Windows Виста

Windows Виста

Версия Windows NT операционной системы
Снимок экрана Windows Vista Ultimate, показывающий рабочий стол , панель задач , меню «Пуск» , боковую панель Windows , центр приветствия и эффекты стекла Windows Aero.
Разработчик	Майкрософт
Исходная модель	Закрытый исходный код Source-available (through Shared Source Initiative)
Released to manufacturing	November 8, 2006 (2006-11-08)
General availability	January 30, 2007 (2007-01-30)
Final release	Service Pack 2 (6.0.6002) / May 26, 2009 (2009-05-26)
Marketing target	Consumer and Business
Update method	Windows Update Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM)
Platforms	IA-32 and x86-64
Kernel type	Hybrid (NT)
Userland	Windows API, NTVDM, SUA
License	Proprietary commercial software
Preceded by	Windows XP (2001)
Succeeded by	Windows 7 (2009)
Official website	Windows Vista (archived at the Wayback Machine)
Support status
Mainstream support ended on April 10, 2012 Extended support ended on April 11, 2017

Windows Vista — основной выпуск операционной системы Windows NT , разработанный Microsoft . Это был прямой преемник Windows XP , выпущенной пятью годами ранее, что на тот момент было самым длительным периодом времени между последовательными выпусками Microsoft Windows. Он был запущен в производство 8 ноября 2006 г., а в течение следующих двух месяцев поэтапно поставлялся бизнес-клиентам, производителям оригинального оборудования (OEM) и розничным каналам. 30 января 2007 года он был выпущен на международном уровне и стал доступен для покупки и загрузки из Windows Marketplace ; это первая версия Windows, доступная через платформу цифрового распространения .

Разработка Windows Vista началась в 2001 году под кодовым названием Longhorn; Первоначально задуманный как второстепенный преемник Windows XP, он постепенно включал в себя множество новых функций из следующего на тот момент основного выпуска Windows под кодовым названием «Blackcomb», после чего он был позиционирован как основной выпуск Windows и, следовательно, подвергся длительной разработке , которая был беспрецедентным для Microsoft. Большинство новых функций были в основном основаны на новом уровне представления под кодовым названием Avalon , новой коммуникационной архитектуре под кодовым названием Indigo и платформе реляционного хранения под кодовым названием WinFS — все они были построены на преждевременной .NET Framework ; однако это оказалось несостоятельным из-за незавершенности технологий и способов добавления новых функций, и Microsoft изменила проект в 2004 году. Многие новые функции в конечном итоге были перереализованы во время разработки, но Microsoft прекратила использовать управляемый код для разработки операционной системы.

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 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 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 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 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.

Development

Main article: Development of Windows Vista

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

Longhorn

Desktop screenshot of Windows Longhorn build 4074, showing the Start menu, an early version of Windows Desktop Sidebar, Windows Explorer, and the Slate visual style

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

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

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

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

Development reset

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

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

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

As Windows Vista

By approximately November 2004, the company had considered several names for the final release, ranging from simple to fanciful and inventive. In the end, Microsoft chose Windows Vista as confirmed on July 22, 2005, believing it to be a "wonderful intersection of what the product really does, what Windows stands for, and what resonates with customers, and their needs". Group Project Manager Greg Sullivan told Paul Thurrott "You want the PC to adapt to you and help you cut through the clutter to focus on what's important to you. That's what Windows Vista is all about: "bringing clarity to your world" (a reference to the three marketing points of Vista—Clear, Connected, Confident), so you can focus on what matters to you". 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 was named Windows Vista in July 2005, an unprecedented beta-test program was started, involving hundreds of thousands of volunteers and companies. In September of that year, Microsoft started releasing regular Community Technology Previews (CTP) to beta testers from July 2005 to February 2006. The first of these was distributed at the 2005 Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, and was subsequently released to beta testers and Microsoft Developer Network subscribers. The builds that followed incorporated most of the planned features for the final product, as well as a number of changes to the user interface, based largely on feedback from beta testers. Windows Vista was deemed feature-complete with the release of the "February CTP", released on February 22, 2006, and much of the remainder of the work between that build and the final release of the product focused on stability, performance, application and driver compatibility, and documentation. Beta 2, released in late May, was the first build to be made available to the general public through Microsoft's Customer Preview Program. It was downloaded over 5 million times. Two release candidates followed in September and October, both of which were made available to a large number of users.

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

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

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

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

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 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 or changed features

Main article: Features new to Windows Vista

New features introduced by Windows Vista are very numerous, encompassing significant functionality not available in its predecessors.

