About 4 weeks ago I installed Windows Vista RC1 on my laptop. Recently, I upgraded the RC1 release to RC2 (not much is new). Also, Microsoft recently announced Vista's final release to consumers will be January 30, 2007. Volume License customers and manufacturer's will receive an RTM release sometime later this month.
Many of my skeptical friends and colleagues have said that Windows Vista is simply a series of "extensions" to Windows XP, and that you can run software on Windows XP that achieves the same value-added benefit as running Vista natively. I'm here to tell you that I believe this assumption is entirely wrong. Although Windows Vista contains a lot of value-added software that's already on the market, (that is -- software you can buy today for Windows XP that's now integrated into the O/S) the new O/S offers more to it's users than just gold-plating.
Essentially, Windows Vista is far more than just Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Media Player 11. Here's a short list of what the naysayers missed.
- The new Windows System Assessment Tool tracks a number of performance indicators about the reliability, stability and capability of the computer running the O/S. Vista actually tunes itself to run appropriately on each machine.
- Under the hood, Windows Vista now natively supports both software and hardware-based Data Execution Prevention.
- The Desktop Window Manager (DWM) is the new windowing system that will be available in all versions of Windows Vista, except Starter Edition, to enable the new Windows Aero user interface. The Windows Aero interface finally brings a Microsoft O/S to a level where it can compete with Mac in terms of "coolness". I'm sure I've offended a large majority of Mac users by saying this.
- Windows Vista runs IIS 7, which has been refactored into a modular architecture, with integrated .NET extensibility. Instead of a monolithic server which features all services, IIS 7 will have a core web server engine, and modules offering specific functionality can be added to the engine to enable its features. Previous versions of IIS included with Windows XP had hard limits on concurrent connections and defined web servers; these limitations have been removed.
- Windows Resource Protection prevents "potentially damaging system configuration changes", by preventing change to system files and settings by any process other than Windows Installer. Also, changes to registry by unauthorized software are blocked. This is just one of many new additions to Windows Vista that Microsoft has pushed through it's Trustworthy Computing initiative.
- User Account Control (UAC) is a new infrastructure that requires user consent before allowing any action that requires administrative privileges. With this feature, all users, including users with administrative privileges, run in a standard user mode by default, since most applications do not require higher privileges. Windows Vista now prompts users to confirm various actions that may affect the stability of their system. This has been done to prevent all sorts of malware from corrupting PC's without the users knowledge.
- Windows Vista includes a range of parental controls. An administrator can apply parental control restrictions to other users on the computer.
- Microsoft is introducing a number of Digital Rights Management and content-protection features in Windows Vista, to help digital content providers, corporations, and end-users protect their data from being copied.
- Windows Vista is the first Windows operating system to include fully integrated support for speech recognition.
There are literally hundreds of new features that I haven't written about here, but I think most readers will get the point by now. It's been 5 years since the release of Windows XP, a great milestone for Microsoft in terms of stability in O/S releases. With only 2 service packs, Windows XP has been the most stable and reliable Windows operating system released to date. I believe that Microsoft has taken that time and energy to continue this trend with Windows Vista.