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Microsoft Windows and Vista | Information, Questions & Chat
Windows Vista is the name of the latest release of Microsoft Windows, a line of graphical operating systems used on personal computers, including home and business desktops, notebook computers, and media centers. Prior to its announcement on July 22, 2005, Vista was known by its codename Longhorn.
On November 8, 2006, Windows Vista development was completed and is now in the release to manufacturing stage; Microsoft has stated that the scheduled release dates are currently November 30, 2006 for volume license customers and worldwide availability on January 30, 2007.
These release dates come more than five years after the release of Windows XP, Microsoft's current consumer and business operating system, making it the longest time span between major releases of Windows.
According to Microsoft, Windows Vista contains hundreds of new features, some of the most significant of which include an updated graphical user interface and visual style dubbed Windows Aero, improved searching features, new multimedia creation tools such as Windows DVD Maker, and completely redesigned networking, audio, print, and display sub-systems. Vista also aims to increase the level of communication between machines on a home network using peer-to-peer technology, making it easier to share files and digital media between computers and devices. For developers, Vista introduces version 3.0 of the .NET Framework, which aims to make it significantly easier for developers to write high-quality applications than with the traditional Windows API.
Microsoft's primary stated objective with Vista, however, has been to improve the state of security in the Windows operating system. One of the most prevalent common criticisms of Windows XP and its predecessors are their commonly exploited security vulnerabilities and overall susceptibility to malware, viruses and buffer overflows. In light of this, then Microsoft chairman Bill Gates announced in early 2002 a company-wide 'Trustworthy Computing initiative' which aims to incorporate security work into every aspect of software development at the company. Microsoft claimed that it prioritized improving the security of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 above finishing Windows Vista, significantly delaying its completion.
During the course of its development, Vista has been the target of a number of negative assessments by various groups. Criticism of Windows Vista has included protracted development time, more restrictive licensing terms, the inclusion of a number of new Digital Rights Management technologies aimed at restricting the copying of protected digital media, and the usability of new features such as User Account Control.
Features
Windows Vista has a long list of new features, changes, and improvements. Recent development builds of Windows Vista, Microsoft employee blogs, and published documentation (including a near-complete list of features in the Windows Vista Product Guide) have collectively identified most of the features that Microsoft intends to include when the product is released.
Windows Aero: a re-designed user interface, named Windows Aero – an acronym (possibly a backronym) for Authentic, Energetic, Reflective, and Open. The new interface is intended to be cleaner and more aesthetically pleasing than previous Windows, including new transparencies, animations and eye candy.
Windows Shell: The new Windows shell is significantly different from 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 Start menu has changed as well; it no longer uses ever-expanding boxes when navigating through Programs. Even the word "Start" itself has been removed in favor of a blue Windows Orb.
Windows Search (also known as Instant Search or search as you type): significantly faster and more thorough search capabilities, similar to what is offered by Windows Desktop Search and Google's Desktop Search. Search boxes have been added to the Start menu, Windows Explorer, and several of the applications included with Vista. By default, Instant Search indexes only a small number of folders such as the start menu, the names of files opened, the Documents folder, and the user's e-mail.
Windows Sidebar: A transparent panel anchored to the side of the screen where a user can place Desktop Gadgets, which are small *****ts designed for a specialized purpose (such as displaying the weather or sports scores). Gadgets can also be placed on other parts of the Desktop, if desired. The technology bears some resemblance to the older Active Channel and Active Desktop technologies introduced with Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2.5, but the gadgets technology is more versatile, and is not integrated with the Internet Explorer browser in the same way as Active 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), a number of new security protection features, and improved web standards support.
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 (or "search as you type"), a completely new and highly graphical interface for the media library, photo display and organization, and the ability to share music libraries over a network with other Vista machines, **** 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 the disk usage. It also features CompletePC Backup which backs up an entire computer as an image onto a hard disk or DVD. CompletePC Backup can automatically recreate a machine setup onto new hardware or hard disk in case of any hardware failures.
Windows Mail: A replacement for Outlook Express that includes a completely replaced mail store that improves stability, and enables real-time search. A number of features from Outlook 2003 are also included, most notably junk mail filtering.
Windows Calendar is a new calendar and task application.
Windows Photo Gallery, a photo and movie library management application. WPG 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, which provides the ability to create video DVDs based on a user's content.
