of achieving 200 million users, with an estimated 330 million internet users in January 2009. On October 22, 2010, Microsoft ceased sales of retail copies of Windows Vista, and the original equipment manufacturer’s sales for Windows Vista ceased the following year.^[10]

Vista was succeeded by Windows 7 (2009), which retained and refined many of the features that Vista introduced. Microsoft ended mainstream support for Vista on April 10, 2012, and extended support on April 11, 2017.^[11] In retrospect, Vista is often described as one of the worst versions of Windows,^[12] but also an important one that laid the foundation for future releases.^[13][14]

Development

Microsoft began work on Windows Vista, known at the time by its codename «Longhorn», in May 2001,^[15] five months before the release of Windows XP. It was originally expected to ship in October 2003 as a minor step between Windows XP and «Blackcomb», which was planned to be the company’s next major operating system release. Gradually, «Longhorn» assimilated many of the important new features and technologies slated for Blackcomb, resulting in the release date being pushed back several times in three years. In some builds of Longhorn, their license agreement said «For the Microsoft product codenamed ‘Whistler'». Many of Microsoft’s developers were also re-tasked to build updates to Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 to strengthen security. Faced with ongoing delays and concerns about feature creep, Microsoft announced on August 27, 2004, that it had revised its plans. For this reason, Longhorn was reset to start work on componentizing the Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 codebase, and over time re-incorporating the features that would be intended for an actual operating system release. However, some previously announced features such as WinFS were dropped or postponed, and a new software development methodology called the Security Development Lifecycle was incorporated to address concerns with the security of the Windows codebase, which is programmed in C, C++ and assembly. Longhorn became known as Vista in 2005. Vista in Spanish means view.^[16][17]

Longhorn

The early development stages of Longhorn were generally characterized by incremental improvements and updates to Windows XP. During this period, Microsoft was fairly quiet about what was being worked on, as their marketing and public relations efforts were more strongly focused on Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003, which was released in April 2003. Occasional builds of Longhorn were leaked onto popular file sharing networks such as IRC, BitTorrent, eDonkey and various newsgroups, and so most of what is known about builds before the first sanctioned development release of Longhorn in May 2003 is derived from these builds.

After several months of relatively little news or activity from Microsoft with Longhorn, Microsoft released Build 4008, which had made an appearance on the Internet around February 28, 2003.^[18] It was also privately handed out to a select group of software developers. As an evolutionary release over build 3683, it contained several small improvements, including a modified blue «Plex» theme and a new, simplified Windows Image-based installer that operates in graphical mode from the outset, and completed an install of the operating system in approximately one third the time of Windows XP on the same hardware. An optional «new taskbar» was introduced that was thinner than the previous build and displayed the time differently.
The most notable visual and functional difference, however, came with Windows Explorer. The incorporation of the Plex theme made blue the dominant color of the entire application. The Windows XP-style task pane was almost completely replaced with a large horizontal pane that appeared under the toolbars. A new search interface allowed for filtering of results, searching for Windows help, and natural-language queries that would be used to integrate with WinFS. The animated search characters were also removed. The «view modes» were also replaced with a single slider that would resize the icons in real-time, in the list, thumbnail, or details mode, depending on where the slider was. File metadata was also made more visible and more easily editable, with more active encouragement to fill out missing pieces of information. Also of note was the conversion of Windows Explorer to being a .NET application.

Most builds of Longhorn and Vista were identified by a label that was always displayed in the bottom-right corner of the desktop. A typical build label would look like «Longhorn Build 3683.Lab06_N.020923-1821». Higher build numbers did not automatically mean that the latest features from every development team at Microsoft was included. Typically, a team working on a certain feature or subsystem would generate their working builds which developers would test with, and when the code was deemed stable, all the changes would be incorporated back into the main development tree at once. At Microsoft, several «Build labs» exist where the compilation of the entirety of Windows can be performed by a team. The name of the lab in which any given build originated is shown as part of the build label, and the date and time of the build follow that. Some builds (such as Beta 1 and Beta 2) only display the build label in the version information dialog (Winver). The icons used in these builds are from Windows XP.

At the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in May 2003, Microsoft gave their first public demonstrations of the new Desktop Window Manager and Aero. The demonstrations were done on a revised build 4015 which was never released. Several sessions for developers and hardware engineers at the conference focused on these new features, as well as the Next-Generation Secure Computing Base (previously known as «Palladium»), which at the time was Microsoft’s proposed solution for creating a secure computing environment whereby any given component of the system could be deemed «trusted». Also at this conference, Microsoft reiterated their roadmap for delivering Longhorn, pointing to an «early 2005» release date.^[19]

Development reset

By 2004, it had become obvious to the Windows team at Microsoft that they were losing sight of what needed to be done to complete the next version of Windows and ship it to customers. Internally, some Microsoft employees were describing the Longhorn project as «another Cairo» or «Cairo.NET», referring to the Cairo development project that the company embarked on through the first half of the 1990s, which never resulted in a shipping operating system (though nearly all the technologies developed in that time did end up in Windows 95 and Windows NT^[20]). Microsoft was shocked in 2005 by Apple’s release of Mac OS X Tiger. It offered only a limited subset of features planned for Longhorn, in particular fast file searching and integrated graphics and sound processing, but appeared to have impressive reliability and performance compared to contemporary Longhorn builds.^[21] Most Longhorn builds had major Windows Explorer system leaks which prevented the OS from performing well, and added more confusion to the development teams in later builds with more and more code being developed which failed to reach stability.

In a September 23, 2005 front-page article in The Wall Street Journal,^[22] Microsoft co-president Jim Allchin, who had overall responsibility for the development and delivery of Windows, explained how development of Longhorn had been «crashing into the ground» due in large part to the haphazard methods by which features were introduced and integrated into the core of the operating system, without a clear focus on an end-product. Allchin went on to explain how in December 2003, he enlisted the help of two other senior executives, Brian Valentine and Amitabh Srivastava, the former being experienced with shipping software at Microsoft, most notably Windows Server 2003,^[23] and the latter having spent his career at Microsoft researching and developing methods of producing high-quality testing systems.^[24] Srivastava employed a team of core architects to visually map out the entirety of the Windows operating system, and to proactively work towards a development process that would enforce high levels of code quality, reduce interdependencies between components, and in general, «not make things worse with Vista».^[25] Since Microsoft decided that Longhorn needed to be further componentized, work started on builds (known as the Omega-13 builds, named after a time travel device in the film Galaxy Quest^[26]) that would componentize existing Windows Server 2003 source code, and over time add back functionality as development progressed. Future Longhorn builds would start from Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 and continue from there.

This change, announced internally to Microsoft employees on August 26, 2004, began in earnest in September, though it would take several more months before the new development process and build methodology would be used by all of the development teams. A number of complaints came from individual developers, and Bill Gates himself, that the new development process was going to be prohibitively difficult to work within.

As Windows Vista

By approximately November 2004, the company had considered several names for the final release, ranging from simple to fanciful and inventive. In the end, Microsoft chose Windows Vista as confirmed on July 22, 2005, believing it to be a «wonderful intersection of what the product really does, what Windows stands for, and what resonates with customers, and their needs». Group Project Manager Greg Sullivan told Paul Thurrott «You want the PC to adapt to you and help you cut through the clutter to focus on what’s important to you. That’s what Windows Vista is all about: «bringing clarity to your world» (a reference to the three marketing points of Vista—Clear, Connected, Confident), so you can focus on what matters to you».^[27] Microsoft co-president Jim Allchin also loved the name, saying that «Vista creates the right imagery for the new product capabilities and inspires the imagination with all the possibilities of what can be done with Windows—making people’s passions come alive.»^[28]

After Longhorn was named Windows Vista in July 2005, an unprecedented beta-test program was started, involving hundreds of thousands of volunteers and companies. In September of that year, Microsoft started releasing regular Community Technology Previews (CTP) to beta testers from July 2005 to February 2006. The first of these was distributed at the 2005 Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, and was subsequently released to beta testers and Microsoft Developer Network subscribers. The builds that followed incorporated most of the planned features for the final product, as well as a number of changes to the user interface, based largely on feedback from beta testers. Windows Vista was deemed feature-complete with the release of the «February CTP», released on February 22, 2006, and much of the remainder of the work between that build and the final release of the product focused on stability, performance, application and driver compatibility, and documentation. Beta 2, released in late May, was the first build to be made available to the general public through Microsoft’s Customer Preview Program. It was downloaded over 5 million times. Two release candidates followed in September and October, both of which were made available to a large number of users.^[29]

At the Intel Developer Forum on March 9, 2006, Microsoft announced a change in their plans to support EFI in Windows Vista. The UEFI 2.0 specification (which replaced EFI 1.10) was not completed until early 2006, and at the time of Microsoft’s announcement, no firmware manufacturers had completed a production implementation which could be used for testing. As a result, the decision was made to postpone the introduction of UEFI support to Windows; support for UEFI on 64-bit platforms was postponed until Vista Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2008 and 32-bit UEFI would not be supported, as Microsoft did not expect many such systems to be built because the market was quickly moving to 64-bit processors.^[30][31]

While Microsoft had originally hoped to have the consumer versions of the operating system available worldwide in time for the 2006 holiday shopping season, it announced in March 2006 that the release date would be pushed back to January 2007 in order to give the company—and the hardware and software companies that Microsoft depends on for providing device drivers—additional time to prepare. Because a release to manufacturing (RTM) build is the final version of code shipped to retailers and other distributors, the purpose of a pre-RTM build is to eliminate any last «show-stopper» bugs that may prevent the code from responsibly being shipped to customers, as well as anything else that consumers may find troublesome. Thus, it is unlikely that any major new features would be introduced; instead, work would focus on Vista’s fit and finish. In just a few days, developers had managed to drop Vista’s bug count from over 2470 on September 22 to just over 1400 by the time RC2 shipped in early October. However, they still had a way to go before Vista was ready to RTM. Microsoft’s internal processes required Vista’s bug count to drop to 500 or fewer before the product could go into escrow for RTM.^[32] For most of the pre-RTM builds, only 32-bit editions were released.

On June 14, 2006, Windows developer Philip Su posted a blog entry which decried the development process of Windows Vista, stating that «The code is way too complicated, and that the pace of coding has been tremendously slowed down by overbearing process.»^[33] The same post also described Windows Vista as having approximately 50 million lines of code, with about 2,000 developers working on the product. During a demonstration of the speech recognition feature new to Windows Vista at Microsoft’s Financial Analyst Meeting on July 27, 2006, the software recognized the phrase «Dear mom» as «Dear aunt». After several failed attempts to correct the error, the sentence eventually became «Dear aunt, let’s set so double the killer delete select all«.^[34] A developer with Vista’s speech recognition team later explained that there was a bug with the build of Vista that was causing the microphone gain level to be set very high, resulting in the audio being received by the speech recognition software being «incredibly distorted».

Windows Vista build 5824 (October 17, 2006) was supposed to be the RTM release, but a bug, where the OOBE hangs at the start of the WinSAT Assessment (if upgraded from Windows XP), requiring the user to terminate msoobe.exe by pressing Shift+F10 to open Command Prompt using either command-line tools or Task Manager prevented this, damaging development and lowering the chance that it would hit its January 2007 deadline.^[36]

Development of Windows Vista came to an end when Microsoft announced that it had been finalized on November 8, 2006, and was concluded by co-president of Windows development, Jim Allchin.^[37] The RTM’s build number had also jumped to 6000 to reflect Vista’s internal version number, NT 6.0.^[38] Jumping RTM build numbers is common practice among consumer-oriented Windows versions, like Windows 98 (build 1998), Windows 98 SE (build 2222), Windows Me (build 3000) or Windows XP (build 2600), as compared to the business-oriented versions like Windows 2000 (build 2195) or Server 2003 (build 3790). On November 16, 2006, Microsoft made the final build available to MSDN and Technet Plus subscribers.^[39] A business-oriented Enterprise edition was made available to volume license customers on November 30, 2006.^[40] Windows Vista was launched for general customer availability on January 30, 2007.^[3]

New or changed features

Windows Vista introduced several features and functionality not present in its predecessors.

End-user

• Windows Aero: The new graphical user interface is named Windows Aero, which Jim Allchin stated is an acronym for Authentic, Energetic, Reflective, and Open.^[41] Microsoft intended the new interface to be cleaner and more aesthetically pleasing than those of previous Windows versions, featuring new transparencies, live thumbnails, live icons, and animations, thus providing a new level of eye candy. Laptop users report, however, that enabling Aero shortens battery life^[42][43] and reduces performance.
• Windows shell: The new Windows shell offers a new range of organization, navigation, and search capabilities: Task panes in Windows Explorer are removed, integrating the relevant task options into the toolbar. A «Favorite links» pane has been added, enabling one-click access to common directories. A search box appears in every Explorer window. The address bar has been replaced with a breadcrumb navigation bar. Icons of certain file types in Windows Explorer are «live» and can be scaled in size up to 256 × 256 pixels. The preview pane allows users to see thumbnails of various files and view the contents of documents. The details pane shows information such as file size and type, and allows viewing and editing of embedded tags in supported file formats. The Start menu has changed as well; incorporating an instant search box, and the All Programs list uses a horizontal scroll bar instead of the cascading flyout menu seen in Windows XP. The word «Start» itself has been removed in favor of a blue orb that bears the Windows logo.
• Windows Search: A new search component of Windows Vista, it features instant search (also known as search as you type), which provides instant search results, thus finding files more quickly than the search features found in previous versions of Windows and can search the contents of recognized file types.^[44] Users can search for certain metadata such as name, extension, size, date or attributes.
• Windows Sidebar: A transparent panel, anchored to the right side of the screen, wherein a user can place Desktop Gadgets, which are small applets designed for a specialized purpose (such as displaying the weather or sports scores). Gadgets can also be placed on the desktop.^[45]
• Windows Internet Explorer 7: New user interface, tabbed browsing, RSS, a search box, improved printing,^[46] Page Zoom, Quick Tabs (thumbnails of all open tabs), Anti-Phishing filter, several new security protection features, Internationalized Domain Name support (IDN), and improved web standards support. IE7 in Windows Vista runs in isolation from other applications in the operating system (protected mode); exploits and malicious software are restricted from writing to any location beyond Temporary Internet Files without explicit user consent.
• Windows Media Player 11, a major revamp of Microsoft’s program for playing and organizing music and video. New features in this version include word wheeling (incremental search or «search as you type»), a new GUI for the media library, photo display and organization, the ability to share music libraries over a network with other Windows Vista machines, Xbox 360 integration, and support for other Media Center Extenders.
• Windows Defender: An antispyware program with several real-time protection agents. It includes a software explorer feature, which provides access to startup programs, and allows one to view currently running software, network-connected applications, and Winsock providers (Winsock LSPs).
• Backup and Restore Center: Includes a backup and restore application that gives users the ability to schedule periodic backups of files on their computer, as well as recovery from previous backups. Backups are incremental, storing only the changes made each time, minimizing disk usage. It also features Complete PC Backup (available only in the Ultimate, Business, and Enterprise editions), which backs up an entire computer as an image onto a hard disk or DVD. Complete PC Backup can automatically recreate a machine setup onto new hardware or hard disk in case of any hardware failures. Complete PC Restore can be initiated from within Windows Vista or from the Windows Vista installation CD if a PC is so corrupt that it cannot start normally from the hard disk.
• Windows Mail: A replacement for Outlook Express that includes a new mail store that improves stability,^[47] and features integrated instant search. It has a Phishing Filter like Internet Explorer 7 and Junk mail filtering that is enhanced through regular updates via Windows Update.^[48]
• Windows Calendar is a new calendar and task application that integrates with Windows Contacts and Windows Mail. It is compatible with various calendar file types, such as the popular iCalendar.
• Windows Photo Gallery, a photo and movie library management application. It can import from digital cameras, tag and rate individual items, adjust colors and exposure, create and display slideshows (with pan and fade effects) through Direct3D and burn slideshows to a DVD.
• Windows DVD Maker, a companion program to Windows Movie Maker that provides the ability to create video DVDs based on a user’s content. Users can design a DVD with title, menus, video, soundtrack, pan and zoom motion effects on pictures or slides.
• Windows Media Center, which was previously exclusively bundled in a separate edition of Windows XP, known as Windows XP Media Center Edition, has been incorporated into the Home Premium and Ultimate editions of Windows Vista.
• Games: Most of the standard computer games included in previous versions of Windows have been redesigned to showcase Vista’s new graphical capabilities. New games available in Windows Vista are Chess Titans (3D Chess game), Mahjong Titans (3D mahjong solitaire game), and Purble Place (a small collection of games, oriented towards younger children, including a matching game, a cake-creator game, and a dress-up puzzle game). Purble Place is the only one of the new games available in the Windows Vista Home Basic edition. InkBall is available for Home Premium (or better) users.
• Games Explorer: A new special folder called «Games» exposes installed video games and information about them. These metadata may be updated from the Internet.^[49]
• Windows Mobility Center is a control panel that centralizes the most relevant information related to mobile computing (brightness, sound, battery level/power scheme selection, wireless network, screen orientation, presentation settings, etc.).
• Windows Fax and Scan Allows computers with fax modems to send and receive fax documents, as well as scan documents. It is not available in the Home editions of Windows Vista, but is available in the Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions.
• Windows Meeting Space replaces NetMeeting. Users can share applications (or their entire desktop) with other users on the local network, or over the Internet using peer-to-peer technology (higher editions than Starter and Home Basic can take advantage of hosting capabilities, Starter and Home Basic editions are limited to «join» mode only)
• Windows HotStart enables compatible computers to start applications directly from operating system startup or resume by the press of a button—this enables what Microsoft has described as appliance-like availability, which allows computers to function in a manner similar to a consumer electronics device such as a DVD player;^[50] the feature was also designed to provide the instant-on feature availability that is traditionally associated with mobile devices.^[51] While Microsoft has emphasized multimedia scenarios with Windows HotStart,^[52] a user can configure this feature so that a button launches a preferred application.^[53]
• Shadow Copy automatically creates daily backup copies of files and folders. Users can also create «shadow copies» by setting a System Protection Point using the System Protection tab in the System control panel. The user can view multiple versions of a file throughout a limited history and be allowed to restore, delete, or copy those versions. This feature is available only in the Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions of Windows Vista and is inherited from Windows Server 2003.^[54]

• Windows Update: Software and security updates have been simplified,^[55] now operating solely via a control panel instead of as a web application. Windows Mail’s spam filter and Windows Defender’s definitions are updated automatically via Windows Update. Users who choose the recommended setting for Automatic Updates will have the latest drivers installed and available when they add a new device.
• Parental controls: Allows administrators to monitor and restrict user activity, as well as control which websites, programs, and games each Standard user can use and install. This feature is not included in the Business or Enterprise editions of Vista.
• Windows SideShow: Enables the auxiliary displays on newer laptops or supported Windows Mobile devices. It is meant to be used to display device gadgets while the computer is on or off.
• Speech recognition is integrated into Vista.^[56] It features a redesigned user interface and configurable command-and-control commands. Unlike the Office 2003 version, which works only in Office and WordPad, Speech Recognition in Windows Vista works for any accessible application. In addition, it currently supports several languages: British and American English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), and Japanese.
• New fonts, including several designed for screen reading, and improved Chinese (Yahei, JhengHei), Japanese (Meiryo), and Korean (Mulgan) fonts. ClearType has also been enhanced and enabled by default.
• Improved audio controls allow the system-wide volume or volume of individual audio devices and even individual applications to be controlled separately. New audio functionalities such as room correction, bass management, speaker fill, and headphone virtualization have also been incorporated.
• Problem Reports and Solutions, a feature that allows users to check for solutions to problems or view previously sent problems for any solutions or additional information, if available. Windows System Assessment Tool is a tool used to benchmark system performance. Software such as games can retrieve this rating and modify its own behavior at runtime to improve performance. The benchmark tests CPU, RAM, 2-D and 3-D graphics acceleration, graphics memory and hard disk space.^[57][58]
• Windows Ultimate Extras: The Ultimate edition of Windows Vista provides, via Windows Update, access to some additional features. These are a collection of additional MUI language packs, Texas Hold ‘Em (a Poker game) and Microsoft Tinker (a strategy game where the character is a robot), BitLocker and EFS enhancements that allow users to back up their encryption key online in a Digital Locker, and Windows DreamScene, which enables the use of videos in MPEG and WMV formats as the desktop background. On April 21, 2008, Microsoft launched two more Ultimate Extras; three new Windows sound schemes, and a content pack for DreamScene. Various DreamScene Content Packs have been released since the final version of DreamScene was released.
• Reliability and Performance Monitor includes various tools for tuning and monitoring system performance and resources activities of CPU, disks, network, memory and other resources. It shows the operations on files, the opened connections, etc.^[59]
• Disk Management: The Logical Disk Manager in Windows Vista supports shrinking and expanding volumes on-the-fly.^[60]
• Windows Anytime Upgrade: is a program that allows a user to upgrade their computer running Vista to a higher edition. For example, a computer running Windows Vista Home Basic can be upgraded to Home Premium or better. Anytime Upgrade permits users to upgrade without having their programs and data erased, and is cheaper than replacing the existing installation of Windows. Anytime Upgrade is no longer available for Vista.^[61]
• Digital Locker Assistant: A program that facilitated access to downloads and purchases from the Windows Marketplace distribution platform.^[62] Apps purchased from Windows Marketplace are managed by Microsoft Account credentials, which are used to access a user’s digital locker that stores the app and its associated information (e.g., licenses) off-site.^[63]