End-user

• Windows Aero is the new graphical user interface, which Jim Allchin stated is an acronym for Authentic, Energetic, Reflective, and Open. Microsoft intended the new interface to be cleaner and more aesthetically pleasing than those of previous Windows versions, and it features advanced visual effects such as blurred glass translucencies and dynamic glass reflections and smooth window animations. Laptop users report, however, that enabling Aero reduces battery life and reduces performance. Windows Aero requires a compositing window manager called Desktop Window Manager.
• Windows Shell offers a new range of organization, navigation, and search capabilities: Task Panes in Windows Explorer are removed, with the relevant tasks moved to a new command bar. The navigation pane can now be displayed when tasks are available, and it has been updated to include a new "Favorite Links" that houses shortcuts to common locations. An incremental search search box now appears at all times in Windows Explorer. The address bar has been replaced with a breadcrumb navigation bar, which means that multiple locations in a hierarchy can be navigated without needing to go back and forth between locations. Icons now display thumbnails depicting contents of items and can be dynamically scaled in size (up to 256 × 256 pixels). A new preview pane allows users to see thumbnails of items and play tracks, read contents of documents, and view photos when they are selected. Groups of items are now selectable and display the number of items in each group. A new details pane allows users to manage metadata. There are several new sharing features, including the ability to directly share files. The Start menu also now includes an incremental search box — allowing the user to press the ⊞ Win key and start typing to instantly find an item or launch a program — and the All Programs list uses a vertical scroll bar instead of the cascading flyout menu of Windows XP.
• Windows Search is a new content index desktop search platform that replaces the Indexing Service of previous Windows versions to enable incremental searches for files and non-file items — documents, emails, folders, programs, photos, tracks, and videos — and contents or details such as attributes, extensions, and filenames across compatible applications.
• Windows Sidebar is a translucent panel that hosts gadgets that display details such as feeds and sports scores on the Windows desktop; the Sidebar can be hidden and gadgets can also be placed on the desktop itself.
• Internet Explorer 7 is a significant revision over Internet Explorer 6 with a new user interface comprising additional address bar features, a new search box, enhanced page zoom, RSS feed functionality, and support for tabbed browsing (with an optional "quick tabs" feature that shows thumbnails of each open tab). Anti-phishing software is introduced that combines client-side scanning with an optional online service; it checks with Microsoft the address being visited to determine its legitimacy, compares the address with a locally stored list of legitimate addresses, and uses heuristics to determine whether an address's characteristics are indicative of phishing attempts. In Windows Vista, it runs in isolation from other applications (protected mode); exploits and malicious software are restricted from writing to any location beyond Temporary Internet Files without explicit user consent.
• Windows Media Player 11 is a significant update to Microsoft's Windows Media Player for playing and organizing photos, tracks, and videos. New features include an updated GUI for the media library, disc spanning, enhanced audio fingerprinting, instant search capabilities, item organization features, synchronization features, the ability to share the media library over a network with other Windows Vista machines, Xbox 360 integration, and Windows Media Center Extender support.
• Windows Defender is an antispyware program with several configurable options for real-time protection, with settings to block and notify of changes to browser, security, and Windows settings; prohibit startup applications; and view network-connected applications and their addresses; users can optionally report detected threats through the Microsoft Active Protection Service to help stop new threats.
• Backup and Restore Center allows for the creation of periodic backups and backup schedules, as well as recovery from previous backups; backups are incremental, storing only subsequent changes, which minimizes disk space usage. Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Enterprise, and Windows Vista Ultimate additionally include Windows Complete PC Backup that allows system images to be created, and this feature can be started from Windows Vista installation media so that images can be restored to a new hard disk or new hardware or if a PC has experienced hardware failures and it cannot boot.
• Windows Calendar is a basic calendar application) that integrates with Windows Contacts and Windows Mail; users can create appointments and tasks, publish calendars to the Internet or to a network share, receive reminders, send and receive calendar invitations, and share calendars with family members.
• Windows Mail is the successor to Outlook Express that includes significant feature additions (many of which were previously exclusive to Microsoft Outlook) and introduces fundamental revisions to the identification process, storage architecture, and security structure.
• Windows Photo Gallery replaces Windows Picture and Fax Viewer; it can acquire photographs from digital cameras; adjust photograph effects; burn photographs to optical media; create Direct3D-accelerated slideshows; and reduce red eye.
• Windows Media Center previously exclusive to Windows XP Media Center Edition is available in Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows Vista Ultimate; it has been updated with many new features such as support for CableCARD, DVD/MPEG-2, HD content, and two dual-tuner cards.
