Windows Vista

Vista Fundamentals

Some of an operating system's crucial responsibilities include managing hardware and drive storage and providing a set of APIs (application programming interfaces) that other software can rely on. And, indeed, some of Vista's most important enhancements lie beneath the surface. Many of these improvements are security related. We've written extensively about them, and you can get the latest in "Microsoft Locks Down Security...and Roils Security Vendors".

Networking is another revamped area. Vista's new TCP/IP stack includes native IPv6 support and auto-tuning via TCP window scaling. And it has better built-in Wi-Fi support.

Vista also has a number of performance enhancers. SuperFetch tracks frequently used programs and preloads them. ReadyBoost lets you use flash memory on a high-speed USB drive as a supplemental swap file (this can be substantially faster than a spinning hard drive). ReadyDrive supports hybrid hard drives with built-in flash-memory caches. There's also a low-priority I/O mechanism that lets programs such as Windows Defender run scans in the background with less disruption to foreground activity; and Vista automatically schedules drive defragmentation.

On the whole, my experience has been positive—on a screamer system. Others have had worse luck, particularly those who skimped on RAM. The SYSmark and MobileMark benchmark tests are currently being modified for testing Vista's performance; once they're up and running, we'll post performance results at go.pcmag.com/vistaspeed.

Vista's new sleep mode is supposed to make suspending and resuming faster and more reliable. With the machines I've been testing it on, I don't sense huge benefits from the new sleep mode. Whether that's due to Vista or to third-party hardware or drivers is hard to determine.

Microsoft also made a lot of more fundamental changes in the OS kernel, which provides low-level functions such as memory management, multi-processor synchronization, and I/O scheduling. Most are intended to help improve performance, security, and reliability.
Vista also extends the Windows API by incorporating the .NET 3.0 framework, giving developers capabilities that include Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly code-named Avalon), Windows Communication Framework (formerly Indigo), and Windows CardSpace (formerly InfoCard). But there's no WinFS (Windows Future Storage), the database-backed file system that was to be one of Vista's core innovations. As a result, Vista's support for tagging and relating files is less extensive than Microsoft promised back when the OS was still known by its code name, Longhorn.

Other additions are APIs to support RSS natively and a central RSS store. For example, if you subscribe to an RSS feed in Internet Explorer 7, the RSS reader Sidebar gadget automatically detects it