Core

Vista includes technologies such as ReadyBoost^[64] and ReadyDrive, which employ fast flash memory (located on USB flash drives and hybrid hard disk drives) to improve system performance by caching commonly used programs and data. This manifests itself in improved battery life on notebook computers as well, since a hybrid drive can be spun down when not in use.^[65] Another new technology called SuperFetch utilizes machine learning techniques to analyze usage patterns to allow Windows Vista to make intelligent decisions about what content should be present in system memory at any given time. It uses almost all the extra RAM as disk cache.^[66] In conjunction with SuperFetch, an automatic built-in Windows Disk Defragmenter makes sure that those applications are strategically positioned on the hard disk where they can be loaded into memory very quickly with the least physical movement of the hard disk’s read-write heads.^[67]

As part of the redesign of the networking architecture, IPv6 has been fully incorporated into the operating system^[68] and a number of performance improvements have been introduced, such as TCP window scaling.^[69] Earlier versions of Windows typically needed third-party wireless networking software to work properly, but this is not the case with Vista, which includes more comprehensive wireless networking support.^[70]

For graphics, Vista introduces a new Windows Display Driver Model^[71] and a major revision to Direct3D. The new driver model facilitates the new Desktop Window Manager, which provides the tearing-free desktop and special effects that are the cornerstones of Windows Aero. Direct3D 10, developed in conjunction with major graphics card manufacturers, is a new architecture with more advanced shader support, and allows the graphics processing unit to render more complex scenes without assistance from the CPU. It features improved load balancing between CPU and GPU and also optimizes data transfer between them.^[72] WDDM also provides video content playback that rivals typical consumer electronics devices. It does this by making it easy to connect to external monitors, providing for protected HD video playback, and increasing overall video playback quality. For the first time in Windows, graphics processing unit (GPU) multitasking is possible, enabling users to run more than one GPU-intensive application simultaneously.^[73]

At the core of the operating system, many improvements have been made to the memory manager, process scheduler and I/O scheduler. The Heap Manager implements additional features such as integrity checking in order to improve robustness and defend against buffer overflow security exploits, although this comes at the price of breaking backward compatibility with some legacy applications.^[74] A Kernel Transaction Manager has been implemented that enables applications to work with the file system and Registry using atomic transaction operations.^[75]

Improved security was a primary design goal for Vista.^[76] Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing initiative, which aims to improve public trust in its products, has had a direct effect on its development. This effort has resulted in a number of new security and safety features and an Evaluation Assurance Level rating of 4+.^[77][78]

User Account Control, or UAC is perhaps the most significant and visible of these changes. UAC is a security technology that makes it possible for users to use their computer with fewer privileges by default, to stop malware from making unauthorized changes to the system. This was often difficult in previous versions of Windows, as the previous «limited» user accounts proved too restrictive and incompatible with a large proportion of application software, and even prevented some basic operations such as looking at the calendar from the notification tray. In Windows Vista, when an action is performed that requires administrative rights (such as installing/uninstalling software or making system-wide configuration changes), the user is first prompted for an administrator name and password; in cases where the user is already an administrator, the user is still prompted to confirm the pending privileged action. Regular use of the computer such as running programs, printing, or surfing the Internet does not trigger UAC prompts. User Account Control asks for credentials in a Secure Desktop mode, in which the entire screen is dimmed, and only the authorization window is active and highlighted. The intent is to stop a malicious program from misleading the user by interfering with the authorization window, and to hint to the user about the importance of the prompt.^[79]

Testing by Symantec Corporation has proven the effectiveness of UAC. Symantec used over 2,000 active malware samples, consisting of backdoors, keyloggers, rootkits, mass mailers, trojan horses, spyware, adware, and various other samples. Each was executed on a default Windows Vista installation within a standard user account. UAC effectively blocked over 50 percent of each threat, excluding rootkits. 5 percent or less of the malware that evaded UAC survived a reboot.^[80][81]

Internet Explorer 7’s new security and safety features include a phishing filter, IDN with anti-spoofing capabilities, and integration with system-wide parental controls. For added security, ActiveX controls are disabled by default. Also, Internet Explorer operates in a protected mode, which operates with lower permissions than the user and runs in isolation from other applications in the operating system, preventing it from accessing or modifying anything besides the Temporary Internet Files directory.^[82] Microsoft’s anti-spyware product, Windows Defender, has been incorporated into Windows, protecting against malware and other threats. Changes to various system configuration settings (such as new auto-starting applications) are blocked unless the user gives consent.

Whereas prior releases of Windows supported per-file encryption using Encrypting File System, the Enterprise and Ultimate editions of Vista include BitLocker Drive Encryption, which can protect entire volumes, notably the operating system volume. However, BitLocker requires approximately a 1.5-gigabyte partition to be permanently not encrypted and to contain system files for Windows to boot. In normal circumstances, the only time this partition is accessed is when the computer is booting, or when there is a Windows update that changes files in this area, which is a legitimate reason to access this section of the drive. The area can be a potential security issue, because a hexadecimal editor (such as dskprobe.exe), or malicious software running with administrator and/or kernel level privileges would be able to write to this «Ghost Partition» and allow a piece of malicious software to compromise the system, or disable the encryption. BitLocker can work in conjunction with a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) cryptoprocessor (version 1.2) embedded in a computer’s motherboard, or with a USB key.^[83] However, as with other full disk encryption technologies, BitLocker is vulnerable to a cold boot attack, especially where TPM is used as a key protector without a boot PIN being required too.^[84]

A variety of other privilege-restriction techniques are also built into Vista. An example is the concept of «integrity levels» in user processes, whereby a process with a lower integrity level cannot interact with processes of a higher integrity level and cannot perform DLL–injection to processes of a higher integrity level. The security restrictions of Windows services are more fine-grained, so that services (especially those listening on the network) cannot interact with parts of the operating system they do not need to. Obfuscation techniques such as address space layout randomization are used to increase the amount of effort required of malware before successful infiltration of a system. Code integrity verifies that system binaries have not been tampered with by malicious code.

As part of the redesign of the network stack, Windows Firewall has been upgraded, with new support for filtering both incoming and outgoing traffic. Advanced packet filter rules can be created that can grant or deny communications to specific services.

The 64-bit versions of Vista require that all device drivers be digitally signed, so that the creator of the driver can be identified.^[85]

System management

While much of the focus of Vista’s new capabilities highlighted the new user interface,^[86] security technologies, and improvements to the core operating system, Microsoft also adding new deployment and maintenance features:

• The Windows Imaging Format (WIM) provides the cornerstone of Microsoft’s new deployment and packaging system. WIM files, which contain a HAL-independent image of Windows Vista, can be maintained and patched without having to rebuild new images. Windows Images can be delivered via Systems Management Server or Business Desktop Deployment technologies. Images can be customized and configured with applications then deployed to corporate client personal computers using little to no touch by a system administrator. ImageX is the Microsoft tool used to create and customize images.
• Windows Deployment Services replaces Remote Installation Services for deploying Vista and prior versions of Windows.
• Approximately 700 new Group Policy settings have been added, covering most aspects of the new features in the operating system, as well as significantly expanding the configurability of wireless networks, removable storage devices, and user desktop experience. Vista also introduced an XML-based format (ADMX) to display registry-based policy settings, making it easier to manage networks that span geographic locations and different languages.^[87]
• Services for UNIX, renamed as «Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications», comes with the Enterprise and Ultimate editions of Vista. Network File System (NFS) client support is also included.
• Multilingual User Interface–Unlike previous versions of Windows (which required the loading of language packs to provide local-language support), Windows Vista Ultimate and Enterprise editions support the ability to dynamically change languages based on the logged-on user’s preference.
• Wireless Projector support

Developer

Windows Vista includes a large number of new application programming interfaces. Chief among them is the inclusion of version 3.0 of the .NET Framework, which consists of a class library and Common Language Runtime. Version 3.0 includes four new major components:^[88]

• Windows Presentation Foundation is a user interface subsystem and framework based vector graphics, which makes use of 3D computer graphics hardware and Direct3D technologies. It provides the foundation for building applications and blending application UI, documents, and media content. It is the successor to Windows Forms.
• Windows Communication Foundation is a service-oriented messaging subsystem that enables applications and systems to interoperate locally or remotely using Web services.
• Windows Workflow Foundation provides task automation and integrated transactions using workflows. It is the programming model, engine, and tools for building workflow-enabled applications on Windows.
• Windows CardSpace is a component that securely stores digital identities of a person, and provides a unified interface for choosing the identity for a particular transaction, such as logging into a website.^[89]

These technologies are also available for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 to facilitate their introduction to and usage by developers and end-users.

There are also significant new development APIs in the core of the operating system, notably the completely re-designed audio, networking, print, and video interfaces, major changes to the security infrastructure, improvements to the deployment and installation of applications («ClickOnce» and Windows Installer 4.0), new device driver development model («Windows Driver Foundation»), Transactional NTFS, mobile computing API advancements (power management, Tablet PC Ink support, SideShow) and major updates to (or complete replacements of) many core subsystems such as Winlogon and CAPI.

There are some issues for software developers using some of the graphics APIs in Vista. Games or programs built solely on the Windows Vista-exclusive version of DirectX, version 10, cannot work on prior versions of Windows, as DirectX 10 is not available for previous Windows versions. Also, games that require the features of D3D9Ex, the updated implementation of DirectX 9 in Windows Vista are also incompatible with previous Windows versions.^[90] According to a Microsoft blog, there are three choices for OpenGL implementation on Vista. An application can use the default implementation, which translates OpenGL calls into the Direct3D API and is frozen at OpenGL version 1.4, or an application can use an Installable Client Driver (ICD), which comes in two flavors: legacy and Vista-compatible. A legacy ICD disables the Desktop Window Manager, a Vista-compatible ICD takes advantage of a new API, and is fully compatible with the Desktop Window Manager.^[91] At least two primary vendors, ATI and NVIDIA provided full Vista-compatible ICDs.^[92] However, hardware overlay is not supported, because it is considered as an obsolete feature in Vista. ATI and NVIDIA strongly recommend using compositing desktop/Framebuffer Objects for same functionality.^[93]

Installation

Windows Vista is the first Microsoft operating system:

• To use DVD-ROM media for installation^[94]
• That can be installed only on a partition formatted with the NTFS file system^[95]
• That provides support for loading drivers for SCSI, SATA and RAID controllers from any source in addition to floppy disks prior to its installation^[96]
• That can be installed on and booted from systems with GPT disks and UEFI firmware^[a][98]

Unification of OEM and retail installation

Windows Vista unifies the previously separate OEM and retail distributions of Microsoft Windows; a license for the edition purchased determines which version of Windows Vista is eligible for installation, regardless of its originating source. OEM and retail versions of Windows before Windows Vista were maintained separately on optical media—users with a manufacturer-supplied disc could not use a retail license during installation, and users with a retail disc could not use an OEM license during installation.^[99]

Removed features

Some notable Windows XP features and components have been replaced or removed in Windows Vista, including several shell and Windows Explorer features, multimedia features, networking related functionality, Windows Messenger, NTBackup, the network Windows Messenger service, HyperTerminal, MSN Explorer, Active Desktop, and the replacement of NetMeeting with Windows Meeting Space. As a result, BOOTMGR in Windows Vista and later versions replaces the functions performed by NTLDR in all Windows NT versions up to Windows XP and directly executes winload.exe, the system loader used to continue the Windows boot process. Windows Vista also does not include the Windows XP «Luna» visual theme, or most of the classic color schemes that have been part of Windows since the Windows 3.x era. The «Hardware profiles» startup feature has also been removed, along with support for older motherboard technologies like the EISA bus, APM and game port support (though on the 32-bit version game port support can be enabled by applying an older driver).^[100] IP over FireWire (TCP/IP over IEEE 1394) has been removed as well.^[101] The IPX/SPX protocol has also been removed, although it can be enabled by a third-party plug-in.^[102]

Support lifecycle

Support for the original release of Windows Vista (without a service pack) ended on April 13, 2010.^[103] Service Pack 1 reached end of support on July 12, 2011, over three years after its general availability.^[104]

Mainstream support for Windows Vista officially ended on April 10, 2012.^[6] The «Extended Support» phase would last for the next 5 years, until April 11, 2017.^[6] Microsoft is no longer offering no-charge incident support, warranty claims, or design fixes for the operating system. For IT pros or users who needed to make specific fixes to the commercial Windows code, Microsoft required an extended hotfix agreement, which provided an additional 90 days from April 10, 2012.

As part of the Extended Support phase, Vista users were still able to get security updates, and could still pay for support per incident, per-hour, or in other ways. Microsoft also made Windows Vista product information available through its online Knowledge Base. On April 11, 2017, support for Windows Vista ended.

Microsoft in 2020 announced that it would disable the Windows Update service for SHA-1 endpoints and since Windows Vista did not get an update for SHA-2, Windows Update Services are no longer available on the OS as of late July 2020.^[105] However, as of April 2021, the old updates for Windows Vista are still available on the Microsoft Update Catalog,^[106] or through Legacy Update, a community-driven third party replacement for the Windows Vista update servers.^[107]

Editions

Windows Vista shipped in six different editions.^[108] These are roughly divided into two target markets, consumer and business, with editions varying to cater to specific sub-markets. For consumers, there are three editions, with two available for economically more developed countries. Windows Vista Starter edition is aimed at low-powered computers with availability only in emerging markets. Windows Vista Home Basic is intended for budget users. Windows Vista Home Premium covers the majority of the consumer market and contains applications for creating and using multimedia. The home editions cannot join a Windows Server domain. For businesses, there are three editions as well. Windows Vista Business is specifically designed for small and medium-sized enterprises,^[109] while Windows Vista Enterprise^[110] is only available to customers participating in Microsoft’s Software Assurance program. Windows Vista Ultimate contains the complete feature-set of both the Home and Business (combination of both Home Premium and Enterprise) editions, as well as a set of Windows Ultimate Extras, and is aimed at enthusiasts.

All editions except Windows Vista Starter support both 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x64) processor architectures.

In the European Union, Home Basic N and Business N variants are also available. These come without Windows Media Player, due to EU sanctions brought against Microsoft for violating anti-trust laws. Similar sanctions exist in South Korea.

Visual styles

Windows Vista has four distinct visual styles.^[111][112]

Windows Aero

Vista’s default visual style, Windows Aero, is built on a desktop composition engine called Desktop Window Manager. Windows Aero introduces support for translucency effects (Glass), window thumbnails on the taskbar, window animations, and other visual effects (for example Windows Flip 3D), and is intended for mainstream and high-end video cards. To enable these features, the contents of every open window are stored in video memory to facilitate tearing-free movement of windows. As such, Windows Aero has significantly higher hardware requirements than its predecessors: systems running Vista must have video card drivers compatible with the Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM), and the minimum graphics memory required is 128 MB, depending on the resolution used.^[113]
Windows Aero is not included in the Starter and Home Basic editions. A variant of Windows Aero, dubbed Windows Vista Standard, lacking the glass effects, window animations, and other advanced graphical effects, is included in Home Basic.^[114]

Windows Vista Basic

This visual style does not employ the Desktop Window Manager; as such, it does not feature transparency or translucency, window animation, Windows Flip 3D or any of the functions provided by the DWM. It is the default visual style on Windows Vista Starter and on systems without WDDM-compatible display drivers, and has similar video card requirements to Windows XP. Before Service Pack 1, a machine that failed Windows Genuine Advantage validation would also default to this visual style.^[115]

Windows Standard

The Windows Standard and Windows Classic visual styles reprise the user interface of Windows 9x, Windows 2000 and Microsoft’s Windows Server line of operating systems. As with previous versions of Windows, this visual style supports custom color schemes, which are collections of color settings. Windows Vista includes four high-contrast color schemes and the default color schemes from Windows 98 (titled «Windows Classic») and Windows 2000/Windows Me (titled «Windows Standard»).^[114]

Hardware requirements

Computers capable of running Windows Vista are classified as Vista Capable and Vista Premium Ready.^[116] A Vista Capable or equivalent PC is capable of running all editions of Windows Vista although some of the special features and high-end graphics options may require additional or more advanced hardware. A Vista Premium Ready PC can take advantage of Vista’s high-end features.^[117]

Windows Vista’s Basic and Classic interfaces work with virtually any graphics hardware that supports Windows XP or 2000; accordingly, most discussion around Vista’s graphics requirements centers on those for the Windows Aero interface. As of Windows Vista Beta 2, the NVIDIA GeForce 6 series and later, the ATI Radeon 9500 and later, Intel’s GMA 950 and later integrated graphics, and a handful of VIA chipsets and S3 Graphics discrete chips are supported. Although originally supported, the GeForce FX 5 series has been dropped from newer drivers from NVIDIA. The last driver from NVIDIA to support the GeForce FX series on Vista was 96.85.^[118][119] Microsoft offered a tool called the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor^[117] to assist Windows XP and Vista users in determining what versions of Windows their machine is capable of running. The required server connections for this utility are no longer available. Although the installation media included in retail packages is a 32-bit DVD, customers needing a CD-ROM or customers who wish for a 64-bit install media can acquire this medium through the Windows Vista Alternate Media program.^[120] The Ultimate edition includes both 32-bit and 64-bit media.^[121] The digitally downloaded version of Ultimate includes only one version, either 32-bit or 64-bit, from Windows Marketplace.

Windows Vista system requirements^[122][123]

Component of PC	Minimum required	Recommended
Processor	800 MHz	1 GHz
Memory	512 MB (384 MB for Starter edition)	1 GB
Graphics card	Super VGA	WDDM 1.0-compliant 32 bits per pixel DirectX 9.0 support Pixel Shader 2.0 support
Graphics memory	—	128 MB
Total HDD capacity	20 GB	40 GB
Free HDD space	15 GB	15 GB
Optical drives	CD-ROM drive	DVD-ROM drive
Others	—	TV tuner card (Premium, Ultimate) Touchscreen (Premium, Business, Ultimate) USB flash drive (Ultimate) Trusted Platform Module (Ultimate)

Physical memory limits

The maximum amount of RAM that Windows Vista can support varies, depending on both its edition and its processor architecture, as shown in the table.^[124]

Edition	Processor architecture
IA-32	x64
Ultimate	4 GB	128 GB
Enterprise
Business
Home Premium	16 GB
Home Basic	8 GB
Starter	1 GB	—

Processor limits

The maximum number of logical processors^[125] in a PC that Windows Vista supports is: 32^[126] for 32-bit; 64^[127] for 64-bit.^[128]

The maximum number of physical processors in a PC that Windows Vista supports is: 2 for Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate, and 1 for Starter, Home Basic, and Home Premium.^[129]

Updates

Microsoft occasionally releases updates such as service packs for its Windows operating systems to fix bugs, improve performance and add new features.

