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|
|
|
Screenshot of Windows Vista Ultimate
|
Developer
|
Microsoft
|
Website
|
Official website
|
Releases
|
Release date
|
RTM: November 8, 2006;
Vol. Lic.: November 30, 2006;
Retail: January 30, 2007 (info)
|
Current version
|
6.0 Service Pack 2 (SP2) (Build 6002)
(6002.18005.090410-1830)
(2009-4-28; 6 months ago) (info)
|
Source model
|
Closed source / Shared source
|
License
|
MS-EULA
|
Kernel type
|
Hybrid
|
Update method
|
Windows Update, Windows Server Update Services, SCCM
|
Platform support
|
IA-32, x86-64
|
Support status
|
Mainstream support
|
Further reading
|
|
WINDOWS VISTA
Windows Vista is a line of operating systems developed by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops, tablet PCs, and media center PCs. Prior to its announcement on July 22, 2005, Windows Vista was known by its codename "Longhorn." Development was completed on November 8, 2006; over the following three
months it was released in stages to computer hardware and software
manufacturers, business customers, and retail channels. On January 30,
2007, it was released worldwide, and was made available for purchase and download from Microsoft's website. The release of Windows Vista came more than five years after the introduction of its predecessor, Windows XP, the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft Windows desktop operating systems. It was succeeded by Windows 7 which was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and for the general public on October 22, 2009. Windows Vista contains many changes and new features, including an updated graphical user interface and visual style dubbed Windows Aero, a redesigned search function, multimedia tools including Windows DVD Maker,
and redesigned networking, audio, print, and display sub-systems. Vista
aims to increase the level of communication between machines on a home network, using peer-to-peer technology to simplify sharing files and digital media between computers and devices. Windows Vista includes version 3.0 of the .NET Framework, allowing software developers to write applications without traditional Windows APIs. Microsoft's primary stated objective with Windows Vista has been to
improve the state of security in the Windows operating system. One common criticism of Windows XP and its predecessors is their commonly exploited security vulnerabilities and overall susceptibility to malware, viruses and buffer overflows. In light of this, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates announced in early 2002 a company-wide "Trustworthy Computing
initiative" which aims to incorporate security work into every aspect
of software development at the company. Microsoft stated that it
prioritized improving the security of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 above finishing Windows Vista, thus delaying its completion.
While these new features and security improvements have garnered
positive reviews, Vista has also been the target of much criticism and
negative press. Criticism of Windows Vista has targeted its high system requirements, its more restrictive licensing terms, the inclusion of a number of new digital rights management
technologies aimed at restricting the copying of protected digital
media, lack of compatibility with some pre-Vista hardware and software,
and the number of authorization prompts for User Account Control. As a result of these and other issues, Windows Vista had seen initial adoption and satisfaction rates lower than Windows XP. However, with an estimated 330 million internet users as of January
2009, it has been announced that Vista usage had surpassed Microsoft’s
pre-launch two-year-out expectations of achieving 200 million users. At the release of Windows 7 (October 2009), Windows Vista (with
approximately 380 million internet users) is the second most widely
used operating system on the internet with an approx. 22% market share,
the most widely used being Windows XP with an approx. 68% market share.
Development 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 sometime late in 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. 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. The original Blackcomb, based on the Windows XP
source code, was scrapped, and Longhorn's development started anew,
building on the Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 codebase, and
re-incorporating only the features that would be intended for an actual
operating system release. Some previously announced features such as WinFS were dropped or postponed, and a new software development methodology called the Security Development Lifecycle was incorporated in an effort to address concerns with the security of the Windows codebase.
After Blackcomb 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. 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 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 by over five million people. Two
release candidates followed in September and October, both of which
were made available to a large number of users.
While Microsoft had originally hoped to have the consumer versions
of the operating system available worldwide in time for Christmas 2006,
it was 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 which Microsoft depends on for providing device drivers–additional
time to prepare. Development of Windows Vista came to an end when
Microsoft announced that it had been finalized on November 8, 2006.
Windows Vista cost Microsoft 6 billion dollars to develop.
