90-537: The Windows System Assessment Tool ( WinSAT ) is a module of Microsoft Windows Vista , Windows 7 , Windows 8 , Windows 8.1 , Windows 10 , and Windows 11 that is available in the Control Panel under Performance Information and Tools (except in Windows 8.1 , Windows 10 , and Windows 11 ). It measures various performance characteristics and capabilities of the hardware it is running on and reports them as
180-564: A RAM upgrade than adding a faster hard drive (or any other component). Detailed raw performance information, like actual disk bandwidth, can be obtained by invoking winsat from the command line. This also allows only specific tests to be re-run. Obtaining the WEI score from the command line is done invoking winsat formal , which also updates the value stored in %systemroot%\Performance\WinSAT\DataStore . (The XML files stored there can be easily hacked to report fake performance values.) The WEI
270-452: A Windows Experience Index (WEI) score. The WEI includes five subscores: processor, memory, 2D graphics, 3D graphics, and disk; the basescore is equal to the lowest of the subscores and is not an average of the subscores. WinSAT reports WEI scores on a scale from 1.0 to 5.9 for Windows Vista, 7.9 for Windows 7, and 9.9 for Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, and Windows 11. The WEI enables users to match their computer hardware performance with
360-454: 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
450-595: A "level system" to designate the performance and capabilities of a system's hardware and that Xbox 360 peripherals would be fully compatible with the operating system. The Windows Experience Index feature in Windows Vista relies on measurements taken with WinSAT to provide an accurate assessment of a system's capabilities—these capabilities are presented in the form of a rating, where a higher rating indicates better performance. Preliminary design elements created for Microsoft by Robert Stein in 2004 suggest that WinSAT
540-549: 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
630-569: 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
720-505: 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. Out-of-box experience An out-of-box experience ( OOBE ( / ˈ uː b iː / OO -bee ))
810-473: 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
900-490: A Windows game directly from optical media during installation—in a manner similar to games designed for a video game console . Microsoft would also require a new method of displaying system requirements on retail packaging for Windows games with a rating system that would categorize games based on a numerical system. In 2004, Lester expanded further on Microsoft's intentions by stating that the company would work with hardware manufacturers to create PCs for Windows Vista that used
990-487: 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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#17328009901261080-481: 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
1170-482: 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
1260-427: 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
1350-473: 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
1440-527: A final score when launching the command "shell:games". According to an article in PC Pro , Microsoft removed the WinSAT GUI in order to promote the idea that all kinds of hardware run Windows 8 equally well. At the 2003 Game Developers Conference Dean Lester, Microsoft's General Manager of Windows Graphics and Gaming, stated in an interview with GameSpot that Microsoft intended to focus on improvements to
1530-561: 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
1620-424: 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
1710-460: 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
1800-533: 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
1890-415: A machine's hardware capabilities. WinSAT would remain a key focus throughout development of the operating system before its release to manufacturing. WinSAT in Windows Vista and Windows 7 performs the following tests: While running, the tests show only a progress bar and a "working" background animation. Aero Glass is deactivated on Windows Vista and Windows 7 during testing so the tool can properly assess
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#17328009901261980-880: 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
2070-460: 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 the project in 2004. Many features were eventually reimplemented after the reset, but Microsoft ceased using managed code to develop
2160-414: 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
2250-564: 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
2340-409: A software product. An out-of-box failure ( OBF or OOBF ) refers to the perceived failure of a product that occurs immediately upon first usage. In relations to computing, an out-of-box failure can refer to the immediate failure mode when installing or performing initial configuration on a piece of computer hardware or software, or a physical defect involving the installation media which requires
2430-542: 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
2520-583: 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
2610-494: 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
2700-491: 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
2790-566: 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
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2880-408: 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
2970-450: 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
3060-458: Is also available to applications through an API , so they can configure themselves as a function of hardware performance, taking advantage of its capabilities without becoming unacceptably slow. The Windows Experience Index score is not displayed in Windows 8.1 and onwards because the graphical user interface for WinSAT was removed in these versions of Windows, although the command line winsat tool still exists and operates correctly along with
3150-456: 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
3240-504: 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
3330-448: 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,
3420-874: 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
3510-401: Is the experience an end-user has when taking a product after unboxing , or for digital distribution , runs the installer , and is preparing to first use it, as opposed to the point-of-sale experience or the interaction experience of an expert user. In computing, this includes the initial configuration of a piece of hardware or software on a computer . The out-of-box experience is typically