Service Pack 1

Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) was released on February 4, 2008, alongside Windows Server 2008 to OEM partners, after a five-month beta test period. The initial deployment of the service pack caused a number of machines to continually reboot, rendering the machines unusable.^[130] This temporarily caused Microsoft to suspend automatic deployment of the service pack until the problem was resolved. The synchronized release date of the two operating systems reflected the merging of the workstation and server kernels back into a single code base for the first time since Windows 2000. MSDN subscribers were able to download SP1 on February 15, 2008. SP1 became available to current Windows Vista users on Windows Update and the Download Center on March 18, 2008.^{[131][132][133]} Initially, the service pack only supported five languages – English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese. Support for the remaining 31 languages was released on April 14, 2008.^[134]

A white paper, published by Microsoft on August 29, 2007, outlined the scope and intent of the service pack, identifying three major areas of improvement: reliability and performance, administration experience, and support for newer hardware and standards.^[135]

One area of particular note is performance. Areas of improvement include file copy operations, hibernation, logging off on domain-joined machines, JavaScript parsing in Internet Explorer, network file share browsing,^[132] Windows Explorer ZIP file handling,^[136] and Windows Disk Defragmenter.^[137] The ability to choose individual drives to defragment is being reintroduced as well.^[132]

Service Pack 1 introduced support for some new hardware and software standards, notably the exFAT file system,^[132] 802.11n wireless networking, IPv6 over VPN connections, and the Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol.^[138]

Booting a system using Extensible Firmware Interface on x64 systems was also introduced;^[132] this feature had originally been slated for the initial release of Vista but was delayed due to a lack of compatible hardware at the time. Booting from a GUID Partition Table–based hard drive greater than 2.19 TB is supported (x64 only).^[139][140]

Two areas have seen changes in SP1 that have come as the result of concerns from software vendors. One of these is desktop search; users will be able to change the default desktop search program to one provided by a third party instead of the Microsoft desktop search program that comes with Windows Vista, and desktop search programs will be able to seamlessly tie in their services into the operating system.^[133] These changes come in part due to complaints from Google, whose Google Desktop Search application was hindered by the presence of Vista’s built-in desktop search. In June 2007, Google claimed that the changes being introduced for SP1 «are a step in the right direction, but they should be improved further to give consumers greater access to alternate desktop search providers».^[141] The other area of note is a set of new security APIs being introduced for the benefit of antivirus software that currently relies on the unsupported practice of patching the kernel (see Kernel Patch Protection).^[142][143]

An update to DirectX 10, named DirectX 10.1,^[132] marked mandatory several features that were previously optional in Direct3D 10 hardware. Graphics cards will be required to support DirectX 10.1.^[144] SP1 includes a kernel (6001.18000) that matches the version shipped with Windows Server 2008.^[145]

The Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) was replaced by the Group Policy Object Editor. An updated downloadable version of the Group Policy Management Console was released soon after the service pack.

SP1 enables support for hotpatching, a reboot-reduction servicing technology designed to maximize uptime. It works by allowing Windows components to be updated (or «patched») while they are still in use by a running process. Hotpatch-enabled update packages are installed via the same methods as traditional update packages, and will not trigger a system reboot.^[146]

Service Pack 2

Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 was released through different channels between April^[147] and June 2009, one year after the release of Windows Vista SP1, and four months before the release of Windows 7.^[5] In addition to a number of security and other fixes, a number of new features have been added. However, it did not include Internet Explorer 8, but instead was included in Windows 7, which was released four months after Vista SP2.^[148][149]

• Windows Search 4 (available for SP1 systems as a standalone update)
• Feature Pack for Wireless adds support for Bluetooth 2.1
• Windows Feature Pack for Storage enables the data recording onto Blu-ray media
• Windows Connect Now (WCN) to simplify Wi-Fi configuration
• Improved support for resuming with active Wi-Fi connections
• Improved support for eSATA drives
• The limit of 10 half-open, outgoing TCP connections introduced in Windows XP SP2 was removed
• Enables the exFAT file system to support UTC timestamps, which allows correct file synchronization across time zones
• Support for ICCD/CCID smart cards
• Support for VIA 64-bit CPUs
• Improved performance and responsiveness with the RSS feeds sidebar
• Improves audio and video performance for streaming high-definition content
• Improves Windows Media Center (WMC) in content protection for TV^[150]
• Provides an improved power management policy that is approximately 10% more efficient than the original with the default policies^[151]

Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 share a single service pack binary, reflecting the fact that their code bases were joined with the release of Server 2008.^[148] Service Pack 2 is not a cumulative update meaning that Service Pack 1 must be installed first.

Platform Update

The Platform Update for Windows Vista was released on October 27, 2009. It includes major new components that shipped with Windows 7, as well as updated runtime libraries.^[152][153] It requires Service Pack 2 of Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 and is listed on Windows Update as a Recommended download.

The Platform Update allows application developers to target both Windows Vista and Windows 7. It consists of the following components:

• Windows Graphics runtime: Direct2D, DirectWrite, Direct3D 11, DXGI 1.1, and WARP
• Updates to Windows Imaging Component
• Updates to XPS Print API, XPS Document API and XPS Rasterization Service
• Windows Automation API (updates to MSAA and UI Automation)
• Windows Portable Devices Platform (adds support for MTP over Bluetooth and MTP Device Services)
• Windows Ribbon API
• Windows Animation Manager library

Some updates are available as separate releases for both Windows XP and Windows Vista:

• Windows Management Framework: Windows PowerShell 2.0, Windows Remote Management 2.0, BITS 4.0
• Remote Desktop Connection 7.0 (RDP7) client

Although extensive, the Platform Update does not bring Windows Vista to the level of features and performance offered by Windows 7.^[154] For example, even though Direct3D 11 runtime will be able to run on D3D9-class hardware and WDDM drivers using «feature levels» first introduced in Direct3D 10.1, Desktop Window Manager has not been updated to use Direct3D 10.1.^[154]

In July 2011, Microsoft released the Platform Update Supplement for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, which contains several bug fixes and performance improvements.^[155]

Out-of-band patches

BlueKeep patch

Microsoft has released an update for Windows Vista SP2 to resolve the BlueKeep security vulnerability (CVE-2019-0708), which affects the Remote Desktop Protocol in older Windows versions.^[156] Subsequent related flaws, CVE-2019-1181, CVE-2019-1182, CVE-2019-1222 and CVE-2019-1226 (collectively known as DejaBlue) do not affect Windows Vista or earlier versions of Windows.^[157] The installation of this patch changed the build number of Windows Vista from 6002 to 6003.^[b]

Text Services Framework patch

The Text Services Framework was compromised by a privilege escalation vulnerability (CVE-2019-1162) that could allow attackers to use the framework to perform privileged operations, run software, or send messages to privileged processes from unprivileged processes—bypassing security features such as sandboxes or User Account Control. Microsoft remediated issues related to this vulnerability with the release of a patch in August 2019 for Windows Vista SP2, Windows Server 2008 SP2, and later versions of Windows.^[160]

Malware Protection Engine patch

A vulnerability related to Windows Defender that affected the way the Malware Protection Engine operates (CVE-2017-0290) was reported in May 2017. If Windows Defender scanned a specially crafted file, it would lead to memory corruption, potentially allowing an attacker to control the affected machine or perform arbitrary code execution in the context of LocalSystem; the vulnerability was exacerbated by the default real-time protection settings of Windows Defender, which were configured to automatically initiate malware scans at regular intervals. The first version of the Protection Engine affected by the vulnerability is Version 1.1.13701.0—subsequent versions of the engine are unaffected. Microsoft released a patch to address the issue.^[161]

Marketing campaign

The Mojave Experiment

In July 2008, Microsoft introduced a web-based advertising campaign called the «Mojave Experiment», which depicts a group of people who are asked to evaluate the newest operating system from Microsoft, calling it Windows ‘Mojave’. Participants are first asked about Vista, if they have used it, and their overall satisfaction with Vista on a scale of 1 to 10. They are then shown a demo of some of the new operating system’s features, and asked their opinion and satisfaction with it on the same 1 to 10 scale. After respondents rate «Mojave», they are then told that they were shown a demo of Windows Vista. The object was to test «A theory: If people could see Windows Vista firsthand, they would like it.» According to Microsoft, the initial sample of respondents rated Vista an average of 4.4 out of 10, and Mojave received an average of 8.5, with no respondents rating Mojave lower than they originally rated Windows Vista before the demo.^[162][163] The «experiment» has been criticized for deliberate selection of positive statements and not addressing all aspects of Vista.^[164] During the launch of Vista, Microsoft also made a lime flavored sparkling water available to campus visitors and developers.^[165]

Reception

Windows Vista received mixed reviews at the time of its release and throughout its lifespan, mainly for its much higher hardware requirements and perceived slowness compared to Windows XP.^[166][167]

It received generally positive reviews from PC gamers who praised the advantages brought by DirectX 10, which allowed for better gaming performance and more realistic graphics, as well as support for many new capabilities featured in new GPUs.^[168] However, many DirectX 9 games initially ran with lower frame rates compared to when they were run on Windows XP. In mid-2008, benchmarks suggested that the SP1 update improved performance to be on par with (or better than) Windows XP in terms of game performance.^[169]

Peter Bright of Ars Technica wrote that, despite its delays and feature cuts, Windows Vista was «a huge evolution in the history of the NT platform […] The fundamental changes to the platform are of a scale not seen since the release of NT [3.1; the first version].»^[170] In a continuation of his previous assessment, Bright stated that «Vista is not simply XP with a new skin; core parts of the OS have been radically overhauled, and virtually every area has seen significant refinement. In terms of the magnitude and extent of these changes, Vista represents probably the biggest leap that the NT platform has ever seen. Never before have significant subsystems been gutted and replaced in the way they are in Vista.»^[171] Many others in the tech industry echoed these sentiments at the time, directing praise towards the massive amount of technical features new to Windows Vista.^[172]

Windows Vista received the «Best of CES» award at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2007.^[173][174]

In its first year of availability, PC World rated it as the biggest tech disappointment of 2007,^[175] and it was rated by InfoWorld as No. 2 of Tech’s all-time 25 flops.^[176] Microsoft’s then much smaller competitor Apple noted that, despite Vista’s far greater sales, its own operating system did not seem to have suffered after its release, and would later invest in advertising mocking Vista’s unpopularity with users.^[177][178]

Computer manufacturers such as Dell, Lenovo, and Hewlett-Packard released their newest computers with Windows Vista pre-installed; however, after the negative reception of the operating system, they also began selling their computers with Windows XP CDs included because of a drop in sales.^[179]

Sales

A Gartner research report predicted that Vista business adoption in 2008 would overtake that of XP during the same time frame (21.3% vs. 16.9%)^[180] while IDC had indicated that the launch of Windows Server 2008 served as a catalyst for the stronger adoption rates.^[181][182] As of January 2009, Forrester Research had indicated that almost one third of North American and European corporations had started deploying Vista.^[183] At a May 2009 conference, a Microsoft Vice President said «Adoption and deployment of Windows Vista has been slightly ahead of where we had been with XP» for big businesses.^[184][185]

Within its first month, 20 million copies of Vista were sold, double the amount of Windows XP sales within its first month in October 2001, five years earlier.^[186] Shortly after however, due to Vista’s relatively low adoption rates and continued demand for Windows XP, Microsoft decided to sell Windows XP until June 30, 2008, instead of the previously planned date of January 31, 2008.^[187] There were reports of Vista users «downgrading» their operating systems back to XP, as well as reports of businesses planning to skip Vista.^[188] A study conducted by ChangeWave in March 2008 showed that the percentage of corporate users who were «very satisfied» with Vista was dramatically lower than other operating systems, with Vista at 8%, compared to the 40% who said they were «very satisfied» with Windows XP.^[189]

The internet-usage market share for Windows Vista after two years of availability, in January 2009, was 20.61%. This figure combined with World Internet Users and Population Stats yielded a user base of roughly 330 million,^[190] which exceeded Microsoft’s two-year post launch expectations by 130 million.^[191] The internet user base reached before the release of its successor (Windows 7) was roughly 400 million according to the same statistical sources.^[192]

Criticism

Windows Vista received mixed reviews. Criticism targets include protracted development time (5–6 years), more restrictive licensing terms, the inclusion of several technologies aimed at restricting the copying of protected digital media,^[193] and the usability of the new User Account Control security technology. Moreover, some concerns have been raised about many PCs meeting «Vista Premium Ready» hardware requirements and Vista’s pricing.

Hardware requirements

While in 2005 Microsoft claimed «nearly all PCs on the market today will run Windows Vista»,^[194] the higher requirements of some of the «premium» features, such as the Aero interface, affected many upgraders. According to the UK newspaper The Times in May 2006, the full set of features «would be available to less than 5 percent of Britain’s PC market»; however, this prediction was made several months before Vista was released.^[195] This continuing lack of clarity eventually led to a class action against Microsoft as people found themselves with new computers that were unable to use the new software to its full potential despite the assurance of «Vista Capable» designations.^[196] The court case has made public internal Microsoft communications that indicate that senior executives have also had difficulty with this issue. For example, Mike Nash (Corporate Vice President, Windows Product Management) commented, «I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine» because of his laptop’s lack of an appropriate graphics chip so hobbled Vista.^[197]

Licensing

Criticism of upgrade licenses pertaining to Windows Vista Starter through Home Premium was expressed by Ars Technica‘s Ken Fisher, who noted that the new requirement of having a prior operating system already installed was going to irritate users who reinstall Windows regularly.^[198]
It has been revealed that an Upgrade copy of Windows Vista can be installed clean without first installing a previous version of Windows. On the first install, Windows will refuse to activate. The user must then reinstall that same copy of Vista. Vista will then activate on the reinstall, thus allowing a user to install an Upgrade of Windows Vista without owning a previous operating system.^[199] As with Windows XP, separate rules still apply to OEM versions of Vista installed on new PCs: Microsoft asserts that these versions are not legally transferable (although whether this conflicts with the right of first sale has yet to be clearly decided legally).^[200]

Cost

Initially, the cost of Windows Vista was also a source of concern and commentary. A majority of users in a poll said that the prices of various Windows Vista editions posted on the Microsoft Canada website in August 2006 make the product too expensive.^[201] A BBC News report on the day of Vista’s release suggested that, «there may be a backlash from consumers over its pricing plans—with the cost of Vista versions in the US roughly half the price of equivalent versions in the UK.»^[202]
Since the release of Vista in 2006, Microsoft has reduced the retail, and upgraded the price point of Vista. Originally, Vista Ultimate was priced at $399, and Home Premium Vista at $239. These prices have since been reduced to $319 and $199 respectively.^[203]

Digital rights management

Windows Vista supports additional forms of DRM restrictions. One aspect of this is the Protected Video Path, which is designed so that «premium content» from HD DVD or Blu-ray Discs may mandate that the connections between PC components be encrypted. Depending on what the content demands, the devices may not pass premium content over non-encrypted outputs, or they must artificially degrade the quality of the signal on such outputs or not display it at all. Drivers for such hardware must be approved by Microsoft; a revocation mechanism is also included, which allows Microsoft to disable drivers of devices in end-user PCs over the Internet.^[204] Peter Gutmann, security researcher and author of the open source cryptlib library, claims that these mechanisms violate fundamental rights of the user (such as fair use), unnecessarily increase the cost of hardware, and make systems less reliable (the «tilt bit» being a particular worry; if triggered, the entire graphic subsystem performs a reset) and vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks.^[205] However, despite several requests^[206] for evidence supporting such claims Peter Gutmann has never supported his claims with any researched evidence. Proponents have claimed that Microsoft had no choice but to follow the demands of the movie studios, and that the technology will not actually be enabled until after 2010;^[207][208] Microsoft also noted that content protection mechanisms have existed in Windows as far back as Windows ME, and that the new protections will not apply to any existing content, only future content.^[209]

User Account Control

Although User Account Control (UAC) is an important part of Vista’s security infrastructure as it blocks software from silently gaining administrator privileges without the user’s knowledge, it has been widely criticized for generating too many prompts.^[210] This has led many Vista UAC users to consider it troublesome, with some consequently either turning the feature off or (for Windows Vista Enterprise or Windows Vista Ultimate users) putting it in auto-approval mode.^[211] Responding to this criticism, Microsoft altered the implementation to reduce the number of prompts with SP1.^[146] Though the changes resulted in some improvement, it did not alleviate the concerns completely.^[212]

Downgrade rights

End-users of licenses of Windows 7 acquired through OEM or volume licensing may downgrade to the equivalent edition of Windows Vista. Downgrade rights are not offered for Starter, Home Basic or Home Premium editions of Windows 7.^[213] For Windows 8 licenses acquired through an OEM, a user may also downgrade to the equivalent edition of Windows Vista. Customers licensed for use of Windows 8 Enterprise are generally licensed for Windows 8 Pro, which may be downgraded to Windows Vista Business.

See also

• BlueKeep (security vulnerability)
• Comparison of Windows Vista and Windows XP
• Microsoft Security Essentials

Notes

References

External links

• Windows Vista End of Support
• Windows Vista Service Pack 2 (SP2) Update

INTRODUCTION

This article describes the prerequisite software updates that apply to versions of Windows Vista that are mentioned in the «Applies to» section. These software updates are a prerequisite for Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1). Additionally, these updates help improve reliability when you install or remove Windows Vista SP1.

More Information

Two or three additional software updates are required before you install Windows Vista SP1. The software updates that are required depend on the version of Windows Vista that you want to upgrade. Prerequisite update 935509 that is listed in this article only applies to Windows Vista Enterprise and to Windows Vista Ultimate. The other prerequisite updates that are listed in this article apply to all versions of Windows Vista.

Before Windows Vista SP1 is released, these prerequisite updates will be delivered to most users through Windows Update as part of regularly scheduled monthly updates. These updates will be installed together with other updates that will require that you restart the computer. Therefore, an additional restart will not be required. This delivery method will help simplify installation of the required updates.

If you decide to install Windows Vista SP1 by using the stand-alone installer instead of by using Windows Update, you will not have to install the prerequisite updates separately. The prerequisite updates will be installed by the stand-alone installer if they are necessary. The following three updates are required before you install Windows Vista SP1. However, these updates are also recommended if you do not intend to install Windows Vista SP1. These updates help improve reliability and performance when you install future individual updates from Microsoft:

• 935509 A software update is available for versions of Windows Vista that include the Windows BitLocker Drive Encryption feature
   
  Update 935509 lets you correctly service Windows BitLocker Drive Encryption-capable computers. This update only applies to the following versions of Windows Vista that include Windows BitLocker Drive Encryption:

  • Windows Vista Enterprise

  • Windows Vista Ultimate

• 938371 A software update is available for the Windows Vista installation components
   
  Update 938371 updates several internal components that Windows Vista requires in order to install or to remove Windows Vista Service Pack 1 more reliably. This update must be applied separately before you install Windows Vista SP1 to make sure that Windows Vista SP1 can be installed or removed from the computer. You must install this update in order to install and to remove Windows Vista SP1 on all versions of Windows Vista. This update will be available on the Windows Update Web site soon after the release of update 935509 and before the release of Windows Vista SP1.

• Update 937287 updates the Windows Vista installation software. For more information, see the «Update information» section.

Update information

Update 937287 is a prerequisite package that contains updates to the Windows Vista installation software. The installation software is the component that handles the installation and the removal of software updates, language packs, optional Windows features, and service packs. Update 937287 is necessary to successfully install and to remove Windows Vista SP1 on all versions of Windows Vista. This update will be available on the Windows Update Web site soon after the release of update 935509 and before the release of Windows Vista SP1.

Update 937287 is available from the Windows Update Web site. To obtain this update, follow these steps:

1. Click Start , click Control Panel, and then click
   Security.

2. Under Windows Update, click Check for updates.

   Important

   • You must install this update package on a Windows Vista operating system that is running. You cannot install this update package on an offline image.

   • If any other updates are waiting for a restart, the restart must occur before you install this update.

   • You must install update 949939 before you install this update.

Update is available from the Microsoft Download Center

119591 How to obtain Microsoft support files from online services
Microsoft scanned this file for viruses. Microsoft used the most current virus-detection software that was available on the date that the file was posted. The file is stored on security-enhanced servers that help prevent any unauthorized changes to the file.

Prerequisites

You must install update 949939 before you install this update.

Restart requirement

You must restart the computer after you apply this update.

Update replacement information

This update does not replace a previously released update.

Update removal information

You cannot remove this update.