• Parental controls allow administrators to control and manage user activity (such as limiting the games that can be played or prohibiting specific contents of websites) of each standard user.
• Games including FreeCell, Hearts, Minesweeper, Solitaire, and Spider Solitaire have been rewritten in DirectX to take advantage of Windows Vista's new graphical capabilities. New games include Chess Titans (3D Chess), Mahjong Titans (3D Mahjong), and Purble Place (a collection consisting of a cake-creation game, a dress-up puzzle game, and a matching game oriented towards younger children). All in-box games in Windows Vista can be played with an Xbox 360 Controller.
• Games Explorer is the central location for installed games that displays details such as covers, developers, genres, installation dates, play times, publishers, ratings, and versions. Customizable tasks for games are available; metadata for installed games can be updated from the Internet. Game-related settings such as audio options, community support options, game controller options, firewall settings, and parental controls are displayed.
• Windows Mobility Center centralizes settings and statuses relevant to mobile computing such as battery life, connectivity status, display brightness, screen orientation, synchronization status, and volume level, and new options can be added by OEMs.
• Windows Fax and Scan allows machines to create, receive, scan, and send faxes, with the goal of making fax management identical to working with email; it is available in Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Enterprise, and Windows Vista Ultimate.
• Windows Meeting Space replaces NetMeeting and relies on People Near Me and WS-Discovery to identify participants on the local subnet or across the Internet; users can give control of their computers to other participants, project their desktops, send messages to participants, and share files.
• Windows HotStart enables compatible computers to start applications directly from startup or resume by the press of a button, which allows them to function as a consumer electronics device such as a DVD player.
• Shadow Copy (originally only available in Windows Server 2003) creates copies of files and folders on a scheduled basis, allowing users to recover multiple versions of deleted or overwritten files or folders. Incremental changes are saved by shadow copies, which helps to limit the disk space in use.
• Windows Update is now a native client application; in previous versions of Windows, it was a web application that had to be accessed from a web browser. Automatic Updates can now automatically download and install Recommended updates (in addition to High Priority updates that could be automatically downloaded and installed in previous versions of Windows). The prompt that appears when an update is installed that requires a machine to be restarted has been revised, with new options to postpone an operating system restart indefinitely, by 10 minutes, by 1 hour, or by 4 hours (in Windows XP, users could only repeatedly dismiss the prompt to restart, or allow the machine to be restarted within 15 minutes of its appearance). Windows Defender definitions and Windows Mail spam filter are delivered through Windows Update.
• Windows SideShow delivers data such as messages and feeds from a personal computer to additional devices and displays, which makes data available in mobile scenarios; compatible devices could additionally transmit commands to applications, devices, or systems connected to a computer (e.g., a smart phone can control a presentation).
• Magnifier in Windows Vista can magnify the vector-based content of Windows Presentation Foundation applications without blurring the magnified content—it performs resolution-independent zooming—when the Desktop Window Manager is enabled; the release of .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 in 2008 removes this capability when installed in Windows Vista. Magnifier can now be docked to the bottom, left, right, or top of the screen. Microsoft also introduced the Magnification API so that developers can build solutions that magnify portions of the screen or that apply color effects.
• Windows Speech Recognition is new speech recognition functionality that enables voice commands for controlling the desktop; dictating documents; navigating websites; operating the mouse cursor; and performing keyboard shortcuts.
• Problem Reports and Solutions allows users to check for solutions to problems and receive solutions and additional information when it is available.
• Disk Management: the Logical Disk Manager in Windows Vista supports shrinking and expanding volumes.
• Reliability and Performance Monitor includes various tools for tuning and monitoring system performance and resources activities of CPU, disks, network, memory and other resources. It shows the operations on files, the opened connections, etc.
• Windows System Assessment Tool performs a series of assessments of a system's CPU, GPU, RAM, and HDD performance and assigns to the system a rating from 1.0 to 5.9; a system is rated during the out-of-box experience to determine if Windows Aero should be enabled.
• Windows Anytime Upgrade enabled users running a lower tier edition of Windows Vista to easily upgrade to a subsequent edition (e.g., to upgrade from Windows Vista Home Basic to Windows Vista Ultimate) by purchasing a license from an online merchant.
• Digital Locker Assistant simplified access to Windows Marketplace purchases for users to download applications and retrieve licenses; purchases were managed with Microsoft account credentials.
• Windows Ultimate Extras in Windows Vista Ultimate provided additional features such as BitLocker and EFS improvements that allowed users to back up their encryption keys; Multilingual User Interface packages; and Windows Dreamscene, which allowed using MPEG and WMV videos as the desktop background.