Core Windows Vista is intended to be a technology-based release, to
provide a base to include advanced technologies, many of which are
related to how the system functions and thus not readily visible to the
user. An example is the complete restructuring of the architecture of
the audio, print, display, and networking subsystems; although the
results of this work are visible to software developers, end-users will
only see what appear to be evolutionary changes in the user interface.
Vista includes technologies such as ReadyBoost and ReadyDrive which employ fast flash memory (located on USB 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 amount of 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 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.
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, with a view to
stopping 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 misleading the user by interfering with the authorization
window, and to hint to the user the importance of the prompt.
Testing by Symantec Corporation has proved 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 which 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, providing protection 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 unencrypted
and to contain system files in order 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 a 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) have no ability to 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 haven’t 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 which 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.
Business While much of the focus of Vista's new capabilities has been on the
new user interface, security technologies, and improvements to the core
operating system, Microsoft is also adding new deployment and
maintenance features.
- The Windows Imaging Format (WIM) is 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 has been renamed "Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications," and is included with the Enterprise and Ultimate editions of Vista. Network File System (NFS) client support is also included.
- Multilingual User Interface–Unlike
previous version of Windows which required language packs to be loaded
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 and OS/2 environment just like its NT predessors. 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 together application UI, documents, and media content. It is
the successor to Windows Forms.
- Windows Communication Foundation is a service-oriented messaging subsystem which 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 which 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-architected 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 which are 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 which
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.
Removed features Some notable Windows XP features and components have been replaced or removed in Windows Vista, including Windows Messenger, NTBackup, the network Messenger Service, HyperTerminal, MSN Explorer, Active Desktop, and the replacement of NetMeeting with Windows Meeting Space. Windows Vista also does not include the Windows XP "Luna"
visual theme, or most of the classic color schemes which have been part
of Windows since the Windows 3.x era. The "Hardware profiles" startup
feature has also been removed, along with support for older motherboard
technologies like the EISA bus, APM and Game port support (though on the 32-bit version game port support can be enabled by applying an older driver). IP over FireWire (TCP/IP over IEEE 1394) has been removed as well. The IPX/SPX Protocol has also been removed, although it can be enabled by a third-party plugin.
Hardware requirements 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 offers 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. 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 are able to
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
|
Vista Capable
|
Vista Premium Ready
|
Processor
|
800 MHz
|
1 GHz
|
Memory
|
512 MB
|
1 GB
|
Graphics card
|
DirectX 9.0 capable
|
DirectX 9.0 capable and WDDM 1.0 driver support
|
Graphics memory
|
32 MB
|
128 MB
|
HDD capacity
|
20 GB
|
40 GB
|
HDD free space
|
15 GB
|
Other drives
|
DVD-ROM
|
Platform Update
The
Platform Update for Windows Vista was released on October 27, 2009. It includes major new components that shipped with Windows 7, as well as updated runtime libraries. It requires Service Pack 2 of Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 and is on Windows Update as a
Recommended download.
The Platform Update allows application developers to target both
Windows Vista and Windows 7. It will consist of the following
components:
- Windows Graphics runtime: Direct2D, DirectWrite, Direct3D 11, DXGI 1.1, and WARP;
- Updates to Windows Imaging Component;
- Updates to XPS Print API, XPS Document API and XPS Rasterization Service;
- Windows Automation API (updates to MSAA and UI Automation); (will also be available on Windows XP)
- Windows Portable Devices Platform; (adds support for MTP over Bluetooth and MTP Device Services)
- Windows Ribbon API;
- Animation Manager Library.
Some updates will also be available as separate releases for both Windows XP and Windows Vista:
- Windows Management Framework: Windows PowerShell 2.0, Windows Remote Management 2.0, BITS 4.0
- Remote Desktop Connection 7.0 (RDP7) client;
Although extensive, the Platform Update does not bring Windows Vista
to the level of features and performance offered by Windows 7. For
example, even though DXGI 1.1 update introduces support for hardware 2D
acceleration featured by WDDM 1.1 video drivers, only Direct2D and DirectWrite will employ it and GDI/GDI+
will continue to rely on software rendering. Also, even though Direct3D
11 runtime will be able to run on D3D9-class hardware and WDDM drivers
using "feature levels" first introduced in Direct3D 10.1, Desktop
Windows Manager has not been updated to use either Direct3D 10.1 or
WARP software rasterizer.