For more information about software update terminology, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

824684 Description of the standard terminology that is used to describe Microsoft software updates

Этой публикацией мы начинаем новый цикл статей, посвящённых семейству операционных систем Windows Vista. Не секрет, что всего несколько месяцев, даже, скорее, недель, отделяют нас от появления на полках магазинов первых компьютеров с предустановленной Windows Vista, и немногим больше – от появления в рознице первых коробочных версий. Поэтому сейчас – самое время начать неторопливое знакомство с особенностями нового поколения операционных систем для настольных и мобильных ПК от Microsoft.

Будем надеяться, что кому-то эти публикации помогут уяснить суть грядущих изменений и новых возможностей, кто-то сможет окончательно уточнить для себя смысл и сроки перехода на новую ОС; кто-то сможет поточнее определиться с выбором версии. Наконец, каждый из нас к моменту начала продаж семейства Windows Vista будет точно знать, где найти подробности о настройках и особенностях новых операционных систем, где найти ответы на большинство вопросов, возникающих по ходу миграции на новый софт. В перспективе на базе этих публикаций вполне может созреть некоторое подобие списка вопросов и ответов — этакий FAQ по Windows Vista, почему бы и нет.

Многие наши читатели уже ознакомились с нашим первым материалом по этой теме – статьёй Microsoft Windows Vista Beta 2 и получили первое представление о новом интерфейсе и оригинальных приложениях новой операционной системы. Начиная с сегодняшнего дня мы попытаемся, что называется, «копнуть немного глубже», то есть, подробнейшим образом рассмотреть процессы инсталляции, настройки, эксплуатации Vista, ознакомиться с её явными возможностями и скрытыми функциями и так далее. Правда, не стоит ждать от автора этакого менторского тона и лекторского занудства: дело в том, я буду знакомиться с возможностями Windows Vista вместе с вами, непосредственно в процессе написания статей. Сдаётся мне, мой непредвзятый взгляд на процесс и ваши письма с отзывами и пожеланиями по ходу повествования позволят сделать эти записки не просто полезными, но также интересными, а возможные упущения и детали мы будем дополнять в следующих «сериях».

Прежде чем перейти непосредственно к рассказу – ещё одно уточнение. Именно в дни подготовки этого материала к публикации стало известно о выпуске Windows Vista версии Release Candidate 2, то есть, самой последней перед анонсом «настоящих» ОС отладочной версии для предварительного тестирования. Так получилось, что этот материал подготавливался на системе с предустановленной Windows Vista версии RC1, что уже не Beta 2, но ещё не RC2. На самом деле, вряд ли ключевые характеристики новых операционных систем финального вида будут отличаться от Release Candidate 1 или 2, скорее всего, можно говорить об фиксации ряда последних «багов» и некотором приумножении производительности. То есть, в целом это уже некритично.

Наш сегодняшний разговор мы начнём с развенчания мифа о том, что для работы с Windows Vista необходимо самая современная аппаратная платформа. Ряд последних новостей, где аналитики наперебой грезят ростом продаж нового компьютерного оборудования, а производители «железа» один за другим анонсируют новые компоненты с пометкой «Vista Ready» вполне может создать впечатление, что при переходе на операционную систему Microsoft нового поколения нам придётся распрощаться с уже имеющимся настольным ПК или ноутбуком годовой и более давности, и всё придётся покупать заново. Это так, и в то же время совсем не так.

Спору нет, исторически каждое новое поколение Windows было более требовательно к аппаратным ресурсам. И в то же время в случае перехода к работе под ОС Vista требования хоть и возросли, но не столь радикально, как это могло показаться по ранним публикациям. Другое дело, что в этот раз Microsoft применила новую оригинальную стратегию позиционирования различных версий ОС. Раньше, во времена Windows 95, 98 или XP, складывалась ситуация, когда «слабенький» в аппаратном смысле компьютер, обладая всеми возможностями, просто «подтормаживал». В случае Windows Vista система берёт на себя функции контроля соответствия возможностей аппаратной части поставленным перед ней программным задачам. В каждом случае система самостоятельно определяет внутренние «рейтинги» производительности тех или иных компонентов, после чего определяет, ограничиться минимальным набором базовых возможностей или запускать возможности «по полной».

Перед тем как перейти к знакомству с принципом начисления этих самых внутренних рейтингов, к минимальным и оптимальным аппаратным требованиям системы, и, наконец, к возможностям, предоставляемым системой при достижении разных рейтингов, есть смысл остановиться на кратком описании каждой из семейства операционных систем Windows Vista. Дело в том, что теперь сегментация операционных систем Microsoft будет проводиться по несколько иному принципу. Напомню, что ныне существует шесть систем Windows XP — Home Edition, Media Center Edition, Professional Edition, Tablet PC Edition, Professional x64 Edition и Starter Edition. Хорошо известно, что версии Windows XP Home Edition и Windows XP Professional Edition, как раз перекрывают потребности основных категорий пользователей, а остальные варианты служат для работы со специфическими аппаратными платформами.

В отличие от них, семейство Windows Vista чётко позиционируется по ключевым категориям потребителей: отдельных пользователей, малых предприятий, средних и крупных организаций, с соответствующими схемами использования программной обвязки, то есть, Windows Vista Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, Ultimate. Иными словами, каждый потребительский сегмент рынка теперь получает как минимум два варианта ОС — начального и расширенного уровня. Сейчас мы вкратце охарактеризуем каждую из них.

Windows Vista Home Basic — самый простой и доступный вариант начального уровня, преимущественно для домашних пользователей. Обладает всеми ключевыми характеристиками ОС нового поколения: безопасностью, поддержкой расширенного родительского контроля, базовым интерфейсом пользователя, новыми функциями поиска и систематизации данных, улучшенной работой в сети.

Windows Vista Home Premium — основной вариант Windows Vista для домашних пользователей настольных и мобильных ПК, помимо возможностей Vista Home Basic поддерживается 3-мерный интерфейс пользователя Windows Aero, функциональность Windows Media Center, ряд дополнительных возможностей по работе с мультимедийными данными вроде редактирования и записи DVD. Наряду с этим реализована возможность работы системы в виде Windows Tablet PC, поддерживаются дополнительные возможности повышения мобильности вроде функции синхронизации двух ПК. Можно ожидать, что несмотря на несколько большую цену, нежели Vista Home Basic, версия Windows Vista Home Premium станет этаким стандартом де-факто для домашних ПК, малых офисов, большинства бытовых и развлекательных ноутбуков.

Windows Vista Business – основная аппаратная платформа для настольных и мобильных ПК корпоративного класса. Vista Business подходит для малого, среднего бизнеса и крупных предприятий, содержит все функции Vista Home Basic (кроме ряда развлекательных) и имеет ряд специфических особенностей. Так, Vista Business поддерживает интерфейс Windows Aero, возможности Windows Tablet PC, ряд функций повышения мобильности, плюс исключительно корпоративные возможности вроде подключения к домену, поддержку групповой политики, шифрование файловой системы, поддержку факсов и сканеров и пр.

Именно под управлением Windows Vista Business будут работать новые настольные ПК и ноутбуки платформы Intel vPro, это позволит в меньшей степени зависеть от службы технической поддержки.

Windows Vista Enterprise расширенный вариант Vista для корпоративных ПК и ноутбуков, исключительно для клиентов программы Microsoft Software Assurance. В дополнение к возможностям Vista Business эта версия обладает средствами шифрования диска Windows BitLocker, поддерживает все существующие языки интерфейса, функцию Virtual PC Express и подсистему для приложений на основе UNIX (SUA). Словом, система с учётом специфики работы крупных предприятий и организаций со сложной инфраструктурой.

Windows Vista Ultimate — все «тридцать три удовольствия» и всё для работы, этакая квинтэссенция версий для домашних и бизнес-пользователей, рассчитанная, главным образом, на тех, кому по долгу службы приходится использовать один и тот же компьютер или ноутбук для развлечений и для работы.

Ultimate — исчерпывающе полный вариант Vista для пользователей настольных и мобильных ПК класса «персоналка» или «малый офис», наряду с полным набором возможностей версий Home Premium и Enterprise. Windows Vista Ultimate, содержит все необходимое для одинаково комфортной работы дома, в поездках и в офисе.

Наконец, Windows Vista Starter — самая недорогая и доступная версия для бытовых ПК и пользователей начального уровня. Базовый набор возможностей Windows Vista Starter несколько урезан, хотя и близок к Home Basic, главное, что сохраняется совместимость со всеми современными приложениями и устройствами. Фактически, это операционная система для начинающих, делающих первые шаги в освоении ПК и не желающих при покупке первого компьютера переплачивать за софт (в OEM-версии цена Vista Starter обещает быть весьма и весьма низкой).

Если у вас ещё остались какие-то вопросы по сегментированию разновидностей операционных систем Windows Vista, надеюсь, окончательную ясность в этом вопросе внесут три слайда, представленные ниже. Совсем другое дело – разобраться в подробностях, чем реально отличается одна версия от другой. Этим мы займёмся на следующей странице.

Сходства и различия разных версий Windows Vista

Думаете, после первых экспериментов с Windows Vista мне охота рассказывать нудные подробности взамен того, чтобы поделиться яркими впечатлениями и замеченными особенностями? Конечно, нет, но – терпение, друзья, есть некоторые важные базовые вещи, справочные данные, к которым мы с вами ещё неоднократно будем возвращаться при выборе версии Vista или конфигурации системы. Вот почему сейчас мы перейдём к длинной подробной таблице, в которой сведены все ключевые сходства и различия разных версий Windows Vista. Если некоторые термины вам пока не до конца понятны – ничего страшного, со временем дойдём и до подробностей.

Windows Vista	Home Basic	Home Premium	Business	Enterprise	Ultimate
Контроль учетных записей пользователей	Да
Центр безопасности Windows	Да
Защитник Windows	Да
Брандмауэр Windows	Да
Защищенный режим Internet Explorer 7	Да
Исправление параметров безопасности в Internet Explorer 7	Да
Фильтр фишинга в Internet Explorer 7	Да
Фильтр фишинга в Windows Mail	Да
Служба Windows Update	Да
Родительский контроль	Да	—	Да
Уменьшение числа перезагрузок, зависаний и сбоев	Да
Ограничение полномочий служб	Да
Автоматическая настройка производительности и диагностика оборудования	Да
Стек TCP/IP нового поколения	Да
Поддержка IPv6 и IPv4	Да
Windows ReadyDrive	Да
Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM)	Да
Средство переноса данных Windows	Да
Поддержка 64-разрядных процессоров	Да
Быстрая загрузка, быстрое выключение и переход в спящий режим	Да
Максимальный объем памяти (32-разрядная система)	4 Гб
Максимальный объем памяти (64-разрядная система)	8 Гб	16 Гб	128+ Гб
Поддержка двух процессоров (двух процессорных разъёмов)	—	Да
Резервное копирование и восстановление файлов и папок пользователя	Да
Резервное копирование файлов пользователя по расписанию	—	Да
Резервное копирование файлов пользователя по сети	—	Да
Windows ShadowCopy	—	Да
Резервное копирование и восстановление на основе образа системы	—	Да
Шифрование файловой системы	—	Да
Средства распространения приложений для управляемых сетей	—	Да
QoS на основе политик для сетевых подключений	—	Да
Клиент службы управления правами Windows (RMS)	—	Да
Управляемая установка драйверов устройств	—	Да
Агент клиента NAP	—	Да
Подключаемая архитектура проверки подлинности при входе в систему	—	Да
Встроенные средства управления смарт-картами	—	Да
Средство шифрования диска Windows BitLocker	—	Да
Поддержка одновременной установки нескольких языков интерфейса пользователя	—	Да
Возможность выбора языков интерфейса пользователя для всех стран мира (36 языков)	—	Да
Подсистема для приложений на основе UNIX	—	Да
Virtual PC Express	—	Да
Программа обновления Windows Anytime Upgrade	Да	—
Дополнения для Windows Ultimate	—	Да
Упрощенный интерфейс пользователя Windows Vista	Да
Интерфейс пользователя Windows Aero с элементами Glass («стекло»), Windows Flip, Windows Flip 3D, масштабируемыми миниатюрами на панели задач, динамическими окнами и более плавным отображением рабочего стола	—	Да
Средство быстрого поиска по всей операционной системе	Да
Автоматическая систематизация содержимого на основе свойств и меток файла	Да
Internet Explorer 7 с поддержкой вкладок, быстрыми вкладками и встроенным поиском	Да
Internet Explorer 7 с поддержкой RSS-каналов	Да
Поддержка приложений нового поколения, основанных на технологии WinFX	Да
Windows SuperFetch	Да
Windows ReadyBoost	Да
Ввод и вывод с низким приоритетом	Да
Автоматическая дефрагментация жесткого диска	Да
Windows Mail	Да
Календарь Windows	Да
Боковая панель Windows	Да
Фотоальбом Windows	Да
Тематические слайд-шоу	—	Да	—	Да
Windows Media 11	Да
Windows Media Center (музыка, фото, видео, ТВ, записанные ТВ-программы, интерактивные развлечения)	—	Да	—	Да
Windows Media Center (просмотр и запись ТВ высокой четкости)	—	Да	—	Да
Windows Media Center, поддержка CableCard	—	Да	—	Да
Поддержка Media Center Extender, в том числе Xbox 360	—	Да	—	Да
Windows Movie Maker	Да	—	Да
Windows Movie Maker HD	—	Да	—	Да
Windows DVD Maker	—	Да	—	Да
Проводник игр	Да
Обновленные игры	Да
Новые дополнительные игры	—	Да	Да*	Да
Поддержка универсальных игровых устройств	Да	Да*	Да
Распознавание речи	Да
Специальные возможности и центр специальных возможностей	Да
Центр начальной настройки Windows	Да
Поддержка документов в формате XPS	Да
Ресурсы для малых предприятий	—	Да	—	Да
Факсы и сканеры Windows	—	Да	Да*
Сетевой центр	Да
Диагностика сети и устранение неисправностей	Да
Улучшенная поддержка беспроводных сетевых соединений	Да
Обеспечение поддержки беспроводной сети	—	Да
Улучшенная поддержка одноранговых сетей	Да
Улучшенная поддержка VPN	Да
Улучшенное управление питанием	Да
Количество одновременных подключений по протоколу SMB в одноранговой сети	5	10
Windows HotStart	Да
Центр мобильных устройств Windows	Частично	Да
Центр синхронизации	Да
Windows Tablet PC со встроенной поддержкой рукописного ввода/цифровых чернил	—	Да
Поддержка сенсорного экрана Windows Tablet PC	—	Да
Улучшенная поддержка распознавания рукописного ввода Windows Tablet PC	—	Да
Повышенное удобство использования и навигации Windows Tablet PC	—	Да
Windows SideShow	—	Да
Программа совместной работы Windows	Только просмотр	Да
Улучшенное совместное использование файлов и папок	Да
Синхронизация двух ПК	—	Да
Сетевое отображение	—	Да
Настройки отображения	—	Да
Средство удаленного управления рабочим столом	Только клиент	Клиент и сервер
Присоединение к домену Windows Small Business Server	—	Да
Присоединение к домену Windows Server	—	Да
Поддержка групповой политики	—	Да
Поддержка автономных файлов и папок	—	Да
Кэширование на стороне клиента	—	Да
Перемещаемые профили пользователей	—	Да
Перенаправление папок	—	Да
Централизованное управление питанием при помощи групповой политики	—	Да
Сервер IIS	—	Да*

* Дополнительная возможность

Как видите, разница между разными версиями огромна, дифференциация версий Windows Vista гораздо глубже и гораздо точнее ориентирована под каждый сектор пользовательских приложений, нежели это наблюдается между разными вариантами Windows XP. По крайней мере, пользуясь этой таблицей каждый из нас теперь в состоянии реально оценить потребность в той или иной версии Windows Vista. Чтобы не переплачивать за ненужное и чтобы заведомо знать исчерпывающий список возможностей своей версии Vista.

Требования к системе

Вероятно, именно сейчас было бы логично перейти к подробному рассказу о всевозможных функциях и установках, впервые реализованных в Windows Vista и неведомых пользователям Windows XP. Однако сегодня мы всё же попытаемся хотя бы в общих чертах закончить поставленную в начале статьи тему, а именно – разобраться с необходимыми, достаточными и оптимальными требованиями, предъявляемыми к аппаратной части системы. Или хотя бы ознакомиться в общих чертах с параметрами, влияющими на общую производительность системы.

Система	Минимальная конфигурация	Конфигурация для Vista Premium
Процессор	Современный чип, не менее 800 МГц	Современный чип, не менее 1 ГГц, 32-разрядный (x86) или 64-разрядный (x64)
Оперативная память	512 Мб	1 Гб
Графика	DirectX9 и выше	DirectX9 и выше (поддержка WDDM для Aero)
Видеопамять	—	128 Мб
Жесткий диск	—	40 Гб
Свободное пространство на жестком диске	15 Гб	15 Гб
Оптический привод	—	DVD-ROM
Звук	—	+
Интернет	—	+

Как видите, требования достаточно скромные. Это, конечно же, уже не тот уровень, что был достаточен для работы Windows XP, но если сильно уж не «прибедняться» и посмотреть правде в глаза, то такие скромные требования не выдвигаются к настольным ПК и ноутбукам уже почитай несколько лет, разве что Windows Vista действительно чувствительна к объёму оперативной памяти.

Другое дело, если вы намерены вкусить все прелести трёхмерного полупрозрачного интерфейса Windows Aero, подробнее о возможностях которого в одной из следующих публикаций. Здесь действительно понадобится более-менее современное оснащение. Как, например, графический процессор, совместимый с DirectX9, аппаратной поддержкой Pixel Shader 2.0 и сертифицированный под драйвер WDDM. При этом также необходима поддержка 32-битной глубины цвета, а также 64 Мб видеопамяти для работы с одним монитором разрешением 1,310 млн. пикселей и менее, или 128 Мб видеопамяти для поддержки монитора с разрешением 2,304 млн. пикселей и менее. Разумеется, необходимо соответствие требованиям пропускной способности шины видеопамяти, полученным с помощью средства Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor.

Как видите, требования по нынешним временам весьма и весьма скромные. Более того, как показала практика, для запуска пользовательского интерфейса Aero в версиях Vista Premium и Ultimate, более чем достаточно даже интегрированной графики чипсетов класса NVIDIA GeForce 6100/6150.

Что касается базовых возможностей Windows Vista, то, как также было выяснено на практике, система с успехом инсталлируется и работает на ура даже в ноутбуках со «старенькими» процессорами Celeron M с тактовой частотой 1,4 ГГц. Напомню, что в настоящее время мне, как и большинству наших читателей, работа с Windows Vista в новинку, и фактически мы вместе делаем первые шаги по изучению её возможностей. Поэтому буду говорить только о тех случаях и результатах, которые были получены лично мной или заслуживающими доверия специалистами. По крайней мере, за вполне достойную работоспособность Windows Vista RC1 в системе с 1,4 ГГц Celeron M можно ручаться, а дальнейшее накопление опытных данных не заставит себя ждать и будет по мере накопления публиковаться в следующих материалах. Впрочем, так же как и информация об особенностях или «багах» системы, если таковые будут со временем обнаружены.

К сожалению, в данный момент ничего нельзя сказать о производительности под Windows Vista RC2. Кое-какие результаты уже опубликованы в интернете, отзывы, кстати, вполне лестные, но такие исследования в нашей лаборатории ещё впереди. В качестве достоверной информации также могу сказать, что производительность систем под Windows Vista RC1 по утверждению многих бета-тестеров возросла значительным образом при переходе с Windows Vista Beta2, это косвенным образом подтверждает готовность системы к финальному варианту.

Vista: внутренний рейтинг и оптимизация производительности

Теперь мы плавно переходим к комплексу функций, отвечающих за производительность системы под управлением Windows Vista. Не секрет, что опытный пользователь Windows XP в состоянии повысить производительность системы чуть ли не в разы без всякого апгрейда «железа», с помощью обычной оптимизации настроек операционной системы.

Что касается Windows Vista, разработчики системы ввели ряд совершенно новых технологий, призванных увеличить или хотя бы оптимизировать производительность. К ним можно отнести усовершенствованные функции автоматического запуска, завершения работы и режима сна, позволяющие настольным и мобильным ПК быстрее возвращаться в рабочее состояние. Кроме того, в Windows Vista более эффективно организовано управление памятью и устройствами ввода-вывода, что также позволяет более оперативно реагировать на запросы приложений.

В Windows Vista применяется новый подход к повышению производительности, для этого в ее состав включён так называемый центр производительности. Благодаря этому, можно ознакомиться с показателями производительности и/или устранить возникшие трудности.