Core

Main article: Technical features new to Windows Vista

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 a hybrid drive can be spun down when not in use. Another new technology called SuperFetch utilizes machine learning techniques to analyze usage patterns to allow Windows Vista to make intelligent decisions about what content should be present in system memory at any given time. It uses almost all the extra RAM as disk cache. In conjunction with SuperFetch, an automatic built-in Windows Disk Defragmenter makes sure that those applications are strategically positioned on the hard disk where they can be loaded into memory very quickly with the least physical movement of the hard disk's read-write heads.

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

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

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

Security-related

Main article: Security and safety features new to Windows Vista

Improved security was a primary design goal for Vista. Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing initiative, which aims to improve public trust in its products, has had a direct effect on its development. This effort has resulted in a number of new security and safety features 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 the system. This was often difficult in previous versions of Windows, as the previous "limited" user accounts proved too restrictive and incompatible with a large proportion of application software, and even prevented some basic operations such as looking at the calendar from the notification tray. In Windows Vista, when an action is performed that requires administrative rights (such as installing/uninstalling software or making system-wide configuration changes), the user is first prompted for an administrator name and password; in cases where the user is already an administrator, the user is still prompted to confirm the pending privileged action. Regular use of the computer such as running programs, printing, or surfing the Internet does not trigger UAC prompts. User Account Control asks for credentials in a Secure Desktop mode, in which the entire screen is dimmed, and only the authorization window is active and highlighted. The intent is to stop a malicious program from misleading the user by interfering with the authorization window, and to hint to the user about the importance of the prompt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

System management

Main article: Management features new to Windows Vista

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:

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

Developer

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

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

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

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

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

Installation

Windows Vista is the first Microsoft operating system:

• To use DVD-ROM media for installation
• To provide during setup a selection of multiple editions of Windows available for installation (a license determines which version of Windows Vista is eligible for installation)
• That can be installed only on a partition formatted with the NTFS file system
• That supports installation from either OEM or retail media and during setup the input of a single license regardless of the installation source (previous releases of Windows maintained OEM and retail versions separately — users installing Windows from a manufacturer-supplied source could not input a retail license during setup, and users installing Windows from a retail source could not input a manufacturer-supplied license)
• That supports loading drivers for SCSI, SATA and RAID controllers from any source (such as optical disc drives and USB flash drives) in addition to floppy disks prior to its installation
• That can be installed on and booted from systems with GPT disks and UEFI firmware

Removed features

Main article: List of features removed in Windows Vista

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 the Luna visual style are no longer available.

Support lifecycle

Support for Windows Vista without a service pack ended on April 13, 2010. Mainstream support for Windows Vista officially ended on April 10, 2012; the extended support period lasted another 5 years, until April 11, 2017.

Editions

Main article: Windows Vista editions

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 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 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-trust laws; similar sanctions exist in South Korea.

Visual styles

A comparison of the four distinct visual styles included in Windows Vista

Windows Vista includes four distinct visual styles:

Windows Aero

Windows Aero requires the Desktop Window Manager and is available in Home Premium and subsequent editions. Windows Aero introduces support for advanced visual effects such as blurred glass translucencies and dynamic glass reflections, Flip and Flip 3D, smooth window animations, and thumbnails on the taskbar. Windows Aero is intended for mid-range to high-end video cards; to enable its features the contents of every open window are stored in video in video memory to facilitate preemptive graphic operations such as tearing-free movement of windows. As a result, Windows Aero has significantly higher hardware requirements than its predecessors; video cards must support 128 MB of memory, 32 bits per pixel, DirectX 9, Pixel Shader 2.0, and the new Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM).

Windows Vista Standard

A variant of Windows Aero, but it lacks advanced graphical effects including blurred glass translucencies, dynamic glass reflections, and smooth window animations; it is only included in Windows Vista Home Basic.

Windows Vista Basic

A visual style that does not rely on the Desktop Window Manager; as such, it does not feature blurred glass translucencies, dynamic glass reflections, smooth window animations, or taskbar thumbnails. Windows Vista Basic has video card requirements similar to Windows XP, and it is the default visual style of Windows Vista Starter and on systems without support for Windows Aero. Before Windows Vista SP1, machines that failed Windows Genuine Advantage product license validation would also revert to this visual style.

Windows Standard

Windows Standard and Windows Classic visual styles reprise the user interface of Windows 9x, Windows 2000, and Windows Server. As with previous versions of Windows, this visual style supports custom color schemes, which are collections of color settings. Windows Vista includes four high-contrast color schemes and the default color schemes from Windows 98 (titled "Windows Classic") and Windows 2000/Windows Me (titled "Windows Standard").