Windows Meeting Space is the replacement for 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.
Windows Media Center, which was previously exclusively bundled as a separate version of Windows XP, known as Windows XP Media Center Edition, will be incorporated into the Home Premium and Ultimate editions of Windows Vista.
Games: Every game included with Windows has been rewritten to take advantage of Vista's new graphics capabilities. New games include Chess Titans, Mahjong Titans and Purble Place. The Games section will also hold links and information to all games on the user's computer. One piece of information that will be shown is the game's ESRB rating.
Previous Versions automatically creates backup copies of files and folders, with daily frequency. 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.
The Windows Mobility Center is a new control panel that centralizes the most relevant information related to mobile computing (e.g. brightness, sound, battery level / power scheme selection, wireless network, screen orientation, presentation settings, etc.).
Windows Update: Software and security updates have been simplified, now operating solely via a control panel instead of as a web application. Mail's spam filter and Defender's definitions will also be automatically updated via Windows Update.
Parental controls: Allows administrators to control which websites, programs, and games each standard user can use and install.
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 fully integrated into Vista, which can be "trained" to understand a user's voice, to activate commands in any Windows application, and to enable voice dictation. It supports multiple languages.
Many new fonts, including several designed especially for screen reading, and a new high-quality Japanese font. See Windows Vista typefaces. ClearType has also been enhanced and enabled by default.
Touchscreen support will be included as part of Tablet PC, which will be incorporated as a standard component.
Problem Reports and Solutions, a new control panel which allows users to see previously sent problems and any solutions or additional information that is available.
Improved audio controls allow the system-wide volume or volume of individual audio devices and even individual applications to be controlled separately.
Full symlink support has been made available for the first time to Windows users in Vista. It works in the same way as it does on other operating systems and platforms (albiet with different nomenclature), and was a much-requested feature to date.
System Performance Assessment is a benchmark used by Windows Vista to regulate the system for optimum performance. Games can take advantage of this feature, reading the data produced by this benchmark in order to fine-tune the game details. The benchmark tests CPU, RAM, Graphics acceleration (2D and 3D) and disk access.
Core Technologies
Windows Vista is intended to be a technology-based release, to provide a solid base to include advanced technologies, many of which will be related to how the system functions, and hence not readily visible to the user. An example of this is the complete restructuring of the architecture of the audio, print, display, and networking subsystems; while the results of this work will be clearly visible to software developers, end-users will only see what appear to be evolutionary changes in the user interface.
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Security
Improved security was the 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 the development of Vista. Security-related technologies include:
User Account Control (UAC) is a new security technology that allows Windows to operate effectively as a "standard" user with fewer privileges. This was often a difficult thing to do in previous versions of Windows, because the previous "limited" user accounts proved too restrictive and incompatible with a large proportion of application software. When an action requiring administrative rights is requested, the user will first be prompted to confirm their action (or be asked for an administrator password if they are not themselves an administrator). UAC asks for credentials in a Secure Desktop mode, where the entire screen is blacked out and temporarily disabled, to present only the elevation UI. This is to prevent spoofing of the UI or the mouse by the application requesting elevation and for preventing application-based Shatter attacks. UAC also provides files and registry virtualization.
Windows Firewall with Advanced Security: Supports filtering both incoming and outgoing traffic. It's also possible to create advanced packet filter rules. Rules can be configured for services by its service name chosen by a list, without needing to specify the full path file name.
Windows Defender: Microsoft's Anti-spyware product has been incorporated into Windows, offering protection against spyware and other threats. Changes to various system configuration settings (such as new auto-starting applications) are blocked unless the user gives consent. The new version uses Windows Automatic Updates to receive definition updates, also works properly with standard user accounts, and has integration with IE so that downloads are scanned when they are downloaded, which reduces the risk of accidentally downloading malicious software.
BitLocker Drive Encryption is a data protection feature that provides encryption for the entire OS volume that will only be included in the Enterprise and Ultimate editions of Vista. Bitlocker can work in conjunction with a Trusted Platform Module chip that is on a computer's motherboard.
Windows Service Hardening prevents Windows Services from doing operations on file systems, registry or networks which they are not supposed to by automatically running each service in a separate user account, thereby preventing entry of malware by piggybacking on system services.
Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) to prevent Return-to-libc buffer overflow attacks.