Наиболее интересная функция центра производительности Vista – несомненно, утилита оценки производительности системы WinSPR. Разумеется, большинство из нас читает различные статьи о тестировании тех или иных компонентов ПК – процессоров, видеокарт, накопителей и т.д. И всё же большинству современных пользователей достаточно сложно разобраться со всеми этими аппаратными сложностями и с умом соотнести параметры производительности процессора, памяти, графической подсистемы, винчестера и т.п. Именно для автоматизации этого процесса и была введена функция оценки производительности WinSPR. Результат её работы – обычные числовые рейтинги, дающие достаточное представление о производительности под управлением Windows Vista.

Рейтинги эти, надо отметить, выставляются каждому ключевому компоненту системы таким образом, что суммарная производительность ПК оценивается по самой нижней оценке. Например, в нашей тестовой системе, собранной на 3,0 ГГц процессоре Pentium 4 и видеокарте NVIDIA GeForce 7600GS, разумеется, «бутылочным горлышком» системы оказался процессор, и именно по его рейтингу была выведена окончательная оценка системы. Впрочем, как видно на скриншоте, таким узким местом мог оказаться любой другой компонент системы – память, винчестер и т.д.

Нам всем ещё предстоит оценить адекватность выставления рейтингов утилитой WinSPR, ведь фактически это означает, что Microsoft взяла на себя функции оценки компонентов системы и в какой-то мере выдачи рекомендаций к последующему апгрейду. Согласитесь, при рейтинге 4.8 у видеокарты NVIDIA GeForce 7600GS, ей совершенно не грозит апгрейд – по крайней мере, гораздо разумнее будет задуматься о замене или «разгоне» процессора.

В то же время функция WinSPR играет ещё одну важную роль, а именно, позволяет оценить, будет ли компьютер поддерживать более ресурсоемкие компоненты Windows Vista, например интерфейс Aero, несколько мониторов или функции записи телепередач формата HDTV. Несомненно, найдутся и другие ресурсоёмкие задачи, которые в перспективе станут краеугольными для суммарной оценки производительности системы.

Кстати, интересно отметить, что в одной из виденных мною систем на базе чипсета с интегрированной графикой NVIDIA GeForce 6150 – именно такие наборы логики нынче популярны для выпуска развлекательных ПК для дома, рейтинг этой самой интегрированной графической системы достигал 2.5 баллов, и этого оказалось более чем достаточно для работы 3D интерфейса Aero.

Как вычисляется рейтинг WinSPR? По данным Microsoft, для этого применяется система оценки системы Windows (WinSAT), которая тестирует аппаратное обеспечение компьютера и преобразует полученные результаты в числовые показатели производительности. Тестированию подвергаются процессор, память и жесткий диск, а также графика, в том числе её способность поддерживать современные компьютерные игры.

Преимущество такой системы оценки производительности очевидно: независимые поставщики могут указывать оценку WinSPR на упаковке своих продуктов, давая знать потенциальным покупателям, какой производительностью должен обладать компьютер под управлением Windows Vista, чтобы приложение работало. Например, если новая программа обработки цифровых видеозаписей рекомендуется для ПК под управлением Windows Vista с рейтингом 4, то пользователи компьютеров с рейтингом 4 и выше могут быть уверены — у них эта программа будет функционировать нормально. В то же время независимый и «неподкупный» рейтинг WinSPR также позволит вам оценить покупаемый компьютер: как бы продавец ни расхваливал свой товар и его возможности, проверка реальной производительности займёт считанные минуты. Не удивлюсь, если со временем финальный рейтинг WinSPR будет совсем не косвенно, но достаточно напрямую влиять на финальную цену ПК или ноутбука.

На самом деле повышение производительности в системах под Windows Vista может быть реализовано целым рядом разных факторов, как аппаратного, так и программного свойства. Всем достаточно хорошо известны такие простые способы немножко повлиять на производительность системы как, например, отключить анимацию и кэширование. Вы будете приятно удивлены, сколько подобных «штучек» доступно пользователю в системах под Windows Vista. Этих настроек обязательно стоит коснуться в одной из наших следующий статей, посвящённых теме оптимизации.

Сегодня же мы отметим ряд совершенно новых встроенных функций операционных систем Windows Vista, нацеленных на полноценное использование возможностей современного «железа». Среди них — технология Windows ReadyBoost (прежнее название — EMD), обеспечивающая рост производительности без расширения оперативной памяти – для этого можно использовать USB-флэшку в роли дополнительной кэш-памяти, к которой компьютер получает доступ быстрее, чем к жесткому диску. В комбинации с технологией SuperFetch функция ReadyBoost способна существенно повысить быстродействие системы.

После первой установки USB-накопителя в порт USB, Vista проверяет его быстродействие для поддержки Windows ReadyBoost, и в случае положительного вердикта предлагает использовать его для наращивания производительности. Интересно, что для повышения производительности достаточно выделить лишь часть флэш-памяти, а остальной объём использовать по прямому назначению. Флэшку под ReadyBoost можно отключить в любое время и это не приведет к потере данных, не окажет негативного воздействия на систему, просто быстродействие возвращается к прежнему уровню. Надо полагать, что именно таким образом будет функционировать технология Intel Robson, предусматривающая в следующем поколении платформы Santa Rosa наличие 1 Гб флэш-памяти, встроенной, в том числе, для этих нужд, в чипсет.

Ещё одна любопытная функция — Windows ReadyDrive, обеспечивает быстрые загрузку, переключение в спящий режим и выход из него, при условии использования гибридных жестких дисков, сочетающих энергонезависимую флэш-память и обычный дисковый накопитель. Использование ReadyDrive в мобильных ПК под управлением Windows Vista позволяет записывать данные на флэш винчестера, благодаря чему сокращается нагрузка накопителя и экономится заряд батарей, а также ускоряется выход из режима сна.

Для того, чтобы представить ключевые функции контроля, оценки и оптимизации производительности Windows Vista, сведём их в единую таблицу.

Функция	Краткое описание
Windows ReadyBoost	С целью обеспечения более стабильной и высокой производительности Windows Vista может использовать память на внешних запоминающих устройствах, например на накопителях USB.
Режим сна, быстрая загрузка	Стандартным вариантом завершения работы Windows Vista является переключение в режим сна. Этот режим обеспечивает стабильное и надежное переключение между режимами питания, простую модель использования, возврат к нормальной работе за 2–3 секунды, а также сохранение пользовательских данных на энергонезависимых накопителях.
Быстрое завершение работы	Быстрые переход в режим сна, завершение работы и перезагрузка. Стабильное и надежное завершение работы системы, без задержек и зависания.
Надежное переключение между режимами питания	Инициированное пользователем завершение работы или переключение в режим сна (например, путем закрывания крышки переносного компьютера или с помощью нового упрощенного интерфейса выключения) происходит значительно надежнее. Это позволяет избежать возникновения проблемы класса «воспламенение сумки», когда переносному компьютеру, при попытке возобновления работы с целью сохранения параметров пользователя на жестком диске, не удается перейти в нужный режим питания, в результате чего он перегревается в сумке.
Windows SuperFetch	Эффективное управление памятью позволяет быстрее получать доступ к данным. Функция оптимизируется за счет выявления закономерностей в работе пользователя с приложениями.
Низкоприоритетный ввод-вывод	В Windows Vista различаются высокоприоритетный, низкоприоритетный и критический ввод-вывод, а также сроки обслуживания запросов ввода-вывода. Фоновые процессы имеют более низкий приоритет при вводе-выводе, чем пользовательские приложения (для повышения быстродействия последних).
Автоматическая настройка и диагностика производительности	Определение и автоматическое устранение проблем с производительностью. Инструментарий и службы, необходимые пользователю для ручной или автоматической диагностики стандартных проблем (таких как прерывистое воспроизведение файлов мультимедиа, медленный запуск приложений, медленная загрузка операционной системы и задержки при работе в сети).
Windows ReadyDrive	Windows Vista использует преимущества гибридных жестких дисков, осуществляя упреждающее управление встроенным энергонезависимым кэшем. Функция Windows ReadyDrive позволяет повысить производительность, продолжительность работы от батареи и надежность по сравнению со стандартными дисками.
Оценка производительности системы Windows (WinSPR)	Рейтинговая система числовых оценок, помогающая составить представление о производительности ПК под управлением Windows Vista и определить возможность использования на нем того или иного программного обеспечения.
Средства оценки системы Windows (WinSAT)	Новый набор средств в составе Windows Vista, которые тестируют процессор, память, жесткий диск и графическую плату, а затем преобразуют полученные результаты в рейтинг производительности системы.

---

На сегодня, пожалуй, достаточно, тем более, для первого раза. Как видите, даже в первой статье получилось множество сведений и подробностей, но так и не удалось добраться до впечатлений от работы с Windows Vista или до её конкретных возможностей, скажем, по обеспечению безопасности или мультимедийным функциям. А ведь даже вопросы обеспечения производительности пока освещены лишь поверххностно, мы даже не добрались до нового монитора ресурсов и конкретных примеров «тюнинга» системы… Так что, готовьтесь, это лишь начало.

Как никогда ранее нам было бы интересно услышать ваши оценки этому материалу и особенно – пожелания о том, какие именно темы, посвящённые использованию Windows Vista, вы бы хотели увидеть в ближайших публикациях этой серии статей.

Словом, продолжение следует…

Выражаем благодарность российскому представительству компании NVIDIA за систему, любезно предоставленную для экспериментов.

Windows Vista

Version of Microsoft Windows
OS family	Windows NT
Version	6.0
Codename	Longhorn
Architecture	x86, x64
Latest build	6.0.6003 (Service Pack 2 Update)
Release date	2007-01-30
Support end	2017-04-11
Server counterpart
Windows Server 2008
Replaces
Windows XP
Replaced by
Windows 7

Windows Vista (codenamed Longhorn) is a major release of Microsoft Windows released to manufacturing on 8 November 2006^[1] and made generally available on 30 January 2007. It is the seventh operating system in the Windows NT operating system line, succeeding Windows XP and preceding Windows 7. It had one of the longest development periods in Microsoft’s history starting in May 2001 and continuing through November 2006, with the project’s development having undergone a reset in August 2004.

Mainstream support ended on 10 April 2012, while extended support ended on 11 April 2017. However, it still runs on 0.08% of computers worldwide as of September 2023.^[2]

This version drops support for the IA-64 architecture and the ability to use boot disks to boot into setup, leaving only the option to boot from optical discs. The ability to upgrade an existing Windows installation from versions prior to Windows XP was also removed. CD-ROM distributions of this version could be obtained through mail for machines that don’t have DVD-ROM drives.

Development[edit | edit source]

Planning for the Longhorn project started in earnest in May 2001,^[3] originally intended as a bridging release between Whistler and the later version of Windows codenamed Blackcomb (reference to the bar between two mountains in British Columbia, Canada). As development progressed, many features slated for Blackcomb became part of Longhorn, and employees jumped ship from other parts of the company, turning into a major version rather than the minor version it was initially planned as. After an initially quiet development cycle, the first build to leak publicly was build 3683, which contained a new theme called Plex, as well as the foundations for WinFS, a subsystem that aimed to bring benefits of relational databases to filesystem storage, and Avalon, a new vector-based user interface framework.

As development slowly progressed prior to the reset, the Longhorn project would end up becoming a largely bloated and unstable piece of vaporware, with release dates constantly being pushed back on multiple occasions. Many components were extended using the still relatively new .NET Framework and Managed C++. Stability increasingly became an issue as development progressed, and very few builds were released to the public as a result. Only two builds were distributed at conferences and to developers: builds 4051 and 4074, released during PDC 2003 and WinHEC 2004 respectively. The last confirmed build prior to the development reset is build 4093 (main), compiled on 19 August 2004.

Approximately four hours after build 4093 was compiled, Microsoft reset the development of Longhorn and started fresh by using a work-in-progress version of the Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 codebase, signifying the start of a major restructuring period internally codenamed «Omega-13»; a direct homage to the time travel device of the same name seen in Galaxy Quest’s climax,^[4] which sent the user exactly thirteen seconds back into the past. Immediate post-reset builds were primarily focused on reintegrating features from pre-reset builds whilst maintaining stability, as a ban on usage of the .NET Framework was imposed across a large majority of the Windows source tree. Most of these builds are similar to Windows XP in the overall look and feel, although markers such as poorly-edited branding (as observed in builds such as 5001) were temporarily utilized to distinguish from its predecessor. Few builds from this stage of development have been released, officially or otherwise. Development of Longhorn continued, although many features originally slated for inclusion (such as WinFS and Castles) were delayed or ultimately dropped in order to produce a more realistic set of goals for the OS.

In April 2005, build 5048 was released to testers on WinHEC 2005 to show off the total progress made after the reset, which also demonstrably proved to be significantly more stable over previous builds, despite insiders raising concerns over the then-current state of the operating system’s lacking feature set at the time. The first leaked build after the development reset was 5098. Build 5112 (Beta 1) was released to the public soon afterward in July and showcased an early version of the Aero interface, as well as many stability improvements over its predecessor. Over the course of two years, many builds (dubbed by Microsoft as Community Technology Previews) were released to testers through a public beta program; the final build pushed out to public preview testers was Release Candidate 2 (build 5744). The RTM build was build 6000.16386, compiled on 1 November 2006 and released to manufacturing on 8 November 2006. The operating system finally reached general availability on 30 January 2007, met with increasingly negative consumer reception.

In early 2008, Microsoft released the first service pack for Windows Vista, which was also released to the public as a Service Pack for the RTM build. This is the first version of Windows to support UEFI firmware for 64-bit versions. It also added support for the exFAT file system, improved performance and stability, and improved wireless support. As well, The Search link on the right pane of the Start menu and the Search option in contextual menus for Windows Explorer folders have been removed.

In May 2009, Microsoft released the second and last service pack for Windows Vista, which includes various new features such as wireless and Bluetooth support; most notably, a Bluetooth Control Panel applet; it also includes Windows Search 4.0 built-in, better support of eSATA drives, support for burning on Blu-ray discs and support for the x64 VIA Nano processor, and also improved performance of the RSS feeds sidebar gadget, and improved streaming high-definition content. Service Pack 2 is slightly different, in that it needs at least Service Pack 1 to have been installed, in order to update a live OS. Another update, known as the Platform Update for Windows Vista, was released in October 2009, and includes the Windows Automation API and the Windows Ribbon API. Service Pack 2 is the last update for Windows Vista before being replaced with Windows 7.

Naming[edit | edit source]

Several product names for the Longhorn project were presented to Microsoft in the lead-up to the final release of the operating system; its final name, Windows Vista, was officially unveiled on 22 July 2005.^[5] Greg Sullivan informed Paul Thurrott about how the name Vista focused around the premise of wanting «the PC to adapt you» and aimed in «bringing clarity to your world»; the operating system was intended to be marketed with the terms «Connected, Clear and Confident». Microsoft vice president Jim Allchin expressed their enthusiasm for the product name, stating that it created the «right imagery for the new product capabilities».^[6]

The earliest known build to use the final name is build 5112, and the final builds to have any leftovers of the Longhorn codename are two compiles of build 5284, with the last traces being removed in January 2006.

System requirements[edit | edit source]

During development of pre-reset Longhorn, the system requirements were largely the same as Windows XP, with the sole exception of build 4001, which required a Pentium III processor or better during setup. However, most builds of Longhorn only install on NTFS partitions, which would be carried to the final release of Vista. Throughout development of post-reset Vista, the system requirements were significantly increased to accommodate new computing standards, such as the use of WDDM to take most advantage of display capabilities, immediately requiring ACPI after replacing NTLDR with BOOTMGR, and greatly increasing the amount of disk space required to install Windows.

Microsoft recommends Windows Vista to be installed on a system with a processor with a speed of at least 800 MHz, at least 512 MB (384 MB for Starter Edition) of RAM, 15 GB of hard drive space, a SVGA or better display adapter, and a DVD-ROM drive.^[7] Windows Vista drops support for systems without ACPI. CD-ROM installation is still possible, but such installation method now uses multiple CD-ROMs due to the increased size of the installation media after the shift to WIM installation and wasn’t offered in retail.

Windows Vista’s setup doesn’t check for a required processor generation or speed to install as long as setup can start, and thus it is possible to install Windows Vista on processors as early as the original Pentium. Windows Vista can also be run with as low as 256 MB of RAM.

Hardware compatibility[edit | edit source]

Intel CPUs whose microarchitectures are based on Haswell or later are not supported on Windows Vista.^[8] Numerous issues relating to certain services or applications failing to start on the affected CPUs have been reported by various users, with extreme cases often leading to potential bugchecks.^[9] The KB4493471 update contains a new version of the HAL (hardware abstraction layer) that fixes most of these issues.

Windows XP, earlier operating systems, and x86 versions of Windows Vista are not affected by the aforementioned problems.

Main changes[edit | edit source]

User interface[edit | edit source]

The new Aero user interface has been introduced, which included large design changes to many of the built-in apps. Microsoft also encouraged third party developers to make their applications consistent with Aero, with the company for the first time producing a definite set of design guidelines that included advice ranging from icon design to text wording. Compared to previous versions, Aero icons are more skeuomorphic and realistic in design, as well as scaling better at higher zoom levels due to larger icon sizes being supported.

An important aspect of the user interface was the hardware-accelerated Windows Aero theme. This was made possible by the new Desktop Window Manager, a compositing window manager that works hand in hand with the also new Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM). The compositing nature of DWM allows for eye candy such as Aero Glass or Flip 3D, but also prevents various rendering glitches that were common for previous versions of Windows. The exact appearance of Aero Glass can be further customized by toggling the transparency or changing the frame’s color, which is not possible for themes that are not composited.

For systems that relied on older drivers made for Windows XP, Vista also included the Windows Basic style, which used the older XP-style theme engine, as well as still including the Windows Classic theme that disabled theming altogether.

A new system font called Segoe UI was introduced which replaces the default Tahoma font that was used in previous versions. It is optimized for ClearType and the font size has been increased to 9 point for better layout and readability for all system languages.

Windows Explorer received a UI overhaul in Windows Vista. The common tasks pane from Windows XP has been replaced by a new command bar located at the top of the window that provides basic file operation commands and additional options depending on the selected file. The navigation pane was added and contains all commonly used folders and certain preconfigured search folders in a navigation tree. The address bar was replaced by a breadcrumbs bar which shows the full path to the current location and clicking any location in the breadcrumbs bar brings the user back to that location, eliminating the need to go back multiple times to find specific files or having to go up to various directories and The Up button was removed in favor of this. The menu bar was hidden by default although it can be brought back into view by pressing the ALT key. The detail pane was also added which displays the metadata and information for the selected file or folder. It also displays a thumbnail if the selected file contains visual information such as a picture. If the selected file does not contain visual information, an icon of the filetype will be displayed instead. It also allows for the modification of certain metadata such as author and title. Tags have also been added as a new metadata type that allows descriptive terms to be added to files for easier categorization and retrieval. Drives can also now show their free amount of space in a bar that appears under the drive’s icon. The ability to save searches as folders was also added. Many legacy Explorer features such as the ability to customize the layout and buttons on toolbars and the ability to assign a password to a compressed folder were removed.

The Taskbar received a minor UI redesign with the addition of live taskbar thumbnails, which shows the preview of a window when its taskbar button is hovered over. The Start button also no longer shows the «Start» text and was changed to a blue orb which bears the Windows logo.

The Windows Sidebar was added which is a transparent panel that is anchored to the right side of the desktop where Desktop Gadgets can be placed in which are small applets that are designed to show information at a quick glance such as displaying the time and date, showing a picture slideshow or displaying the weather. Gadgets can also be placed on the desktop.

The Start menu was redesigned to align with the Windows Aero design principles and the All Programs menu is now a scrollable menu instead of being a cascading dropdown menu. The right side of the menu was updated to show the user account picture which upon clicking takes the user to the User Account settings in Control Panel. It also only shows the names of items and instead when hovering over an item, the user account picture changes to reflect the item that will be opened. The Printers and Run items are no longer present by default and a search box was added that allows users to instantly search for programs, as well as files and system options. As with its predecessor, the user can revert to the classic start menu.

