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99-571: MMCSS is used by the multimedia applications in Windows Vista , including Windows Media Player and Windows Media Center to provide glitch-free audio playback. This service has been implicated in poor networking performance while multimedia is playing. In response to this, Microsoft has included a configurable option in Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and later where users can specify the network throttling index value for

198-509: A home network ; and new multimedia tools such as Windows DVD Maker . Windows Vista included version 3.0 of the .NET Framework , allowing software developers to write applications without traditional Windows APIs . There are major architectural overhauls to audio, display, network, and print sub-systems; deployment, installation, servicing, and startup procedures are also revised. It is the first release of Windows built on Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing initiative and emphasized security with

297-454: 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

396-426: A .NET application using the " runas " verb. An example using C# : In a native Win32 application the same " runas " verb can be added to a ShellExecute() or ShellExecuteEx() call: In the absence of a specific directive stating what privileges the application requests, UAC will apply heuristics , to determine whether or not the application needs administrator privileges. For example, if UAC detects that

495-549: A 64-bit install media can 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. The maximum amount of RAM that Windows Vista supports varies by edition and processor architecture, as shown in the table. All editions except Windows Vista Starter support both

594-569: 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

693-460: A PC that Windows Vista supports is: one processor for Windows Vista Starter, Windows Vista Home Basic, and Windows Vista Home Premium, and two processors for Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Enterprise, and Windows Vista Ultimate. Microsoft releases updates such as service packs for its Windows operating systems to add features, address issues, and improve performance and stability. User Account Control User Account Control ( UAC )

792-473: A September 23, 2005 front-page article in The Wall Street Journal , 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

891-522: A UAC prompt (if UAC is enabled); they are typically marked by a security shield icon with the 4 colors of the Windows logo (in Vista and Windows Server 2008) or with two panels yellow and two blue (Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and later). In the case of executable files, the icon will have a security shield overlay. The following tasks require administrator privileges: Common tasks, such as changing

990-450: A UAC prompt and presented a proof of concept for a privilege escalation . Stefan Kanthak presented a proof of concept for a privilege escalation via UAC's installer detection and IExpress installers. Stefan Kanthak presented another proof of concept for arbitrary code execution as well as privilege escalation via UAC's auto-elevation and binary planting. There have been complaints that UAC notifications slow down various tasks on

1089-487: 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." 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,

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1188-481: 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 processes of a higher integrity level. The security restrictions of Windows services are more fine-grained, so that services (especially those listening on

1287-482: 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, and the latter having spent his career at Microsoft researching and developing methods of producing high-quality testing systems. Srivastava employed

1386-542: A concept of different user-accounts on the same machine. Subsequent versions of Windows and Microsoft applications encouraged the use of non-administrator user-logons, yet some applications continued to require administrator rights. Microsoft does not certify applications as Windows-compliant if they require administrator privileges; such applications may not use the Windows-compliant logo with their packaging. Tasks that require administrator privileges will trigger

1485-427: 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+. 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

1584-473: 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. For most of the pre-RTM builds, only 32-bit editions were released. On June 14, 2006, Windows developer Philip Su posted

1683-561: 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

1782-424: 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

1881-460: 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: 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

1980-533: 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. 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

2079-430: A manifest that requests specific privileges. There are a number of configurable UAC settings. It is possible to: Command Prompt windows that are running elevated will prefix the title of the window with the word "Administrator", so that a user can discern which instances are running with elevated privileges. A distinction is made between elevation requests from a signed executable and an unsigned executable; and if

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2178-891: 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. Windows Vista is the first Microsoft operating system: Some notable Windows XP applications and features have been replaced or removed in Windows Vista, including Active Desktop , MSN Explorer , HyperTerminal , Messenger service NetMeeting , NTBackup , and Windows Messenger . Several multimedia features, networking features, and Shell and Windows Explorer features such as

2277-434: A per-user location within the user's profile. For example, if an application attempts to write to a directory such as "C:\Program Files\appname\settings.ini" to which the user does not have write permission, the write will be redirected to "C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\appname\settings.ini". The redirection feature is only provided for non-elevated 32-bit applications, and only if they do not include

2376-443: A period of protracted development that was unprecedented for Microsoft. Most new features were prominently based on a new presentation layer codenamed Avalon , a new communications architecture codenamed Indigo , and a relational storage platform codenamed WinFS — all built on the .NET Framework ; however, this proved to be untenable due to incompleteness of technologies and ways in which new features were added, and Microsoft reset