Hardware requirements

Computers with a "Certified for Windows Vista" sticker met WHQL Testing requirements and supported new features such as Windows Aero.

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

Windows Vista's Basic and Classic interfaces work with virtually any graphics hardware that supports Windows XP or 2000; accordingly, most discussion around Vista's graphics requirements centers on those for the Windows Aero interface. As of Windows Vista Beta 2, the NVIDIA GeForce 6 series and later, the ATI Radeon 9500 and later, Intel's GMA 950 and later integrated graphics, and a handful of VIA chipsets and S3 Graphics discrete chips are supported. Although originally supported, the GeForce FX 5 series has been dropped from newer drivers from NVIDIA. The last driver from NVIDIA to support the GeForce FX series on Vista was 96.85. Microsoft 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 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.

Windows Vista system requirements

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

Physical memory limits

The maximum amount of RAM that Windows Vista supports varies by edition and processor architecture, as shown in the table.

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

Processor limits

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

Updates

Microsoft releases updates such as service packs for its Windows operating systems to add features, address issues, and improve performance and stability.

Service Pack 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Service Pack 2

Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 was released through different channels between April 28 and June 9, 2009, one year after the release of Windows Vista SP1, and four months before the release of Windows 7. In addition to a number of security and other fixes, a number of new features have been added. However, it did not include Internet Explorer 8, but instead was included in Windows 7.

• Windows Search 4 (available for SP1 systems as a standalone update)
• Feature Pack for Wireless adds support for Bluetooth 2.1
• Windows Feature Pack for Storage enables the data recording onto Blu-ray media
• Windows Connect Now (WCN) to simplify Wi-Fi configuration
• Improved support for resuming with active Wi-Fi connections
• Improved support for eSATA drives
• The limit of 10 half-open, outgoing TCP connections introduced in Windows XP SP2 was removed
• Позволяет файловой системе exFAT поддерживать временные метки UTC , что обеспечивает правильную синхронизацию файлов между часовыми поясами.
• Поддержка смарт-карт ICCD/CCID.
• Поддержка 64-битных процессоров VIA.
• Улучшена производительность и скорость реагирования благодаря боковой панели RSS-каналов.
• Улучшает качество звука и видео для потоковой передачи контента высокой четкости.
• Улучшает защиту контента для ТВ в Windows Media Center (WMC).
• Обеспечивает улучшенную политику управления питанием, которая примерно на 10 % более эффективна, чем исходная политика с политиками по умолчанию.

Windows Vista и Windows Server 2008 используют один двоичный файл пакета обновления, что отражает тот факт, что их кодовые базы были объединены с выпуском Server 2008. Пакет обновления 2 не является накопительным обновлением, поэтому сначала необходимо установить пакет обновления 1.

Обновление платформы

Обновление платформы для Windows Vista и Windows Server 2008 (KB971644) было анонсировано 10 сентября 2009 г. и выпущен 27 октября 2009 г.; Обновление платформы для Windows Vista и Windows Server 2008 позволяет разработчикам ориентироваться как на Windows Vista, так и на Windows 7, обеспечивая резервное копирование нескольких важных компонентов, состоящих из:

• Windows Automation API 3.0 ( обновления MSAA и автоматизации пользовательского интерфейса )
• Среда выполнения графики Windows ( Direct2D , Direct3D 10 уровня 9, Direct3D 11 , DirectX 11 , DXGI 1.1, DirectWrite и WARP )
• XPS API документов , служба растеризации XPS и API печати XPS
• Библиотека ленты Windows и диспетчера анимации (Windows Animation Manager API и Windows Ribbon API)
• Платформа портативных устройств Windows ( протокол передачи мультимедиа через Bluetooth и WPD через службы устройств MTP)

С выпуском обновления платформы 27 октября 2009 г. платформа управления Windows ( фоновая интеллектуальная служба передачи 4.0, Windows PowerShell 2.0 и Windows Remote Management 2.0) для Windows 7 также стала доступна пользователям Windows XP и Windows Vista. подключение к удаленному рабочему столу 7.0. Также стало доступно

В июле 2011 года Microsoft выпустила дополнение к обновлению платформы (KB2117917) для устранения проблем и повышения производительности на компьютерах с Windows Vista и Windows Server 2008 с установленным обновлением платформы.