A new search component called Windows Search was also introduced to replace the Indexing Service of previous versions of Windows. It creates a locally stored index of all of the files and items stored on the computer and works in hand with a new feature called Instant Search which pulls down the indexed items as the user starts typing, allowing files to be searched and found faster. It also supports IFilters which are components that allow Windows Search to scan the contents and metadata of files. Windows Search also uses property handlers to index the metadata from various indexed file formats using protocol handlers to index and search various data stores. Windows Search is initiated by using the search box in the Start menu and Windows Explorer.

Windows Vista also introduces integrated support for speech recognition through a speech recognition component called Windows Speech Recognition which allows users to control their computer using various voice commands and enables dictation of text in various programs. An interactive tutorial is included to teach users how to use voice commands. The speech recognition technology utilizes Microsoft Speech API version 5.3 and Speech Recognizer version 8.

The Speech synthesis engine for text-to-speech programs like Narrator and Microsoft Agent has also been updated to support SAPI 5, which supports more natural sounding voices like Anna and Lili.

Windows Vista introduced many improved security features such as User Account Control which improves the security of the computer by limiting programs to use fewer privileges by default and to stop malware from compromising the security of the computer and making unauthorized changes. It also allows standard users to use the computer with the fewest privileges as possible. When a program or action asks for administrative rights, UAC will ask for credentials through a prompt window that is displayed in a Secure Desktop Mode which dims the entire screen and only shows the authorization window and the window is highlighted and active to prevent programs from tapering with the prompt window. Standard user accounts will be asked to enter the administrator user name and password. Administrators can confirm the prompt without entering their credentials. BitLocker Drive Encryption was also introduced for the Enterprise and Ultimate editions which can encrypt entire volumes using TPM.

ReadyBoost and ReadyDrive were also introduced to improve system performance by using available flash memory on USB flash drives and hybrid hard disks to catch commonly used programs and data which improves battery life on portable computers since hybrid drives can be spun down when the system is not in use. Another new technology called SuperFetch was also introduced which utilizes machine learning techniques to analyze usage patterns to allow the operating system to make decisions about what should be present in the system memory at any given time. It also uses almost the available RAM as disk cache.

The login experience in Windows Vista has been overhauled. Support for GINA DLLs were removed and the roles and responsibilities of Winlogon have also been changed significantly. The design of the Welcome screen was overhauled with the shutdown button now also having a drop-down menu which allows access to additional power options and the Ease of Access button was also added to the Welcome screen which allows users launch various accessibility programs. The legacy login dialog prompt was completely removed. The design of the Windows Security dialog box was also overhauled and is now in full-screen and takes on the appearance of the Welcome screen.

The licensing subsystem has been completely rewritten in Windows Vista. This allowed Microsoft to define licensing restrictions for each SKU more easily and systemically using product policies, rather than hardcoding them in the kernel or using hooks for core system components. Product policies are used to limit the maximum amount of RAM, number of processors, as well as the availability of user interface options such as the Aero theme or transparency.

The boot loader architecture has been completely overhauled and redesigned in Windows Vista. The legacy NTLDR boot loader used since Windows NT 3.1 has been replaced by the Windows Boot Manager (BOOTMGR). It implements a new firmware-independent database called Boot Configuration Data (BCD) which replaces boot.ini that was used by NTLDR.

Networking stack has also been overhauled in Windows Vista. The new stack model includes IPv6 support, completely overhauled IPv4 and TCP/IP stacks and improves peer-to-peer connectivity.

The print architecture has also been overhauled in Windows Vista. The new print architecture is built around WPF and provides high-fidelity color printing using improved color management features. The XPS format was also introduced for printers which allows prints to look much better in quality. Client Side Rendering was also introduced to allow documents to be rendered on to the main client machine rather than on the server. This allows the rendered form of the document to be passed on to the main print server without additional processing.

The audio stack has also been overhauled in Windows Vista. The new stack model includes support for UAA and support for better audio processing through major new APIs such as Windows Audio Session, Multimedia Device and Device Topology. In addition, new digital signal processing features such as Room Correction, Bass Management, Loudness Equalization and Speaker Fill have been introduced which adapts and modifies an existing audio signal to take more advantage of the speaker configuration. The ability to calibrate audio speakers to a room’s acoustics automatically using an Aero wizard has also been added.

Applications and components[edit | edit source]

Windows Vista introduces major upgrades to the operating system’s built-in programs and components and adds many new programs and components.

• Internet Explorer 7 features a redesigned UI and also introduces tabbed browsing, support for PNG images, improvements to CSS and HTML rendering, a phishing filter, Protected Mode and Tab Groups. It can be updated to Internet Explorer 9.
• Windows Media Center receives a completely redesigned UI with support for DVD/MPEG-2, HD content and CableCARD.
• Windows Media Player 11 features a new layout and interface.
• Windows Movie Maker has an updated layout and interface and adds support for DVR-MS files and Direct3D effects and transitions. Support for HD video was added along with the ability to burn movies to a CD. HDV video can be imported from camcorders and movies can also be imported to Windows DVD Maker.
• Windows Mail replaces Outlook Express as the default mail client.
• Windows Defender was added and provides real-time protection against spyware. It also adds security agents which monitors certain corners of the operating system for any malicious activity. Software Explorers were added to provide views of startup programs, currently running programs, network connected programs, and Winsock providers with each of them having additional information such as program name, publisher and the version number of the program.
• Backup and Restore Center was introduced as a replacement for the legacy NTBackup tool.
• Windows Contacts was added as a replacement for Windows Address Book. It is implemented as a special folder rather than an actual program.
• Windows Meeting Space was introduced as a replacement for Windows NetMeeting.
• Windows Mobility Center was added as a quick way to adjust frequent parameters on laptops such as brightness, volume, or the power state.
• Windows Fax and Scan was added as a replacement for the Fax Console.
• Windows Photo Gallery was added to replace Windows Picture and Fax Viewer.
• Windows Calendar was added. It allows users to create and manage electronic calendars. It also adds the ability to share and publish calendars online and on network shares along with the ability to subscribe to them.
• Windows DVD Maker was added. It allows users to create slideshows and videos and burn them to a DVD for playback on media devices like DVD and Blu-ray players.
• Windows Update became a Control Panel applet rather than being based on a web service and is now fully integrated into the operating system, which simplifies the installation of software updates. It also allows users of the Ultimate edition of Windows Vista to download Windows Ultimate Extras.
• Windows Easy Transfer has been added. It allows one to transfer files from an old Windows 2000, XP and Vista system to a new Vista computer using either an Easy Transfer Cable, an USB cable or CD/DVDs.
• New premium games such as Purble Place, Mahjong Titans and Chess Titans were added. Many of the existing games were redesigned to showcase the operating system’s new graphical capabilities. InkBall which was previously introduced in Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005, was also included and no longer hides the mouse cursor allowing it to easily be played without a tablet.
• Games Explorer has been added which is a special folder that contains all installed video games on the system along with information that can be updated over the internet.
• Shadow Copy which was first introduced in Windows Server 2003 was added for the Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions.
• Windows HotStart was added which allows users and OEMs to assign a specific key or button to a specific application.
• Windows CardSpace was added to store digital ID’s that can be used to login into certain websites.
• Windows Firewall was upgraded to support filtering both incoming and outgoing traffic. Advanced packet filter rules were also added which can accept or deny communications to specific programs and services.
• Flip 3D was added which allows users to flip through a cascading stack of open windows in a three-dimensional view. It also displays dynamic thumbnails of all open windows.
• Sync Center was added which allows users to set up their computers with a network server so that they can manage offline files and folders and check recent sync activity over a network.
• Many of the Control Panel applets now run inside the Control Panel window while many applets turned into Aero wizards.
• Windows SideShow was added which enables auxiliary displays of certain laptops to display certain information even when the computer is turned off.
• Windows System Assessment Tool was added which benchmarks overall system performance.
• The ability to shrink and expand volumes on-the-fly in Disk Manager was added.
• DirectX 10 was introduced.
• The Problem Reports and Solutions Control Panel applet was added which allows users to check solutions to problems and view previously sent problems for any solutions or information.
• Reliability Monitor and Performance Monitor was added which includes many tools to tune and monitor overall system performance.
• Windows Parental Controls was added which allows administrators to monitor and restrict computer activity of standard user accounts.
• .NET Framework 3.0 was introduced, allowing developers to write programs without using traditional Windows APIs. The last version that was released for Windows Vista was .NET Framework 4.6, which shipped with Windows 10 (original release).
• Windows Installer 4.0 was introduced. It was later upgraded to version 4.5 in Windows Vista SP2.
• The Welcome Center Control Panel applet was introduced which contains tips on how to use Windows as well as providing easy access to basic functionality such as adding new users or connecting the computer to a network. It also displays the computer’s specifications and the Windows edition. It also opens automatically when the operating system boots up. It replaces the Windows XP Tour.
• Windows Help and Support Center received a major UI redesign.

Deprecations[edit | edit source]

• Windows Vista drops the ability to upgrade from Windows NT 4.0, Windows 98, Windows 98 SE, Windows Me, Windows 2000 and can be only officially upgraded to on devices using an 800MHz CPU or faster, 512MB RAM or higher, Super VGA video output, and 20GB HDD disk or larger, with BIOS or compatible firmware and Windows XP or Windows XP x64 Edition supported and installed.
• Windows Vista can no longer be uninstalled, unlike Windows XP, which could be uninstalled if upgraded from Windows 9x.
• MSN Explorer has been removed.
• Active Desktop has been removed. Windows Sidebar is its replacement.
• Windows NetMeeting has been removed in favor of Windows Meeting Space, although it can be restored by copying the program files from a Windows XP installation.
• Dr. Watson has been removed in favor of Problems Reports and Solutions.
• The Internet games have been removed.
• The Windows Messenger service has been removed, as instead a link to download Windows Live Messenger has been placed in Welcome Center.
• Serial Keys are no longer available.
• Internet Explorer is no longer integrated with Windows Explorer, starting with Internet Explorer 7.
• The Desktop Cleanup wizard has been removed.
• The Web Publishing Wizard has been removed.
• WordPad can no longer open Microsoft Word documents. Instead, Microsoft recommended to use Word Viewer instead.
• Service Packs can no longer be installed cumulatively in Windows Vista SP2, meaning that Service Pack 1 has to be installed first.
• WinHelp has been deprecated and is no longer included. Support for WinHelp files would later be completely removed in Windows 10.
• Program Manager has been removed completely. Previously, in Windows XP Service Pack 2, running the executable did not launch it (it just acts as a compatibility stub to Windows Explorer), but it contained several old icons dating back to Windows 3.1.
• Windows Classic color schemes like Brick, Desert, Eggplant, Plum, Storm, Spurce, Teal, Rainy Day, Wheat, Rose, Pumpkin, Marine and Red, White and Blue have been removed, only leaving Windows Standard, Windows Classic and the High Contrast themes.
• The «What’s This» buttons on various dialog boxes no longer work.
• The Clipboard viewer has been removed.
• 3D Pinball has been removed.
• Unicode IME was removed. It would later be readded in Windows 7.
• Many legacy DirectX features have been removed, including DxDiag tests. They have been replaced by the Windows Experience Index.
• Many legacy features in Windows Media Player 11 have been removed.
• Windows Media Player 6.4 has been removed and not included like with Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005.
• The Search Companion has been removed in favor of Windows Search.
• Many toolbars like Quick Launch can no longer float on the desktop. The Language bar is the only toolbar that can float directly on the desktop.
• The Taskbar can no longer be hidden manually by resizing it to zero height.
• Legacy drivers dating from NT 4.0 are no longer bundled, and the legacy drivers that were bundled are only designed for Windows XP. Cirrus Logic drivers are also dropped.

Editions[edit | edit source]

Windows Vista was shipped in a number of editions. Unlike Windows XP, there were no special editions for Media Center, 64-bit capabilities and Tablet PCs since these features were included in at least one of the consumer editions. Windows Vista also did not have a separate componentized embedded version, as Microsoft instead planned to release Windows Embedded 2009, which is based on Windows XP. Although the Business and Ultimate editions were also available for licensing on embedded devices (namely Windows Vista Business for Embedded Systems and Windows Vista Ultimate for Embedded Systems) as a part of Windows Embedded Enterprise product line, they are essentially the same as the base editions available on retail.^[10][11] Windows Anytime Upgrade was also introduced to allow users to easily facilitate upgrades to higher editions of Windows Vista.

• Starter: This edition is intended for emerging markets and low-cost PCs. Like its predecessor, the three-program limit was included, and a maximum limitation of 1GB installable RAM is imposed. Other software restrictions were applied as well; hence, this version isn’t available in 64-bit. This edition is the only edition of Vista that does not have Desktop Window Manager and Windows HotStart enabled. Only Windows XP Starter Edition can be upgraded to Windows Vista Starter.
• Home Basic: Found in low-cost to mid-range computers, this version of Windows Vista does not feature complete Aero (though it includes DWM functionality) and hence does not have effects like transparency and Flip 3D. Windows Media Center, Windows DVD Maker and various backup features are also not present in this edition and unlike the Starter edition, it doesn’t have the hardware and 3-program maximum limitations. The user can also only join a meeting but cannot create one in Windows Meeting Space.
• Home Premium: The consumer version of Windows Vista. This version includes full Aero functionality, Windows Media Center, Windows DVD Maker, Premium Games (e.g.: Inkball, Purble Place) and various WMP11 audio decoders. However, it lacks the BitLocker and Complete PC Backup functionalities.
• Business: A business-oriented version of Windows Vista. It contains several features like full RDP (client/host) capability, Group Policy, domain joinability and Windows Fax and Scan. However, Windows Media Center and Parental Controls are not included, and Premium Games are disabled by default. For the embedded market, there’s a sub-edition called «Windows Vista Business for Embedded Systems».
• Enterprise: A business-oriented variant of Windows Vista. It is similar to Ultimate but does not include consumer-specific features such as Windows Media Center and Parental Controls. Rather, it includes enterprise-specific tools such as Windows Fax and Scan and Windows Services for UNIX. This edition was only available to customers who participated in the Microsoft Software Assurance program.

  

  «Windows Vista (PRODUCT)^RED» gadgets

• Ultimate: The high-end variant of Windows Vista. It is a merger of the features included with Windows Vista Home Premium and Business. BitLocker is included in this version. This edition also allows the user to install «Windows Ultimate Extras», which is a set of addons that include games, sound schemes, animated wallpapers (referred to as Windows DreamScene), BitLocker and additional Windows Marketplace enhancements. This SKU also has all features of Windows Vista.
  • A sub-edition of Vista Ultimate called «Windows Vista (PRODUCT)^RED» was related to the Product Red campaign, which aids in supporting global funding for research on diseases such as AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. This version includes extra (PRODUCT)^RED-themed wallpapers, gadgets and a special theme.

Marketing[edit | edit source]

Windows Vista was initially marketed with the slogan The Wow Starts Now. The slogan would be later changed to I’m a PC in 2008 in response to Apple’s opposing Get a Mac marketing campaign from 2006. The campaign would carry over to Windows 7, and lasted through 2011.

In an attempt to curb the negative reputation of Windows Vista, Microsoft launched an advertising campaign named the Mojave Experiment, which involved a limited set of users being given the chance to try out a rebranded copy of Windows Vista under the assumption that it was an in-development version of a fictitious operating system codenamed Mojave.^[12]

Criticism[edit | edit source]

While Windows Vista was praised for its new design, features and security improvements, it received extreme criticism due to various factors such as stability issues that were present in the original release of Vista, lack of compatibility with many drivers and programs that previously ran on Windows XP and older, its much higher system requirements that caused performance problems on older computers and rendered many high-end features such as the Windows Aero interface unusable on older hardware and the excessive intrusiveness of the User Account Control feature. Later updates would resolve many of the performance issues.

As a result of these issues, Windows Vista’s initial adoption and satisfaction rates were very low compared to Windows XP and many users also downgraded back to Windows XP due to compatibility issues that rendered many programs and computer peripherals unusable along with performance issues. The Windows Vista Capable marketing campaign was also subject to criticism due to OEM’s installing the OS on underpowered machines which did not fully meet Vista’s system requirements which resulted in a class-action lawsuit being filed against Microsoft in early 2008 and eventually lost its class-action status in early 2009.

Misattributed system sounds[edit | edit source]

The widespread sound scheme often attributed to Longhorn was never included in any official build and originates from a Samsung-produced theme for Windows XP from 2003.^[13] The Windows XP sounds remain and are used in all pre-reset and post-reset builds, with a few being swapped with Vista sounds between builds 5469 and 5840.16384.

The alleged Windows Vista Beta 1 startup sound^[14] is actually WELCOMESEQUENCE.WAV used in the Speech Recognition tutorial from build 5308.6. Likewise, an alternative interpretation of the final startup sound that is sometimes labeled as the Windows Vista Beta 2 startup sound^[15] is actually a jingle used in Vista Beta 2 Help video outros.

List of known builds[edit | edit source]

Pre-reset builds[edit | edit source]

Milestone 3[edit | edit source]

Milestone 4[edit | edit source]

Milestone 5[edit | edit source]

Milestone 6[edit | edit source]

Milestone 7[edit | edit source]

Post-reset builds[edit | edit source]

Development reset[edit | edit source]

These builds are also referred to as Omega-13 builds.

Longhorn Developer Preview[edit | edit source]

Beta 1[edit | edit source]

Beta 2[edit | edit source]

September 2005 CTP[edit | edit source]

October 2005 CTP[edit | edit source]

December 2005 CTP[edit | edit source]

February 2006 CTP[edit | edit source]

Updates[edit | edit source]

Refresh[edit | edit source]

April 2006 EDW[edit | edit source]

Beta 2 Preview[edit | edit source]

Public release[edit | edit source]

Release Candidate 1[edit | edit source]

Release Candidate 2[edit | edit source]

Pre-RTM[edit | edit source]

RTM[edit | edit source]

Service Pack 1[edit | edit source]

Beta[edit | edit source]

Release Candidate 0[edit | edit source]

Release Candidate 1[edit | edit source]

Pre-RTM[edit | edit source]

RTM[edit | edit source]

Service Pack 2[edit | edit source]

Beta[edit | edit source]

Release Candidate[edit | edit source]

Pre-RTM[edit | edit source]

RTM[edit | edit source]

Lifecycle Servicing Update[edit | edit source]

References[edit | edit source]

Windows Vista (codenamed Longhorn) is a major release of the Windows NT series of operating systems by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on November 8, 2006, and became generally available on January 30, 2007, more than five years after the introduction of its predecessor, Windows XP, the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft Windows at the time. It was released on the Windows Marketplace, being the first version of Windows to be released digitally. Windows Vista was succeeded by Windows 7, which was released for retail on October 22, 2009.

Windows Vista contains many changes and new features, including an updated graphical user interface and visual style dubbed Aero, a redesigned search function, multimedia tools including Windows DVD Maker, and redesigned networking, audio, print, and display sub-systems. Windows Vista aimed to increase the level of communication between machines on a home network, using peer-to-peer technology to simplify sharing files and media between computers and devices. Windows Vista includes version 3.0 of the .NET Framework, allowing software developers to write applications without traditional Windows APIs.

Microsoft’s primary stated objective with Windows Vista was to improve the state of security in the Windows operating system. One common criticism of Windows XP and its predecessors was their commonly exploited security vulnerabilities and overall susceptibility to malware, viruses and buffer overflows. In light of this, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates announced in early 2002 a company-wide «Trustworthy Computing initiative» which aimed to incorporate security into every aspect of software development at the company. Microsoft stated that it prioritized improving the security of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 above finishing Windows Vista, thus delaying its completion.

Development of Vista[]

Microsoft began work on Windows Vista, known at the time by its codename «Longhorn», in May 2001, five months before the release of Windows XP. It was originally expected to ship sometime late in 2003 as a minor step between Windows XP and Blackcomb, which was planned to be the company’s next major operating system release. Gradually, «Longhorn» assimilated many of the important new features and technologies slated for Blackcomb, resulting in the release date being pushed back several times. Many of Microsoft’s developers were also re-tasked to build updates to Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 to strengthen security. Faced with ongoing delays and concerns about feature creep, Microsoft announced on August 27, 2004, that it had revised its plans. The original Longhorn, based on the Windows.NET Server Release Candidate 1 source code, was scrapped, and Longhorn’s development started anew, building on the Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 codebase, and re-incorporating only the features that would be intended for an actual operating system release. Some previously announced features such as WinFS were dropped or postponed, and a new software development methodology called the Security Development Lifecycle was incorporated in an effort to address concerns with the security of the Windows codebase which is programmed in C, C++ and Assembly.