3600-399: 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
3690-516: 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
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3780-919: 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
3870-572: 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
3960-471: 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
4050-517: 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
4140-447: The PC gaming experience as part of a new gaming initiative for the next version of Windows, Windows Vista , then codenamed "Longhorn." Lester stated that as part of this initiative the operating system would include a games folder that would centralize settings pertinent to gamers and, among other features, display driver streamlining , parental controls for games and the ability to start
4230-585: 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
4320-627: 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
4410-403: The box (packing material, pack configuration, how item is position when opening, cords neatly wrapped, etc), what the paperwork looks like and includes (well designed packing slip, a thank you note from the vendor, return form, etc). Microsoft uses this term, particularly, to refer to the user experience that takes place after software installation, and immediately following the first launch of
4500-849: 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
4590-569: 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
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#17328009901264680-407: 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 a period of protracted development that was unprecedented for Microsoft. Most new features were prominently based on
4770-617: 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
4860-477: 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
4950-413: 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
5040-424: The first impression a product creates, such as the ease with which a buyer can begin using the product. For hardware products, a positive OOBE can be created with logical easy-to-follow instructions and good quality of manufacturing. It can also be defined as the experience an online shopper has when receiving an item in the mail, that begins with the box itself (style, design), how the item is presented when opening
5130-483: 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
5220-479: 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
5310-509: The graphics card and CPU. In Windows 8, WinSAT runs under the maintenance scheduler every week. The default schedule is 1am on Sundays. The maintenance scheduler collates various OS tasks into a schedule so the computer is not being randomly interrupted by the individual tasks. The scheduler wakes the computer from sleep, runs all the scheduled tasks and then puts the computer back to sleep. During this weekly task, WinSAT runs long enough to detect if there have been any hardware changes. If so, then
5400-461: 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
5490-449: 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
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#17328009901265580-434: 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
5670-514: 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
5760-723: 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
5850-536: 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
5940-579: 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
6030-413: 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
6120-442: 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
6210-431: 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 a home network ; and new multimedia tools such as Windows DVD Maker . Windows Vista included version 3.0 of
6300-456: The performance requirements of software. For example, the Aero graphical user interface will not automatically be enabled unless the system has a WEI score of 3 or higher. The WEI can also be used to show which part of a system would be expected to provide the greatest increase in performance when upgraded. For example, a computer with the lowest subscore being its memory, would benefit more from
6390-471: 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,
6480-406: 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
6570-544: 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
6660-505: 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
6750-401: 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
6840-404: 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
6930-469: 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),
7020-525: The tests are run again. If not, then WinSAT simply ends as the existing scores must be valid. WinSAT cannot perform the above tests when a laptop is battery-operated. Microsoft 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 was then the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft Windows. It
7110-460: 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
7200-510: 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,
7290-401: 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
7380-557: 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 is the first release of Windows to be made available through a digital distribution platform . Development of Windows Vista began in 2001 under
7470-513: 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
7560-463: Was intended to rate a user's hardware during the out-of-box experience ; this is a design decision that would be retained for the operating system's release to manufacturing . During the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference of 2005, Microsoft formally unveiled the existence of WinSAT and presented it as a technology not only for games, but one that would allow Windows Vista to make decisions, such as whether to enable desktop composition , based on
7650-583: 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
7740-483: 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
7830-709: 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
7920-521: 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
8010-561: 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
8100-524: 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)
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