Внеполосные патчи

Патч BlueKeep

Microsoft выпустила обновление для Windows Vista SP2, устраняющее уязвимость безопасности BlueKeep ( CVE — 2019-0708 ), который влияет на протокол удаленного рабочего стола нескольких версий Windows. Последующие связанные с этим недостатки, CVE - 2019-1181 , CVE- 2019-1182 , CVE- 2019-1222 и CVE- 2019-1226 (совместно известные как DejaBlue ) не влияют на Windows Vista или более ранние версии Windows. Установка этого патча в Windows Vista меняет номер сборки Windows Vista с 6002 на 6003.

Исправление шифрования CredSSP Oracle

была обнаружена уязвимость удаленного выполнения кода. В протоколе Credential Security Support Provider (CredSSP) ( CVE ) 2018-0886 ), что может позволить злоумышленникам передавать учетные данные пользователя во время соединения для выполнения кода в целевой системе. Microsoft выпустила патч для решения этой проблемы.

Исправление Microsoft Malware Protection Engine

Уязвимость, связанная с Защитником Windows, влияющая на работу механизма защиты от вредоносных программ ( CVE — 2017-0290 ) сообщалось в мае 2017 года. Если Защитник Windows просканирует специально созданный файл, это приведет к повреждению памяти, потенциально позволяя злоумышленнику контролировать пораженный компьютер или выполнять произвольный код в контексте LocalSystem ; уязвимость усугублялась стандартными настройками защиты в реальном времени Защитника Windows, которые были настроены на автоматический запуск сканирования на наличие вредоносных программ через регулярные промежутки времени. Первой версией модуля защиты, затронутой уязвимостью, является версия 1.1.13701.0; последующие версии механизма не затрагиваются. Microsoft выпустила патч для решения этой проблемы.

Исправление платформы текстовых служб

Платформа текстовых служб была скомпрометирована из- за уязвимости повышения привилегий ( CVE - 2019-1162 ), которые могут позволить злоумышленникам использовать платформу для выполнения привилегированных операций, запуска программного обеспечения или отправки сообщений привилегированным процессам из непривилегированных процессов — в обход функций безопасности, таких как песочницы или контроль учетных записей пользователей. Microsoft устранила проблемы, связанные с этой уязвимостью, выпустив в августе 2019 года исправление для Windows Vista SP2, Windows Server 2008 SP2 и более поздних версий Windows.

Маркетинговые кампании

Эксперимент Мохаве

Основная статья: Эксперимент Мохаве

В июле 2008 года Microsoft представила рекламную кампанию под названием « Эксперимент Мохаве» , в которой группу людей просили оценить то, что якобы является новой операционной системой под кодовым названием «Мохаве». Участников попросили высказать свои впечатления от Windows Vista, использовали ли они ее, а также оценить ее по шкале от одного до десяти. Затем участникам продемонстрировали возможности Windows Vista, а затем попросили оценить «Мохаве»; ни один из участников не поставил «Мохаве» оценку ниже первоначальной оценки для Windows Vista. Кампания подразумевала, что негативное восприятие Windows Vista частично основано на предвзятых идеях. Кампанию критиковали за то, что она сосредоточилась на положительных заявлениях участников и не рассмотрела всю критику в адрес Windows Vista.

Прием

Windows Vista получила неоднозначные отзывы на момент выпуска и на протяжении всего срока службы, в основном из-за гораздо более высоких требований к оборудованию и кажущейся медлительности по сравнению с Windows XP.

Он получил в целом положительные отзывы от геймеров на ПК, которые высоко оценили преимущества DirectX 10, которые позволили повысить производительность в играх и сделать более реалистичную графику, а также поддержку многих новых возможностей, представленных в новых графических процессорах . Однако многие игры DirectX 9 изначально работали с более низкой частотой кадров по сравнению с тем, когда они запускались в Windows XP. В середине 2008 года тесты показали, что обновление SP1 улучшило производительность до уровня Windows XP (или даже лучше) с точки зрения производительности игр.

Питер Брайт из Ars Technica написал, что, несмотря на задержки и сокращения функций, Windows Vista стала «огромной эволюцией в истории платформы NT [...] Фундаментальные изменения в платформе имеют масштаб, невиданный со времени выпуска NT [3.1; первая версия]». В продолжение своей предыдущей оценки Брайт заявил, что «Vista — это не просто XP с новой оболочкой; основные части ОС были радикально переработаны, и практически каждая область претерпела значительные улучшения. изменений, Vista представляет собой, вероятно, самый большой скачок, который когда-либо видела платформа NT. Никогда прежде важные подсистемы не были удалены и заменены так, как это происходит в Vista». Многие представители технологической индустрии в то время поддержали эти настроения, похвалив огромное количество новых технических возможностей Windows Vista .

Windows Vista получила награду «Best of CES» на выставке Consumer Electronics Show в 2007 году.