On July 22, 2005, Microsoft announced that the next version of Microsoft Windows would be called «Windows Vista» and also launched the Windows Vista website.^[1] An unprecedented beta-test program was started, involving hundreds of thousands of volunteers and companies. In September of that year, Microsoft started releasing regular Community Technology Previews (CTP) to beta testers. The first of these was distributed at the 2005 Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, and was subsequently released to beta testers and Microsoft Developer Network subscribers. The builds that followed incorporated most of the planned features for the final product, as well as a number of changes to the user interface, based largely on feedback from beta testers. Windows Vista was deemed feature-complete with the release of the «February CTP», released on February 22, 2006, and much of the remainder of work between that build and the final release of the product focused on stability, performance, application and driver compatibility, and documentation. Beta 2, released in late May, was the first build to be made available to the general public through Microsoft’s Customer Preview Program. It was downloaded by over five million people. Two release candidates followed in September and October, both of which were made available to a large number of users.

While Microsoft had originally hoped to have the consumer versions of the operating system available worldwide in time for Christmas 2006, it was announced in March 2006 that the release date would be pushed back to January 2007, in order to give the company–and the hardware and software companies which Microsoft depends on for providing device drivers–additional time to prepare. Development of Windows Vista came to an end when Microsoft announced that it had been finalized on November 8, 2006.

Sound scheme myth[]

No build of Windows Vista (including pre-reset) used or even included the widespread sound scheme that appears in several fanmade Longhorn or Vista themes, which appears to be a sound scheme titled «Deep Fantasy», which was commercially available on NEO Sounds, a stock sound/music website, until 2006. The Windows XP sounds remain and are used in all pre-reset builds, with a few being swapped with Vista sounds between builds 5466 and 5840.16384.

The alleged Windows Vista Beta 1 startup is actually WELCOMESEQUENCE.WAV used in the Speech Recognition tutorial in build 5308.6 and onwards. Likewise, the alleged Windows Vista Beta 2 startup is actually a jingle used in Vista Beta 2 Help video outros.

New or changed features[]

Windows Vista developed features and functionalities not present in its predecessors.

End-user[]

• Windows Aero: The new graphical user interface is named Windows Aero, which Jim Allchin stated is an acronym for Authentic, Energetic, Reflective, and Open. Microsoft intended the new interface to be cleaner and more aesthetically pleasing than those of previous Windows versions, including new transparencies, live thumbnails, live icons, and animations, thus providing a new level of eye candy. Laptop users report, however, that enabling Aero shortens battery life and makes it Laggier.
• Windows Shell: The new Windows shell differs significantly from the shell in Windows XP, offering a new range of organization, navigation, and search capabilities. Windows Explorer’s task pane has been removed, integrating the relevant task options into the toolbar. A «Favorite links» pane has been added, enabling one-click access to common directories. The address bar has been replaced with a breadcrumb navigation system. The preview pane allows users to see thumbnails of various files and view the contents of documents. The details pane shows information such as file size and type, and allows viewing and editing of embedded tags in supported file formats. The Start menu has changed as well; it no longer uses ever-expanding boxes when navigating through Programs. The word «Start» itself has been removed in favor of a blue Windows Pearl.
• Instant Search (also known as search as you type) : Windows Vista features a new way of searching called Instant Search, which is significantly faster and more in-depth (content-based) than the search features found in any of the previous versions of Windows.
• Windows Sidebar: A transparent panel anchored to the side of the screen where a user can place Desktop Gadgets, which are small applets designed for a specialized purpose (such as displaying the weather or sports scores). Gadgets can also be placed on other parts of the desktop.
• Windows Internet Explorer 7: New user interface, tabbed browsing, RSS, a search box, improved printing, Page Zoom, Quick Tabs (thumbnails of all open tabs), Anti-Phishing filter, a number of new security protection features, Internationalized Domain Name support (IDN), and improved web standards support. IE7 in Windows Vista runs in isolation from other applications in the operating system (protected mode); exploits and malicious software are restricted from writing to any location beyond Temporary Internet Files without explicit user consent.

• Windows Media Player 11, a major revamp of Microsoft’s program for playing and organizing music and video. New features in this version include word wheeling (incremental search or «search as you type»), a new GUI for the media library, photo display and organization, the ability to share music libraries over a network with other Windows Vista machines, Xbox 360 integration, and support for other Media Center Extenders.
• Backup and Restore Center: Includes a backup and restore application that gives users the ability to schedule periodic backups of files on their computer, as well as recovery from previous backups. Backups are incremental, storing only the changes each time, minimizing disk usage. It also features Complete PC Backup (available only in the Ultimate, Business, and Enterprise versions) which backs up an entire computer as an image onto a hard disk or DVD. Complete PC Backup can automatically recreate a machine setup onto new hardware or hard disk in case of any hardware failures. Complete PC Restore can be initiated from within Windows Vista or from the Windows Vista installation CD in the event the PC is so corrupt that it cannot start up normally from the hard disk.
• Windows Mail: A replacement for Outlook Express that includes a new mail store that improves stability, and features integrated Instant Search. It has the Phishing Filter like IE7 and Junk mail filtering that is enhanced through regular updates via Windows Update.
• Windows Calendar is a new calendar and task application.
• Windows Photo Gallery, a photo and movie library management application. It can import from digital cameras, tag and rate individual items, adjust colors and exposure, create and display slideshows (with pan and fade effects) and burn slideshows to DVD.
• Windows DVD Maker, a companion program to Windows Movie Maker that provides the ability to create video DVDs based on a user’s content. Users can design a DVD with title, menu, video, soundtrack, pan and zoom motion effects on pictures or slides.
• Windows Media Center, which was previously exclusively bundled in a separate version of Windows XP, known as Windows XP Media Center Edition, has been incorporated into the Home Premium and Ultimate editions of Windows Vista.
• Games and Games Explorer: Games included with Windows have been modified to showcase Vista’s graphics capabilities. New games are Chess Titans (3D Chess game), Mahjong Titans (3D Mahjong game) and Purble Place (A small collection of games, oriented towards younger children. Including: A matching game, a cake-creator game, and a dress-up puzzle game). A new Games Explorer special folder contains shortcuts and information to all games on the user’s computer.

• Windows Mobility Center is a control panel that centralizes the most relevant information related to mobile computing (brightness, sound, battery level / power scheme selection, wireless network, screen orientation, presentation settings, etc.).
• Windows Meeting Space replaces NetMeeting. Users can share applications (or their entire desktop) with other users on the local network, or over the Internet using peer-to-peer technology (higher versions than Starter and Home Basic can take advantage of hosting capabilities, Starter and Home Basic editions are limited to «join» mode only)
• Shadow Copy automatically creates daily backup copies of files and folders. Users can also create «shadow copies» by setting a System Protection Point using the System Protection tab in the System control panel. The user can be presented multiple versions of a file throughout a limited history and be allowed to restore, delete, or copy those versions. This feature is available only in the Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions of Windows Vista and is inherited from Windows Server 2003.

• Windows Update: Software and security updates have been simplified, now operating solely via a control panel instead of as a web application. Windows Mail’s spam filter and Windows Defender’s definitions are updated automatically via Windows Update. Users who choose the recommended setting for Automatic Updates will have the latest drivers installed and available when they add a new device.
• Parental controls: Allows administrators to control which websites, programs and games each Limited user can use and install. This feature is not included in the Business or Enterprise editions of Vista.
• Windows SideShow: Enables the auxiliary displays on newer laptops or on supported Windows Mobile devices. It is meant to be used to display device gadgets while the computer is on or off.
• Speech recognition is integrated into Vista. It features a redesigned user interface and configurable command-and-control commands. Unlike the Office 2003 version, which works only in Office and WordPad, Speech Recognition in Windows Vista works for any accessible application. In addition, it currently supports several languages: British and American English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified) and Japanese.
• New fonts, including several designed for screen reading, and improved Chinese (Yahei, JhengHei), Japanese (Meiryo) and Korean (Malgun) fonts. ClearType has also been enhanced and enabled by default.
• Improved audio controls allow the system-wide volume or volume of individual audio devices and even individual applications to be controlled separately. New audio functionalities such as Room Correction, Bass Management, Speaker Fill and Headphone virtualization have also been incorporated.
• Problem Reports and Solutions, a control panel which allows users to view previously sent problems and any solutions or additional information that is available.
• Windows System Assessment Tool is a tool used to benchmark system performance. Software such as games can retrieve this rating and modify its own behavior at runtime to improve performance. The benchmark tests CPU, RAM, 2-D and 3-D graphics acceleration, graphics memory and hard disk space.
• Windows Ultimate Extras: The Ultimate edition of Windows Vista provides, via Windows Update, access to some additional features. These are a collection of additional MUI language packs, Texas Hold ‘Em (a Poker game) and Microsoft Tinker (a strategy game where the character is a robot), BitLocker and EFS enhancements which allow users to back up their encryption key online in a Digital Locker, and Windows Dreamscene, which enables the use of videos in MPEG and WMV formats as the desktop background. On April 21, 2008, Microsoft launched two more Ultimate Extras; three new Windows sound schemes, and a content pack for Dreamscene. Various DreamScene Content Packs have been released since the final version of DreamScene was released.
• Reliability and Performance Monitor includes various tools for tuning and monitoring system performance and resources activities of CPU, disks, network, memory and other resources. It shows the operations on files, the opened connections, etc.
• Disk Management: The Logical Disk Manager in Windows Vista supports shrinking and expanding volumes on-the-fly.
• Windows Anytime Upgrade: is a program that allows a user to upgrade their computer running Vista to a higher edition. For example, a computer running Windows Vista Home Basic can be upgraded to Home Premium or better. The advantages of using Anytime Upgrade are that your programs and data aren’t erased, It just installs the extra features of the edition you’re upgrading to, and the price is less to upgrade than to replace your installation of windows with the edition you wish to upgrade to.

Core[]

Windows Vista is intended to be a technology-based release, to provide a base to include advanced technologies, many of which are related to how the system functions and thus not readily visible to the user. An example is the complete restructuring of the architecture of the audio, print, display, and networking subsystems; although the results of this work are visible to software developers, end-users will only see what appear to be evolutionary changes in the user interface.

Vista includes technologies such as ReadyBoost and ReadyDrive which employ fast flash memory (located on USB drives and hybrid hard disk drives) to improve system performance by caching commonly used programs and data. This manifests itself in improved battery life on notebook computers as well, since a hybrid drive can be spun down when not in use. Another new technology called SuperFetch utilizes machine learning techniques to analyze usage patterns to allow Windows Vista to make intelligent decisions about what content should be present in system memory at any given time. It uses almost all the extra RAM as disk cache. In conjunction with SuperFetch, an automatic built-in Windows Disk Defragmenter makes sure that those applications are strategically positioned on the hard disk where they can be loaded into memory very quickly with the least amount of physical movement of the hard disk’s read-write heads.

As part of the redesign of the networking architecture, IPv6 has been fully incorporated into the operating system and a number of performance improvements have been introduced, such as TCP window scaling. Earlier versions of Windows typically needed third-party wireless networking software to work properly, but this is not the case with Vista, which includes more comprehensive wireless networking support.

For graphics, Vista introduces a new Windows Display Driver Model and a major revision to Direct3D. The new driver model facilitates the new Desktop Window Manager, which provides the tearing-free desktop and special effects that are the cornerstones of Windows Aero. Direct3D 10, developed in conjunction with major graphics card manufacturers, is a new architecture with more advanced shader support, and allows the graphics processing unit to render more complex scenes without assistance from the CPU. It features improved load balancing between CPU and GPU and also optimizes data transfer between them. WDDM also provides video content playback that rivals typical consumer electronics devices. It does this by making it easy to connect to external monitors, providing for protected HD video playback and increasing overall video playback quality. For the first time in Windows, graphics processing unit (GPU) multitasking is possible, enabling users to run more than one GPU-intensive application simultaneously.

At the core of the operating system, many improvements have been made to the memory manager, process scheduler and I/O scheduler. The Heap Manager implements additional features such as integrity checking in order to improve robustness and defend against buffer overflow security exploits, although this comes at the price of breaking backward compatibility with some legacy applications. A Kernel Transaction Manager has been implemented that enables applications to work with the file system and Registry using atomic transaction operations.

[]

Improved security was a primary design goal for Vista. Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing initiative, which aims to improve public trust in its products, has had a direct effect on its development. This effort has resulted in a number of new security and safety features.

User Account Control, or UAC is perhaps the most significant and visible of these changes. UAC is a security technology that makes it possible for users to use their computer with fewer privileges by default, with a view to stopping malware from making unauthorized changes to the system. This was often difficult in previous versions of Windows, as the previous «limited» user accounts proved too restrictive and incompatible with a large proportion of application software, and even prevented some basic operations such as looking at the calendar from the notification tray. In Windows Vista, when an action is performed that requires administrative rights (such as installing/uninstalling software or making system-wide configuration changes), the user is first prompted for an administrator name and password; in cases where the user is already an administrator, the user is still prompted to confirm the pending privileged action. Regular use of the computer such as running programs, printing, or surfing the Internet does not trigger UAC prompts. User Account Control asks for credentials in a Secure Desktop mode, in which the entire screen is dimmed, and only the authorization window is active and highlighted. The intent is to stop a malicious program misleading the user by interfering with the authorization window, and to hint to the user the importance of the prompt.

Testing by Symantec Corporation has proven the effectiveness of UAC. Symantec used over 2,000 active malware samples, consisting of backdoors, keyloggers, rootkits, mass mailers, trojan horses, spyware, adware, and various other samples. Each was executed on a default Windows Vista installation within a standard user account. UAC effectively blocked over 50 percent of each threat, excluding rootkits. 5 percent or less of the malware which evaded UAC survived a reboot.

Internet Explorer 7’s new security and safety features include a phishing filter, IDN with anti-spoofing capabilities, and integration with system-wide parental controls. For added security, ActiveX controls are disabled by default. Also, Internet Explorer operates in a protected mode, which operates with lower permissions than the user and runs in isolation from other applications in the operating system, preventing it from accessing or modifying anything besides the Temporary Internet Files directory. Microsoft’s anti-spyware product, Windows Defender, has been incorporated into Windows, providing protection against malware and other threats. Changes to various system configuration settings (such as new auto-starting applications) are blocked unless the user gives consent.

Whereas prior releases of Windows supported per-file encryption using Encrypting File System, the Enterprise and Ultimate editions of Vista include BitLocker Drive Encryption which can protect entire volumes, notably the operating system volume. However, BitLocker requires approximately a 1.5-gigabyte partition to be permanently unencrypted and to contain system files in order for Windows to boot. In normal circumstances, the only time this partition is accessed is when the computer is booting, or when there is a Windows update that changes files in this area which is a legitimate reason to access this section of the drive. The area can be a potential security issue, because a hexadecimal editor (such as dskprobe.exe), or malicious software running with administrator and/or kernel level privileges would be able to write to this «Ghost Partition» and allow a piece of malicious software to compromise the system, or disable the encryption. BitLocker can work in conjunction with a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) cryptoprocessor (version 1.2) embedded in a computer’s motherboard, or with a USB key. However, as with other full disk encryption technologies, BitLocker is vulnerable to a cold boot attack, especially where TPM is used as a key protector without a boot PIN being required too.

A variety of other privilege-restriction techniques are also built into Vista. An example is the concept of «integrity levels» in user processes, whereby a process with a lower integrity level cannot interact with processes of a higher integrity level and cannot perform DLL–injection to a processes of a higher integrity level. The security restrictions of Windows services are more fine-grained, so that services (especially those listening on the network) have no ability to interact with parts of the operating system they do not need to. Obfuscation techniques such as address space layout randomization are used to increase the amount of effort required of malware before successful infiltration of a system. Code Integrity verifies that system binaries have not been tampered with by malicious code.

As part of the redesign of the network stack, Windows Firewall has been upgraded, with new support for filtering both incoming and outgoing traffic. Advanced packet filter rules can be created which can grant or deny communications to specific services.

The 64-bit versions of Vista require that all device drivers be digitally signed, so that the creator of the driver can be identified.

System management[]

While much of the focus of Vista’s new capabilities has highlighted the new user-interface, security technologies, and improvements to the core operating system, Microsoft also adding new deployment and maintenance features:

• The Windows Imaging Format (WIM) provides the cornerstone of Microsoft’s new deployment and packaging system. WIM files, which contain a HAL-independent image of Windows Vista, can be maintained and patched without having to rebuild new images. Windows Images can be delivered via Systems Management Server or Business Desktop Deployment technologies. Images can be customized and configured with applications then deployed to corporate client personal computers using little to no touch by a system administrator. ImageX is the Microsoft tool used to create and customize images.
• Windows Deployment Services replaces Remote Installation Services for deploying Vista and prior versions of Windows.
• Approximately 700 new Group Policy settings have been added, covering most aspects of the new features in the operating system, as well as significantly expanding the configurability of wireless networks, removable storage devices, and user desktop experience. Vista also introduced an XML-based format (ADMX) to display registry-based policy settings, making it easier to manage networks that span geographic locations and different languages.
• Services for UNIX has been renamed «Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications,» and is included with the Enterprise and Ultimate editions of Vista. Network File System (NFS) client support is also included.
• Multilingual User Interface–Unlike previous versions of Windows (which required the loading of language packs to provide local-language support), Windows Vista Ultimate and Enterprise editions support the ability to dynamically change languages based on the logged-on user’s preference.
• Wireless Projector support

Developer[]

Windows Vista includes a large number of new application programming interfaces. Chief among them is the inclusion of version 3.0 of the .NET Framework, which consists of a class library and Common Language Runtime and OS/2 environment just like its NT predecessors. Version 3.0 includes four new major components:

• Windows Presentation Foundation is a user interface subsystem and framework based vector graphics, which makes use of 3D computer graphics hardware and Direct3D technologies. It provides the foundation for building applications and blending together application UI, documents, and media content. It is the successor to Windows Forms.
• Windows Communication Foundation is a service-oriented messaging subsystem which enables applications and systems to inter-operate locally or remotely using Web services.
• Windows Workflow Foundation provides task automation and integrated transactions using workflows. It is the programming model, engine and tools for building workflow-enabled applications on Windows.
• Windows CardSpace is a component which securely stores digital identities of a person, and provides a unified interface for choosing the identity for a particular transaction, such as logging into a website.

These technologies are also available for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 to facilitate their introduction to and usage by developers and end users.

There are also significant new development APIs in the core of the operating system, notably the completely re-architected audio, networking, print, and video interfaces, major changes to the security infrastructure, improvements to the deployment and installation of applications («ClickOnce» and Windows Installer 4.0), new device driver development model («Windows Driver Foundation»), Transactional NTFS, mobile computing API advancements (power management, Tablet PC Ink support, SideShow) and major updates to (or complete replacements of) many core subsystems such as Winlogon and CAPI.

There are some issues for software developers using some of the graphics APIs in Vista. Games or programs which are built solely on the Windows Vista-exclusive version of DirectX, version 10, cannot work on prior versions of Windows, as DirectX 10 is not available for previous Windows versions. Also, games which require the features of D3D9Ex, the updated implementation of DirectX 9 in Windows Vista are also incompatible with previous Windows versions. According to a Microsoft blog, there are three choices for OpenGL implementation on Vista. An application can use the default implementation, which translates OpenGL calls into the Direct3D API and is frozen at OpenGL version 1.4, or an application can use an Installable Client Driver (ICD), which comes in two flavors: legacy and Vista-compatible. A legacy ICD disables the Desktop Window Manager, a Vista-compatible ICD takes advantage of a new API, and is fully compatible with the Desktop Window Manager. At least two primary vendors, ATI and NVIDIA provided full Vista-compatible ICDs. However, hardware overlay is not supported, because it is considered as an obsolete feature in Vista. ATI and NVIDIA strongly recommend using compositing desktop/Framebuffer Objects for same functionality.