2475-414: 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

2574-501: A prompt will usually be shown. Should this fail, the only workaround is to run a Command Prompt as an administrator and launch the MSI or MSP package from there. User Account Control asks for credentials in a Secure Desktop mode, where the entire screen is temporarily dimmed, Windows Aero disabled, and only the authorization window at full brightness, to present only the elevation user interface (UI). Normal applications cannot interact with

2673-564: 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, protecting against malware and other threats. Changes to various system configuration settings (such as new auto-starting applications) are blocked unless

2772-484: A sandbox, unable to write to most of the system (apart from the Temporary Internet Files folder) without elevating via UAC. Since toolbars and ActiveX controls run within the Internet Explorer process, they will run with low privileges as well, and will be severely limited in what damage they can do to the system. A program can request elevation in a number of different ways. One way for program developers

2871-487: 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". Since Microsoft decided that Longhorn needed to be further componentized, work started on builds (known as the Omega-13 builds, named after

2970-583: 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

3069-494: A time travel device in the film Galaxy Quest ) 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

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3168-408: A user-specific directory) if UAC is switched off than they would be otherwise. Also Internet Explorer 7 's "Protected Mode", whereby the browser runs in a sandbox with lower privileges than the standard user, relies on UAC; and will not function if UAC is disabled. Yankee Group analyst Andrew Jaquith said, six months before Vista was released, that "while the new security system shows promise, it

3267-491: A year later. Windows Vista was succeeded by Windows 7 in 2009. Mainstream support for Windows Vista ended on April 10, 2012 and extended support ended on April 11, 2017. 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 in October 2003 as a minor step between Windows XP and "Blackcomb", which

3366-616: Is a mandatory access control enforcement feature introduced with Microsoft 's Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 operating systems , with a more relaxed version also present in Windows 7 , Windows Server 2008 R2 , Windows 8 , Windows Server 2012 , Windows 8.1 , Windows Server 2012 R2 , Windows 10 , and Windows 11 . It aims to improve the security of Microsoft Windows by limiting application software to standard user privileges until an administrator authorises an increase or elevation. In this way, only applications trusted by

3465-566: 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

3564-408: 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 consequentally cannot join a Windows Server domain . For businesses, there are three editions as well. Windows Vista Business

3663-450: 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". 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." After Longhorn

3762-456: 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

3861-504: 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. 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

3960-538: Is far too chatty and annoying." By the time Windows Vista was released in November 2006, Microsoft had drastically reduced the number of operating system tasks that triggered UAC prompts, and added file and registry virtualization to reduce the number of legacy applications that triggered UAC prompts. However, David Cross, a product unit manager at Microsoft, stated during the RSA Conference 2008 that UAC

4059-497: Is inadvisable from a security perspective. In earlier versions of Windows, Applications written with the assumption that the user will be running with administrator privileges experienced problems when run from limited user accounts, often because they attempted to write to machine-wide or system directories (such as Program Files ) or registry keys (notably HKLM ). UAC attempts to alleviate this using File and Registry Virtualization , which redirects writes (and subsequent reads) to

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4158-403: Is not supplied, then the dialog will show up as a blinking item in the taskbar. Inspecting an executable's manifest to determine if it requires elevation is not recommended, as elevation may be required for other reasons (setup executables, application compatibility). However, it is possible to programmatically detect if an executable will require elevation by using CreateProcess() and setting

4257-448: 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,

4356-874: Is specifically designed for small and medium-sized enterprises , while Windows Vista Enterprise is only available to Software Assurance customers. Windows Vista Ultimate contains all features from the Home and Business editions, as well as Windows Ultimate Extras . In the European Union , Home Basic N and Business N variants without Windows Media Player are also available due to sanctions brought against Microsoft for violating anti-monopoly laws ; similar sanctions exist in South Korea . Windows Vista includes four distinct visual styles: Computers capable of running Windows Vista are classified as Vista Capable and Vista Premium Ready . A Vista Capable or equivalent PC

4455-439: Is the first release of Windows to be made available through a digital distribution platform . Development of Windows Vista began in 2001 under the codename "Longhorn"; originally envisioned as a minor successor to Windows XP, it gradually included numerous new features from the then-next major release of Windows codenamed "Blackcomb", after which it was repositioned as a major release of Windows, and it subsequently underwent

