By approximately November , 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, , 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'.
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'. After Longhorn was named Windows Vista in November , an unprecedented beta-test program was started, involving hundreds of thousands of volunteers and companies.
The first of these was distributed at the 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, , 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 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.
The UEFI 2. While Microsoft had originally hoped to have the consumer versions of the operating system available worldwide in time for the holiday shopping season, it announced in March that the release date would be pushed back to January 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 annoying.
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 on September 22 to just over 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 or fewer before the product could go into escrow for RTM. On June 14, , 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.
During a demonstration of the speech recognition feature new to Windows Vista at Microsoft's Financial Analyst Meeting on July 27, , 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 '.
Windows Vista build October 17, was supposed to be the RTM release, but a bug, which destroyed any system that was upgraded from Windows XP, prevented this, damaging development and lowering the chance that it would hit its January deadline.
Development of Windows Vista came to an end when Microsoft announced that it had been finalized on November 8, , and was concluded by co-president of Windows development, Jim Allchin. Vista includes technologies such as ReadyBoost [68] 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.
It uses almost all the extra RAM as disk cache. As part of the redesign of the networking architecture, IPv6 has been fully incorporated into the operating system [72] and a number of performance improvements have been introduced, such as TCP window scaling.
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 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. 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.
Improved security was a primary design goal for Vista. 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.
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. Symantec used over 2, 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. 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.
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. 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. 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 that can grant or deny communications to specific services.
The bit versions of Vista require that all device drivers be digitally signed, so that the creator of the driver can be identified. While much of the focus of Vista's new capabilities highlighted the new user-interface, [89] security technologies, and improvements to the core operating system, Microsoft also adding new deployment and maintenance features:.
Windows Vista includes a large number of new application programming interfaces. Chief among them is the inclusion of version 3. Version 3. These technologies are also available for Windows XP and Windows Server 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.
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. 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. 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 bit version game port support can be enabled by applying an older driver.
Windows Vista shipped in six different editions. For consumers, there are three editions, with two available for economically more developed countries. Windows Vista Starter edition is aimed for 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, [] while Windows Vista Enterprise [] 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 bit x32 and bit x64 processor architectures. Similar sanctions exist in South Korea. Windows Vista's Basic and Classic interfaces work with virtually any graphics hardware that supports Windows XP or ; accordingly, most discussion around Vista's graphics requirements centers on those for the Windows Aero interface.
The required server connections for this utility are no longer available. Although the installation media included in retail packages is a bit DVD, customers needing a CD-ROM or customers who wish for a bit install media are able to acquire this media through the Windows Vista Alternate Media program.
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. The maximum number of logical processors [] in a PC that Windows Vista supports is: 32 [] for bit; 64 [] for bit. Microsoft occasionally releases updates such as service packs for its Windows operating systems to fix bugs, improve performance and add new features.
The initial deployment of the service pack caused a number of machines to continually reboot, rendering the machines unusable. 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 Support for the remaining 31 languages was released on April 14, A white paper, published by Microsoft on August 29, , 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.
Service Pack 1 introduced support for some new hardware and software standards, notably the exFAT file system, [] 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.
In June , 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'. An update to DirectX 10, named DirectX Graphics cards will be required to support DirectX 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. Turn on suggestions. Auto-suggest helps you quickly narrow down your search results by suggesting possible matches as you type. Showing results for. Search instead for. Did you mean:. All forum topics Previous Topic Next Topic.
Davet50 7 Thorium. Rebel9 5 Rhenium. I have no idea why these would be considered "illegal" as Microsoft is making both of these publicly available. Hydralisk 5 Tungsten. Message Edited by mombodog on AM. Davet50 - no offense intended. NemesisDB 7 Gold. Ever notice that whenever we have these big discussions that the OP is nowhere to be found?
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