В первый год существования PC World назвал его самым большим технологическим разочарованием 2007 года. оценил его и InfoWorld как второе место из 25 провалов Tech за всю историю. Тогдашний гораздо меньший конкурент Microsoft, Apple, отметила, что, несмотря на гораздо большие продажи Vista, ее собственная операционная система, похоже, не пострадала после ее выпуска, и позже будет инвестировать в рекламу, высмеивающую непопулярность Vista среди пользователей.

Производители компьютеров, такие как Dell , Lenovo и Hewlett-Packard, выпустили свои новейшие компьютеры с предустановленной Windows Vista; однако после негативной реакции на операционную систему они также начали продавать свои компьютеры с компакт-дисками с Windows XP из-за падения продаж.

Продажи

В исследовательском отчете Gartner прогнозируется, что внедрение Vista в бизнесе в 2008 году обгонит распространение XP за тот же период времени (21,3% против 16,9%). в то время как IDC указала, что запуск Windows Server 2008 послужил катализатором более высоких темпов внедрения. , по состоянию на январь 2009 года По данным Forrester Research почти треть корпораций Северной Америки и Европы начали внедрение Vista. На конференции в мае 2009 года вице-президент Microsoft сказал: «Внедрение и развертывание Windows Vista немного опережает то, что было с XP» для крупного бизнеса.

За первый месяц было продано 20 миллионов копий Vista, что вдвое превышает объем продаж Windows XP за первый месяц в октябре 2001 года, то есть пятью годами ранее. Однако вскоре после этого из-за относительно низких темпов внедрения Vista и продолжающегося спроса на Windows XP Microsoft решила продавать Windows XP до 30 июня 2008 года вместо ранее запланированной даты 31 января 2008 года. Поступали сообщения о том, что пользователи Vista «понизили» свои операционные системы обратно до XP, а также о компаниях, планирующих отказаться от Vista. Исследование, проведенное ChangeWave в марте 2008 года, показало, что процент корпоративных пользователей, которые были «очень довольны» Vista, был значительно ниже, чем в других операционных системах: Vista составляла 8% по сравнению с 40%, которые заявили, что они «очень довольны». с Windows XP.

использования Интернета Доля рынка для Windows Vista после двух лет доступности, в январе 2009 года, составила 20,61%. Эта цифра в сочетании с мировыми пользователями Интернета и статистикой населения дала базу пользователей примерно в 330 миллионов человек. что превысило двухлетние ожидания Microsoft после запуска на 130 миллионов. По данным тех же статистических источников, база интернет-пользователей, достигнутая до выпуска ее преемника (Windows 7), составляла примерно 400 миллионов человек.

Критика

Основная статья: Критика Windows Vista

Windows Vista получила неоднозначные отзывы. Объекты критики включают длительное время разработки (5–6 лет), более строгие условия лицензирования, включение нескольких технологий, направленных на ограничение копирования защищенных цифровых носителей, и удобство использования новой технологии безопасности контроля учетных записей пользователей . Более того, были высказаны некоторые опасения по поводу того, что многие ПК соответствуют аппаратным требованиям Vista Premium Ready и ценам Vista.

Требования к оборудованию

Хотя в 2005 году Microsoft заявила, что «почти все компьютеры, представленные сегодня на рынке, будут работать под управлением Windows Vista», более высокие требования к некоторым «премиум-функциям», таким как интерфейс Aero, затронули многих апгрейдов. По данным британской газеты The Times в мае 2006 года, полный набор функций «будет доступен менее чем 5 процентам британского рынка ПК»; однако этот прогноз был сделан за несколько месяцев до выпуска Vista. Это продолжающееся отсутствие ясности в конечном итоге привело к групповому иску против Microsoft, поскольку люди оказались с новыми компьютерами, которые не могли использовать новое программное обеспечение в полной мере, несмотря на заверения в маркировке «Vista Capable». Судебное дело обнародовало внутренние сообщения Microsoft, которые указывают на то, что у высшего руководства также возникли трудности с этим вопросом. Например, Майк Нэш (корпоративный вице-президент по управлению продуктами Windows) прокомментировал: «Теперь у меня есть машина электронной почты стоимостью 2100 долларов», потому что отсутствие подходящего графического чипа в его ноутбуке сильно затрудняло работу Vista.