4554-434: Is to add a requestedPrivileges section to an XML document, known as the manifest , that is then embedded into the application. A manifest can specify dependencies, visual styles, and now the appropriate security context: Setting the level attribute for requestedExecutionLevel to "asInvoker" will make the application run with the token that started it, "highestAvailable" will present a UAC prompt for administrators and run with

4653-498: The dwCreationFlags parameter to CREATE_SUSPENDED . If elevation is required, then ERROR_ELEVATION_REQUIRED will be returned. If elevation is not required, a success return code will be returned at which point one can use TerminateProcess() on the newly created, suspended process. This will not allow one to detect that an executable requires elevation if one is already executing in an elevated process, however. A new process with elevated privileges can be spawned from within

4752-516: The 32-bit ( x86 ) architecture and the additional 64-bit ( x86-64 ) instruction set extensions, which Vista was the first consumer home release of Windows to support. Intel IA-64 Itanium support however is exclusively limited to the Vista-based Windows Server 2008 . The maximum number of logical processors in a PC that Windows Vista supports is: 32 for 32-bit; 64 for 64-bit. The maximum number of physical processors in

4851-919: The Luna visual style are no longer available. Support for the original release of Windows Vista (without a service pack) ended on April 13, 2010. Windows Vista Service Pack 1 was retired on July 12, 2011, and Windows Vista Service Pack 2 reached its end of support on April 11, 2017. Several Windows Vista components are upgradable to the latest versions, which include new versions introduced in later versions of Windows, and other major Microsoft applications are available. These latest versions for Windows Vista include: Windows Vista shipped in six different product editions. These were deviced across separate consumer and business target markets, with editions varying in features to cater to specific sub-markets. For consumers, there are three editions, with two available for economically more developed countries. Windows Vista Starter edition

4950-572: The GeForce FX series on Vista was 96.85. Microsoft offered 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. 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

5049-471: The Internet around February 28, 2003. 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

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5148-517: 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 ). Microsoft was shocked in 2005 by Apple's release of Mac OS X Tiger . It offered only

5247-606: The Multimedia Class Scheduling Service so that network performance and audio/video playback quality can be balanced according to how users configure it. This Microsoft Windows article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft . It was the direct successor to Windows XP , released five years earlier, which

5346-514: The Secure Desktop. This helps prevent spoofing, such as overlaying different text or graphics on top of the elevation request, or tweaking the mouse pointer to click the confirmation button when that's not what the user intended. If an administrative activity comes from a minimized application, the secure desktop request will also be minimized so as to prevent the focus from being lost. It is possible to disable Secure Desktop , though this

5445-585: 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

5544-503: The application is a setup program, from clues such as the filename, versioning fields, or the presence of certain sequences of bytes within the executable, in the absence of a manifest it will assume that the application needs administrator privileges. UAC is a convenience feature; it neither introduces a security boundary nor prevents execution of malware . Leo Davidson discovered that Microsoft weakened UAC in Windows 7 through exemption of about 70 Windows programs from displaying

5643-627: 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

5742-849: 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. A business-oriented Enterprise edition was made available to volume license customers on November 30, 2006. Windows Vista was launched for general customer availability on January 30, 2007. New features introduced by Windows Vista are very numerous, encompassing significant functionality not available in its predecessors. Vista includes technologies such as ReadyBoost 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

5841-569: The chance that it would hit its January 2007 deadline. 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 . The RTM's build number had also jumped to 6000 to reflect Vista's internal version number, NT 6.0. 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

5940-401: The computer such as the initial installation of software onto Windows Vista . It is possible to turn off UAC while installing software, and re-enable it at a later time. However, this is not recommended since, as File & Registry Virtualization is only active when UAC is turned on, user settings and configuration files may be installed to a different place (a system directory rather than

6039-617: 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

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6138-477: The creator of the driver can be identified. This is also on par with one of the primary goals of Vista to move code out of kernel-mode into user-mode drivers, with another example bing the new Windows Display Driver Model . While much of the focus of Vista's new capabilities highlighted the new user interface, security technologies, and improvements to the core operating system, Microsoft also adding new deployment and maintenance features: Windows Vista includes

6237-461: 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

6336-483: 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

6435-490: The former, whether the publisher is 'Windows Vista'. The color, icon, and wording of the prompts are different in each case; for example, attempting to convey a greater sense of warning if the executable is unsigned than if not. Internet Explorer 7 's "Protected Mode" feature uses UAC to run with a 'low' integrity level (a Standard user token has an integrity level of 'medium'; an elevated (Administrator) token has an integrity level of 'high'). As such, it effectively runs in