Windows Filtering Platform enables software such as firewall products to perform activities such as packet inspection. Anti-virus software can also use the file system mini filter to participate in file system activities.
Kernel Patch Protection protects the integrity of the kernel for the 64-bit version from malicious attacks and from inadvertent reliability problems that result from patching. This is not actually a new security feature in Windows Vista; it was first supported on the x64 (AMD64/EM64T) CPU architecture versions of Microsoft Windows including Microsoft Windows Server 2003 SP1 and Microsoft Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. Kernel Patch Protection monitors if key resources used by the kernel or kernel code itself has been modified and will initiate a shut down of the system if unauthorized patches of certain data structures or code are detected. Kernel Patch Protection has been designed to protect against threats such as rootkits, although it cannot currently prevent attacks exploiting hardware-based virtualization;this was demonstrated by the Blue pill.
Code Integrity (CI) protects Windows Vista by verifying that system binaries haven’t been tampered with by malicious code and by ensuring that there are no unsigned drivers running in kernel mode on the system. CI starts as Windows starts up. The boot loader checks the integrity of the kernel, the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL), and the boot-start drivers. After these binaries have been verified, the system starts and the memory manager calls CI to verify any binaries that are loaded into the kernel’s memory space. The binaries are verified by looking up their signatures in the system catalogs. Aside from the kernel memory space, CI verifies binaries loaded into a protected process and system installed dynamic libraries that implement core cryptographic functions.
Internet Explorer 7's new security and safety features include a phishing filter, IDN with anti-spoofing technology, and better integration of system-wide parental controls. For added security, ActiveX controls are disabled by default. Also, Internet Explorer operates in a "protected mode" sandbox which operates with lower permissions than the user, preventing it from accessing or modifying anything besides the Temporary Internet Files directory. Also, for better security, Internet Explorer is no longer integrated with the explorer shell (local files typed in IE are opened using the explorer shell and Web sites typed in the explorer shell are opened using the default web browser).
Added new SSL and TLS extensions, which enable the support of both AES and new ECC cipher suites. The support for AES is not available in Microsoft Windows 2000 or Windows Server 2003.
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Windows Vista editions and pricingEditionDescriptionPricing (USD)Retail boxRetailUpgrade
Windows Vista
Home BasicSimilar to Windows XP Home Edition, Home Basic is intended for budget users not requiring advanced media support for home use. The Windows Aero theme with translucent effects will not be included with this edition. Home Basic will support up to 8 GB of physical memory.
$199.00$99.95
Windows VistaHome PremiumContaining all features from Home Basic, this edition will additionally support more advanced features aimed for the home market segment, such as HDTV support and DVD authoring. Extra games, mobile and tablet computer support, file system encryption, and a photo management application are also included. This edition is comparable to Windows XP Media Center Edition and Tablet PC Edition. Home Premium will support up to 16 GB of physical memory.
$239.00$159.00
Windows VistaBusinessComparable to Windows XP Professional, and aimed at the business market. Does not include the Media Center features of Home Premium, but does include the IIS web server, fax support, offline files, dual (physical) processor support, Remote Desktop, ad-hoc P2P collaboration capabilities, Previous Versions, and support for 128 GB of memory.$299.00$199.95
Windows Vista
UltimateThis edition combines all the features of the Home Premium and Enterprise editions, and additionally comes with podcast creation support, a game performance tweaker (WinSAT), DVD ripping capabilities [citation needed], and special online services for downloadable media, as well as additional customer service options. The Ultimate edition is aimed at high-end PC users, gamers, multimedia professionals, and PC enthusiasts.$399.00$259.00
Windows Vista system requirementsVista CapableVista Premium ReadyProcessor800 MHz1 GHzMemory512 MB RAM1 GB RAMGraphics CardDirectX 9 capableDirectX 9 capable GPU with Hardware Pixel Shader v2.0 and WDDM Driver support
Graphics MemoryN/A128 MB RAM supports up to 2,756,000 total pixels (e.g. 1920 × 1200) or 512 MB+ for greater resolutions such as 2560x1600[39]
HDD capacity20 GB40 GBHDD free space15 GB15 GBHDD typeNormalNormal, but hybrid flash memory/hard disk drive recommendedOther drivesN/ADVD-ROM
To learn more about Microsoft® Windows® Vista, [Click Here] and don't forget to visit http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/
The final release of Microsoft® Windows® Vista will be available:
JANUARY 2007
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