Removed features[]

Some notable Windows XP features and components have been replaced or removed in Windows Vista, including several shell and Windows Explorer features, multimedia features, networking related functionality, Windows Messenger, NTBackup, the network Messenger Service, HyperTerminal, MSN Explorer, Active Desktop, and the replacement of NetMeeting with Windows Meeting Space. The «Hardware profiles» startup feature has also been removed, along with support for older motherboard technologies like the EISA bus, APM and Game port support (though on the 32-bit version game port support can be enabled by applying an older driver). The IPX/SPX Protocol has also been removed, although it can be enabled by a third-party plug-in.

Theme[]

Windows Vista does not include the «Luna» visual theme, created in 2001 for Windows XP, or most of the classic color schemes which have been part of Windows since the Windows 3.x era. Also the caption buttons are changed. Only Windows Classic can still be found in that operating system.

Editions[]

Windows Vista ships in six different editions. These are roughly divided into two target markets, consumer and business, with editions varying to cater for specific sub-markets. For consumers, there are four editions, with three available for economically more developed countries. Windows Vista Starter edition is for Netbooks and small PC’s. Windows Vista Home Basic is intended for budget users and is available only in emerging markets. Windows Vista Home Premium covers the majority of the consumer market, and contains applications for creating and using multimedia. The home editions cannot join a Windows Server domain. For businesses, there are three editions. Windows Vista Business is specifically designed for small and medium enterprises|small and medium-sized businesses, is only available to customers participating in Microsoft’s Microsoft Software Assurance|Software Assurance program. Windows Vista Ultimate contains the complete feature-set of both the Home and Business (combination of both Home Premium and Enterprise) editions, as well as a set of Windows Ultimate Extras, and is aimed at enthusiasts.

All editions except Windows Vista Starter support both 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x64) processor architectures.

In the European Union, Home Basic N and Business N versions are also available. These come without Windows Media Player, due to EU sanctions brought against Microsoft for violating anti-trust laws. Similar sanctions exist in South Korea.

Visual styles[]

Windows Vista has four distinct visual styles.

Windows Aero

Vista’s premier visual style, Windows Aero, is built on a new desktop composition engine called Desktop Window Manager. Windows Aero introduces support for 3D graphics (Windows Flip 3D), translucency effects (Glass), live thumbnails, window animations, and other visual effects, and is intended for mainstream and high-end video cards. To enable these features, the contents of every open window are stored in video memory to facilitate tearing-free movement of windows. As such, Windows Aero has significantly higher hardware requirements than its predecessors. The minimum requirement is for 128 MB of graphics memory, depending on resolution used. Windows Aero (including Windows Flip 3D) is not included in the Starter and Home Basic editions.

Windows Vista Standard

This style is a variation of Windows Aero without the glass effects, window animations, and other advanced graphical effects such as Windows Flip 3D. Like Windows Aero, it uses the Desktop Window Manager, and has generally the same video hardware requirements as Windows Aero. This visual style is included with Home Basic edition only as a «cheap» replacement of Windows Aero style.

Windows Vista Basic

This style has aspects that are similar to Windows XP’s «Luna» visual style with the addition of subtle animations such as those found on progress bars. It does not employ the Desktop Window Manager, as such, it does not feature transparency or translucency, window animation, Windows Flip 3D or any of the functions provided by the DWM. The Basic mode does not require the new Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) for display drivers, and has similar video card requirements to Windows XP. For computers with video cards that are not powerful enough to support Windows Aero, this is the default graphics mode. Prior to Service Pack 1, a machine that failed Windows Genuine Advantage validation would also default to this visual style.

Windows Standard

The Windows Standard (or Windows Classic) visual style is similar to that of Windows 2000 and Microsoft’s Windows Server line of operating systems. It does not use the Desktop Window Manager, and does not require a WDDM driver. As with previous versions of Windows, this visual style supports color schemes, which are collections of color settings. Windows Vista includes six color schemes: four high-contrast color schemes and the default color schemes from Windows 95/Windows 98 (titled «Windows Classic») and Windows 2000/Windows Me (titled «Windows Standard»).

Hardware requirements[]

Computers capable of running Windows Vista are classified as Vista Capable and Vista Premium Ready. A Vista Capable or equivalent PC is capable of running all editions of Windows Vista although some of the special features and high-end graphics options may require additional or more advanced hardware. A Vista Premium Ready PC can take advantage of Vista’s high-end features.

Windows Vista’s Basic and Classic interfaces work with virtually any graphics hardware that supports Windows XP or 2000; accordingly, most discussion around Vista’s graphics requirements centers on those for the Windows Aero interface. As of Windows Vista Beta 2, the NVIDIA GeForce 6 series and later, the ATI Radeon 9500 and later, Intel’s GMA 950 and later integrated graphics, and a handful of VIA chipsets and S3 Graphics discrete chips are supported. Although originally supported, the GeForce FX 5 series has been dropped from newer drivers from NVIDIA. The last driver from NVIDIA to support the GeForce FX series on Vista was 96.85. Microsoft offers a tool called the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor to assist Windows XP and Vista users in determining what versions of Windows their machine is capable of running. Although the installation media included in retail packages is a 32-bit DVD, customers needing a CD-ROM or customers who wish for a 64-bit install media are able to acquire this media through the Windows Vista Alternate Media program. The Ultimate edition includes both 32-bit and 64-bit media. The digitally downloaded version of Ultimate includes only one version, either 32-bit or 64-bit, from Windows Marketplace.

Windows Vista system requirements

	Vista Capable	Vista Premium Ready
Processor	800 MHz	1 GHz
Memory	512 MB	1 GB
Graphics card	DirectX 9.0 capable	DirectX 9.0 capable and WDDM 1.0 driver support
Graphics memory	32 MB	128 MB
HDD capacity	20 GB	40 GB
HDD free space	15 GB
Optical drives	DVD-ROM drive (Only to install from DVD-ROM media)
It is possible to install and run the operating system on early IA-32 processors such as a Intel Pentium II/III and older Celeron and AMD Athlon (K7 and Thunderbird), K6/K6-2/K6-III and AMD K5 with or without SSE instructions. Windows Vista is not compatible with processors older than Pentium II (such as Original Pentium, Pentium Pro and Pentium MMX) because it requires a i686 (Intel) or RISC86 (AMD) Compliant Processors.

Physical memory limits[]

Maximum limits on physical memory (RAM) that Windows Vista can address vary depending on the both the Windows version and between 32-bit and 64-bit versions. The following table specifies the maximum physical memory limits supported:

Physical memory limits for Windows Vista versions

Version	Limit in 32-bit Windows	Limit in 64-bit Windows
Windows Vista Ultimate	4 GB	128 GB
Windows Vista Enterprise
Windows Vista Business
Windows Vista Home Premium	16GB
Windows Vista Home Basic	8GB
Windows Vista Starter	1 GB	N/A

Processor limits[]

The total maximum number of logical processors of a PC that Windows Vista supports is: 32 for 32-bit; 64 for 64-bit.

The maximum number of physical processors in a PC that Windows Vista supports is: 2 for Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate; 1 for Starter, Home Basic, and Home Premium.

Service packs[]

Microsoft occasionally releases service packs for its Windows operating systems to fix bugs and add new features.

Service Pack 1[]

Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) was released on February 4, 2008, alongside Windows Server 2008 to OEM partners, it was a five-month beta test period. The initial deployment of the service pack caused a number of machines to continually reboot, rendering the machines unusable. This caused Microsoft to temporarily suspend automatic deployment of the service pack until the problem was resolved. The synchronized release date of the two operating systems reflected the merging of the workstation and server kernels back into a single code base for the first time since Windows 2000. MSDN subscribers were able to download SP1 on February 15, 2008. SP1 became available to current Windows Vista users on Windows Update and the Download Center on March 18, 2008. Initially, the service pack only supported 5 languages – English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese. Support for the remaining 31 languages was released on April 14, 2008.

A whitepaper published by Microsoft near the end of August 2007 outlined the scope and intent of the service pack, identifying three major areas of improvement: reliability and performance, administration experience, and support for newer hardware and standards.

One area of particular note is performance. Areas of improvement include file copy operations, hibernation, logging off on domain-joined machines, JavaScript parsing in Internet Explorer, network file share browsing, Windows Explorer ZIP file handling, and Windows Disk Defragmenter. The ability to choose individual drives to defragment is being reintroduced as well.

Service Pack 1 introduced support for some new hardware and software standards, notably the exFAT file system, 802.11n wireless networking, IPv6 over VPN connections, and the Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol. Booting a system using Extensible Firmware Interface on x64 systems was also introduced; this feature had originally been slated for the initial release of Vista but was delayed due to a lack of compatible hardware at the time.

Two areas have seen changes in SP1 that have come as the result of concerns from software vendors. One of these is desktop search; users will be able to change the default desktop search program to one provided by a third party instead of the Microsoft desktop search program that comes with Windows Vista, and desktop search programs will be able to seamlessly tie in their services into the operating system. These changes come in part due to complaints from Google, whose Google Desktop Search application was hindered by the presence of Vista’s built-in desktop search. In June 2007, Google claimed that the changes being introduced for SP1 «are a step in the right direction, but they should be improved further to give consumers greater access to alternate desktop search providers». The other area of note is a set of new security APIs being introduced for the benefit of antivirus software that currently relies on the unsupported practice of patching the kernel (see Kernel Patch Protection).

An update to DirectX 10, named DirectX 10.1, marked mandatory several features which were previously optional in Direct3D 10 hardware. Graphics cards will be required to support DirectX 10.1. SP1 includes a kernel (6001.18000) that matches the version shipped with Windows Server 2008.

The Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) was replaced by the Group Policy Object Editor. An updated downloadable version of the Group Policy Management Console was released soon after the service pack.

SP1 enables support for hotpatching, a reboot-reduction servicing technology designed to maximize uptime. It works by allowing Windows components to be updated (or «patched») while they are still in use by a running process. Hotpatch-enabled update packages are installed via the same methods as traditional update packages, and will not trigger a system reboot.

Service Pack 2[]

Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista was released to manufacturing on April 28, 2009, and released to Microsoft Download Center and Windows Update on May 26, 2009. In addition to a number of security and other fixes, a number of new features have been added. However, it did not include Internet Explorer 8: Windows Vista Service Pack 2 is build 6002.18005.090410-1830.

• Windows Search 4.0 (currently available for SP1 systems as a standalone update)
• Feature Pack for Wireless adds support for Bluetooth 2.1
• Windows Feature Pack for Storage enables the data recording onto Blu-ray media
• Windows Connect Now (WCN) to simplify Wi-Fi configuration
• Improved support for resuming with active Wi-Fi connections
• Enables the exFAT file system to support UTC timestamps, which allows correct file synchronisation across time zones
• Support for ICCD/CCID smart cards
• Support for VIA 64-bit CPUs
• Improves audio and video performance for streaming high-definition content
• Improves Windows Media Center (WMC) in content protection for TV.
• Provides an improved power management policy that is up to 10% more efficient than the original in some configurations.

Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 share a single service pack binary, reflecting the fact that their code bases were joined with the release of Server 2008. Service Pack 2 is not a cumulative update meaning that Service Pack 1 must be installed first.

Platform Update[]

The Platform Update for Windows Vista was released on October 27, 2009. It includes major new components that shipped with Windows 7, as well as updated runtime libraries. It requires Service Pack 2 of Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 and is listed on Windows Update as a Recommended download.

The Platform Update allows application developers to target both Windows Vista and Windows 7. It consists of the following components:

• Windows Graphics runtime: Direct2D, DirectWrite, Direct3D 11, DXGI 1.1, and WARP;
• Updates to Windows Imaging Component;
• Updates to XPS Print API, XPS Document API and XPS Rasterization Service;
• Windows Automation API (updates to MSAA and UI Automation); (will also be available on Windows XP)
• Windows Portable Devices Platform; (adds support for MTP over Bluetooth and MTP Device Services)
• Animation Manager Library.

Some updates will also be available as separate releases for both Windows XP and Windows Vista:

• Windows Management Framework: Windows PowerShell 2.0, Windows Remote Management 2.0, BITS 4.0
• Remote Desktop Connection 7.0 (RDP7) client

Although extensive, the Platform Update does not bring Windows Vista to the level of features and performance offered by Windows 7. For example, even though Direct3D 11 runtime will be able to run on D3D9-class hardware and WDDM drivers using «feature levels» first introduced in Direct3D 10.1, Desktop Window Manager has not been updated to use Direct3D 10.1.

Microsoft also has released Platform Update Supplement for Windows Vista and for Windows Server 2008 (KB2117917) which brings many Direct2D and DirectWrite fixes from Windows 7 SP1 to Windows Vista SP2 with Platform Update installed. Another update, KB2505189 fixes another DirectWrite bug on Vista SP2 with Platform Update.

Marketing campaign[]

The Mojave Experiment[]

Main article: The Mojave Experiment

In July 2008, Microsoft introduced a web-based advertising campaign called the «Mojave Experiment», that depicts a group of people who are asked to evaluate the newest operating system from Microsoft, calling it Windows ‘Mojave’. Participants are first asked about Vista, if they have used it, and their overall satisfaction with Vista on a scale of 1 to 10. They are then shown a demo of some of the new operating system’s features, and asked their opinion and satisfaction with it on the same 1 to 10 scale. After respondents rate «Mojave», they are then told that they were really shown a demo of Windows Vista. The object was to test «A theory: If people could see Windows Vista firsthand, they would like it.» According to Microsoft, the initial sample of respondents rated Vista an average of 4.4 out of 10, and Mojave received an average of 8.5, with no respondents rating Mojave lower than they originally rated Windows Vista before the demo. The «experiment» has been criticized for deliberate selection of positive statements and not addressing all aspects of Vista.

Reception[]

A Gartner research report predicted that Vista business adoption in 2008 would overtake that of XP during the same time frame (21.3% vs. 16.9%) while IDC had indicated that the launch of Windows Server 2008 served as a catalyst for the stronger adoption rates. As of January 2009, Forrester Research had indicated that almost one third of North American and European corporations had started deploying Vista.

At a May 2009 conference, a Microsoft Vice President said «Adoption and deployment of Windows Vista has been slightly ahead of where we had been with XP» for big businesses.

In its first year of availability, PC World rated it as the biggest tech disappointment of 2007, and it was rated by InfoWorld as #2 of Tech’s all-time 25 flops. The internet-usage market share for Windows Vista after two years of availability, in January 2009, was 20.61%. This figure combined with World Internet Users and Population Stats yielded a user base of roughly 330 million, which exceeded Microsoft’s two-year post launch expectations by 130 million. The internet user base reached before the release of its successor (Windows 7) was roughly 400 million according to the same statistical sources.

Within its first month, 20 million copies of Vista were sold, double the amount of Windows XP sales within its first month in October 2001, five years earlier. Shortly after however, due to Vista’s relatively low adoption rates and continued demand for Windows XP, Microsoft continued to sell Windows XP until June 30, 2008, instead of the previously planned date of January 31, 2008. There were reports of Vista users «downgrading» their operating systems, as well as reports of businesses planning to skip Vista. A study conducted by ChangeWave in March 2008 showed that the percentage of corporate users who were «very satisfied» with Vista was dramatically lower than other operating systems, with Vista at 8%, compared to the 40% who said they were «very satisfied» with Windows XP.

Amid the negative reviews and reception, there were also significant positive reviews of Vista, most notably among PC gamers and the advantages brought about with DirectX 10, which allows for better gaming performance and more realistic graphics, as well as support for many new capabilities brought about in new video cards and GPUs. However, many DirectX 9 games initially showed a drop in frame rate compared to that experienced in Windows XP.
Though in mid-2008, benchmarks suggested that Vista SP1 was on par with (or better than) Windows XP in terms of game performance.

Around the release of Windows 7 in October 2009, a survey by Valve Corporation indicated that 40.41% of gamers were running DirectX 10 systems. The survey also indicated that DirectX 10 was supported on 83.21% of DirectX10 capable OS’s (Windows Vista, Windows 7 beta and Windows 7 represented 48.56% of the survey) and that 42.27% of these OS’s were 64-bit.

Criticism[]

Windows Vista has received a number of negative assessments. Criticism targets include protracted development time (5–6 years), more restrictive licensing terms, the inclusion of a number of technologies aimed at restricting the copying of protected digital media, and the usability of the new User Account Control security technology. Moreover, some concerns have been raised about many PCs meeting «Vista Premium Ready» hardware requirements and Vista’s pricing.

Hardware requirements[]

While Microsoft claimed «nearly all PCs on the market today will run Windows Vista», the higher requirements of some of the «premium» features, such as the Aero interface, have had an impact on many upgraders. According to the UK newspaper The Times in May 2006, the full set of features «would be available to less than 5 percent of Britain’s PC market»; however, this prediction was made several months before Vista was released.

This continuing lack of clarity eventually led to a class action against Microsoft as people found themselves with new computers that were unable to use the new software to its full potential despite the assurance of «Vista Capable» designations. The court case has made public internal Microsoft communications that indicate that senior executives have also had difficulty with this issue. For example, Mike Nash (Corporate Vice President, Windows Product Management) commented «I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine» because his laptop’s lack of an appropriate graphics chip so hobbled Vista.

Licensing[]

Criticism of upgrade licenses pertaining to Windows Vista Starter through Home Premium was expressed by Ars Technica’s Ken Fisher, who noted that the new requirement of having a prior operating system already installed was going to cause irritation for users who reinstall Windows on a regular basis.

It has been revealed that an Upgrade copy of Windows Vista can be installed clean without first installing a previous version of Windows. On the first install, Windows will refuse to activate. The user must then reinstall that same copy of Vista. Vista will then activate on the reinstall, thus allowing a user to install an Upgrade of Windows Vista without owning a previous operating system.

As with Windows XP, separate rules still apply to OEM versions of Vista installed on new PCs: Microsoft asserts that these versions are not legally transferable (although whether this conflicts with the right of first sale has yet to be decided clearly legally).

Cost[]

Initially the cost of Windows Vista was also a source of concern and commentary. A majority of users in a poll said that the prices of various Windows Vista editions posted on the Microsoft Canada website in August 2006 make the product too expensive.

A BBC News report on the day of Vista’s release suggested that, «there may be a backlash from consumers over its pricing plans—with the cost of Vista versions in the US roughly half the price of equivalent versions in the UK.»

Since the release of Vista in 2006 Microsoft has reduced the retail, and upgrade price point of Vista considerably. Originally Vista Ultimate was priced at $399, and Home Premium Vista at $239. These prices have since been reduced to $319 and $199 respectively.

Digital rights management[]

Windows Vista supports additional forms of digital rights management restrictions. One aspect of this is the Protected Video Path, which is designed so that «premium content» from HD DVD or Blu-ray Discs may mandate that the connections between PC components be encrypted. Depending on what the content demands, the devices may not pass premium content over non-encrypted outputs, or they must artificially degrade the quality of the signal on such outputs or not display it at all. Drivers for such hardware must be approved by Microsoft; a revocation mechanism is also included which allows Microsoft to disable drivers of devices in end-user PCs over the Internet

Peter Gutmann, security researcher and author of the open source cryptlib library, claims that these mechanisms violate fundamental rights of the user (such as fair use), unnecessarily increase the cost of hardware, and make systems less reliable (the «tilt bit» being a particular worry; if triggered, the entire graphic subsystem performs a reset) and vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks.

However despite several requests for evidence supporting such claims Peter Gutmann has never supported his claims with any researched evidence. Proponents have claimed that Microsoft had no choice but to follow the demands of the movie studios, and that the technology will not actually be enabled until after 2010; Microsoft also noted that content protection mechanisms have existed in Windows as far back as Windows Me, and that the new protections will not apply to any existing content (only future content).

User Account Control[]

Although user Account Control (UAC) is an important part of Vista’s security infrastructure, as it blocks software from silently gaining administrator privileges without the user’s knowledge, it has been widely criticized for generating too many prompts. This has led many Vista UAC users to consider it annoying and tiresome, with some consequently either turning the feature off or putting it in auto-approval mode.

Responding to this criticism, Microsoft altered the implementation to reduce the number of prompts with SP1. Though the changes have resulted in some improvement, it has not alleviated the concerns completely.

Trivia[]

• No build of Windows Vista (including pre-reset) actually used or even included the widespread Longhorn sound scheme.
• The name vista in Spanish means view. If Windows Vista is translated from Spanish, it means Windows View.

See also[]

• Microsoft Security Essentials
• History of Microsoft Windows

References[]

External links[]

• Windows Vista at Microsoft (archived 2007-02-02, 2005-07-24)
• Windows Vista at Wikipedia

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