6534-479: 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. According to

6633-461: 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. 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

6732-449: The introduction of many new security and safety features such as BitLocker and User Account Control . The ambitiousness and scope of these changes, and the abundance of new features earned positive reviews, but Windows Vista was the subject of frequent negative press and significant criticism. Criticism of Windows Vista focused on driver, peripheral, and program incompatibility; digital rights management ; excessive authorization from

6831-434: 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

6930-514: The market was quickly moving to 64-bit processors. 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

7029-723: 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 new Kernel-Mode device drivers be digitally signed, so that

7128-536: 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

7227-579: The new User Account Control; inordinately high system requirements when contrasted with Windows XP; its protracted development; longer boot time ; and more restrictive product licensing. Windows Vista deployment and satisfaction rates were consequently lower than those of Windows XP, and it is considered a market failure; however, its use surpassed Microsoft's pre-launch two-year-out expectations of achieving 200 million users (with an estimated 330 million users by 2009). On October 22, 2010, Microsoft ceased retail distribution of Windows Vista; OEM supply ceased

7326-413: 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. By approximately November 2004, the company had considered several names for the final release, ranging from simple to fanciful and inventive. In

7425-442: 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

7524-471: 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,

7623-676: The possibility of lower-privilege applications communicating with higher-privilege ones, another new technology, User Interface Privilege Isolation , is used in conjunction with User Account Control to isolate these processes from each other. One prominent use of this is Internet Explorer 7 's "Protected Mode". Operating systems on mainframes and on servers have differentiated between superusers and userland for decades. This had an obvious security component, but also an administrative component, in that it prevented users from accidentally changing system settings. Early Microsoft home operating-systems (such as MS-DOS and Windows 9x ) did not have

7722-406: 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

7821-456: The project in 2004. Many features were eventually reimplemented after the reset, but Microsoft ceased using managed code to develop the operating system. New features of Windows Vista include a graphical user interface and visual style referred to as Windows Aero ; a content index and desktop search platform called Windows Search ; new peer-to-peer technologies to simplify sharing files and media between computers and devices on

7920-544: 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. 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

8019-505: 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

8118-401: 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 ". 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

8217-404: The system could be deemed "trusted". Also at this conference, Microsoft reiterated their roadmap for delivering Longhorn, pointing to an "early 2005" release date. 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

8316-469: 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),

8415-460: 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

8514-571: The time zone, do not require administrator privileges (although changing the system time itself does, since the system time is commonly used in security protocols such as Kerberos ). A number of tasks that required administrator privileges in earlier versions of Windows, such as installing critical Windows updates, no longer require administrator privileges in Vista. Any program can be run as administrator by right-clicking its icon and clicking "Run as administrator", except MSI or MSU packages as, due to their nature, if administrator rights will be required

8613-510: 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,

8712-401: 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

8811-439: The user may receive administrative privileges and malware are kept from compromising the operating system. In other words, a user account may have administrator privileges assigned to it, but applications that the user runs do not inherit those privileges unless they are approved beforehand or the user explicitly authorises it. UAC uses Mandatory Integrity Control to isolate running processes with different privileges. To reduce

8910-517: The usual reduced privileges for standard users, and "requireAdministrator" will require elevation. In both highestAvailable and requireAdministrator modes, failure to provide confirmation results in the program not being launched. An executable that is marked as " requireAdministrator " in its manifest cannot be started from a non-elevated process using CreateProcess() . Instead, ERROR_ELEVATION_REQUIRED will be returned. ShellExecute() or ShellExecuteEx() must be used instead. If an HWND

9009-513: 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. 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

9108-537: Was in fact designed to "annoy users," and force independent software vendors to make their programs more secure so that UAC prompts would not be triggered. Software written for Windows XP , and many peripherals, would no longer work in Windows Vista or 7 due to the extensive changes made in the introduction of UAC. The compatibility options were also insufficient. In response to these criticisms, Microsoft altered UAC activity in Windows 7 . For example, by default users are not prompted to confirm many actions initiated with

9207-583: 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

9306-483: 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

9405-709: 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

9504-521: 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

9603-561: 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

9702-524: 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. 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)

9801-491: Was then the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft Windows. It was released to manufacturing on November 8, 2006, and over the following two months, it was released in stages to business customers, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), and retail channels. On January 30, 2007, it was released internationally and was made available for purchase and download from the Windows Marketplace ; it

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