Лицензирование

Критику лицензий на обновление с Windows Vista Starter до Home Premium высказал Кен Фишер из Ars Technica , который отметил, что новое требование наличия уже установленной предыдущей операционной системы будет раздражать пользователей, которые регулярно переустанавливают Windows. Выяснилось, что обновленную копию Windows Vista можно установить без предварительной установки предыдущей версии Windows. При первой установке Windows откажется активироваться. Затем пользователь должен переустановить ту же копию Vista. Затем Vista активируется при переустановке, что позволяет пользователю установить обновление Windows Vista, не владея предыдущей операционной системой. Как и в случае с Windows XP, к OEM-версиям Vista, установленным на новых ПК, по-прежнему применяются отдельные правила: Microsoft утверждает, что эти версии не подлежат передаче по закону (хотя вопрос о том, противоречит ли это праву первой продажи , еще не решен юридически).

Расходы

Первоначально стоимость Windows Vista также вызывала беспокойство и комментарии. Большинство пользователей в опросе заявили, что цены на различные выпуски Windows Vista, опубликованные на веб-сайте Microsoft Canada в августе 2006 года, делают этот продукт слишком дорогим. В репортаже BBC News в день выпуска Vista говорилось, что «потребители могут вызвать негативную реакцию по поводу ее ценовых планов - стоимость версий Vista в США примерно вдвое ниже цены эквивалентных версий в Великобритании». С момента выпуска Vista в 2006 году Microsoft сократила розничную продажу и повысила цену Vista. Первоначально Vista Ultimate стоила 399 долларов, а Home Premium Vista — 239 долларов. С тех пор эти цены были снижены до 319 и 199 долларов соответственно.

Управление цифровыми правами

Windows Vista поддерживает дополнительные формы ограничений DRM . Одним из аспектов этого является защищенный путь видео , который разработан таким образом, что «премиум-контент» с HD DVD или дисков Blu-ray может требовать шифрования соединений между компонентами ПК. В зависимости от того, чего требует контент, устройства могут не передавать премиум-контент через незашифрованные выходы, либо они должны искусственно ухудшать качество сигнала на таких выходах, либо вообще не отображать его. Драйверы для такого оборудования должны быть одобрены Microsoft; также включен механизм отзыва, который позволяет Microsoft отключать драйверы устройств на ПК конечных пользователей через Интернет. Питер Гутманн , исследователь безопасности и автор библиотеки cryptlib с открытым исходным кодом , утверждает, что эти механизмы нарушают фундаментальные права пользователя (например, добросовестное использование ), неоправданно увеличивают стоимость оборудования и делают системы менее надежными («бит наклона» является особое беспокойство; при срабатывании вся графическая подсистема выполняет сброс) и уязвима для атак типа «отказ в обслуживании» . Однако, несмотря на многочисленные просьбы Что касается доказательств, подтверждающих такие утверждения, Питер Гутманн никогда не подкреплял свои утверждения какими-либо исследованными доказательствами. Сторонники утверждают, что у Microsoft не было другого выбора, кроме как следовать требованиям киностудий, и что технология фактически не будет реализована до 2010 года; Microsoft также отметила, что механизмы защиты контента существовали в Windows еще в Windows ME , и что новые меры защиты не будут применяться к какому-либо существующему контенту, а только к будущему контенту.

Контроль учетных записей пользователей

Хотя контроль учетных записей пользователей (UAC) является важной частью инфраструктуры безопасности Vista, поскольку он не позволяет программному обеспечению незаметно получать права администратора без ведома пользователя, его широко критикуют за создание слишком большого количества запросов. Это привело к тому, что многие пользователи Vista UAC сочли это проблематичным, и некоторые из них либо отключили эту функцию, либо (для пользователей Windows Vista Enterprise или Windows Vista Ultimate) перевели ее в режим автоматического одобрения. В ответ на эту критику Microsoft изменила реализацию, чтобы уменьшить количество запросов в SP1. Хотя изменения привели к некоторому улучшению, они не устранили беспокойства полностью.

Права на понижение версии

Конечные пользователи лицензий Windows 7, приобретенных посредством OEM или корпоративного лицензирования, могут перейти на эквивалентную версию Windows Vista. Права на понижение версии не предоставляются для выпусков Windows 7 Starter, Home Basic или Home Premium. Для лицензий Windows 8 , приобретенных у OEM-производителя, пользователь также может перейти на эквивалентную версию Windows Vista. Клиенты, имеющие лицензию на использование Windows 8 Enterprise, обычно получают лицензию на Windows 8 Pro, которую можно понизить до Windows Vista Business.

См. также

• BlueKeep (уязвимость безопасности)
• Сравнение Windows Vista и Windows XP
• Основы безопасности Майкрософт

Внешние ссылки

• Прекращение поддержки Windows Vista
• Обновление пакета обновления 2 (SP2) для Windows Vista