Reception Initially it was thought that the adoption of Vista has been
generally low, due to largely poor reviews and harsh criticism, but a
later Gartner
research report predicted that Vista business adoption in 2008 will
actually beat that of XP during the same time frame (21.3% vs. 16.9%) while IDC had indicated that the launch of Windows Server 2008 served as a catalyst for the stronger adoption rates. As of January 2009, Forrester Research had indicated that almost one
third of North American and European corporations have started
deploying Vista.On a May 2009 conference, the Microsoft Vice President said for big
businesses, "Adoption and deployment of Windows Vista has been slightly
ahead of where we had been with XP". In its first year of availability,
PC World rated it as the biggest tech disappointment of 2007, and it was rated by InfoWorld as #2 of Tech's all-time 25 flops. The internet-usage market share for Windows Vista after two years of availability (as of January 2009
[update]) was 20.61%. This figure combined with World Internet Users and Population Stats yielded a user base of roughly 330 million, which exceeded Microsoft's two-year post launch expectations by 130 million. The present user base is roughly 380 million by the same statistical sources.
Within its first month, 20 million copies of Vista were sold, double
the amount of Windows XP sales within its first month in October 2001,
five years earlier.
Shortly after however, due to Vista's relatively low adoption rates and
continued demand for Windows XP, Microsoft continued to sell Windows XP
until June 30, 2008, instead of the previously planned date of January
31, 2008.
There were reports of Vista users "downgrading" their operating
systems, as well as reports of businesses planning to skip Vista. A study conducted by ChangeWave in March 2008 showed that the
percentage of corporate users who are "very satisfied" with Vista was
dramatically lower than other operating systems, with Vista at 8%,
compared to the 40% who said they were "very satisfied" with Windows XP.
Amid the negative reviews and reception, there have also been
significant positive reviews of Vista, most notable among PC gamers and
the advantages brought about with DirectX 10, which allows for better
gaming performance and more realistic graphics, as well as support for
many new capabilities brought about in new video cards and GPUs.
However, many DirectX 9 games initially showed a drop in frame rate
compared to that experienced in Windows XP. As of mid-2008, benchmarks
suggest that Vista SP1 is on par with (or better than) Windows XP in
terms of game performance. At the release of Windows 7 (October 2009) a survey by Valve Corporation
indicated that 40.41% of gamers were running DirectX 10 systems. The
survey also indicated that DirectX 10 was supported on 83.21% of
DirectX10 capable OS’s (Windows Vista, Windows 7 beta and Windows 7
represented 48.56% of the survey) and that 42.27% of these OS’s were
64-bit.
Criticism Windows Vista has received a number of negative assessments.
Criticism targets include protracted development time, more restrictive
licensing terms, the inclusion of a number of technologies aimed at
restricting the copying of protected digital media, and the usability of the new User Account Control
security technology. Moreover, some concerns have been raised about
many PCs meeting "Vista Premium Ready" hardware requirements and
Vista's pricing.
Hardware requirements While Microsoft claimed "nearly all PCs on the market today [2005] will run Windows Vista",
the higher requirements of some of the "premium" features, such as the
Aero interface, have had an impact on many upgraders. According to the
UK newspaper
The Times
in May 2006, the full set of features "would be available to less than
5 percent of Britain’s PC market", however, this prediction was made
several months before Vista was released.
This continuing lack of clarity eventually led to a class action
against Microsoft as people found themselves with new computers that
were unable to use the new software to its full potential despite the
assurance of "Vista Capable" designations.
The court case has made public internal Microsoft communications that
indicate that senior executives have also had difficulty with this
issue. For example, his laptop's lack of an appropriate graphics chip
so hobbled Vista features that vice president Mike Nash (Corporate Vice
President, Windows Product Management) commented "I now have a $2,100
e-mail machine."
Licensing Criticism of upgrade licenses pertaining to Windows Vista Starter through Home Premium was expressed by Ars Technica's
Ken Fisher, who noted that the new requirement of having a prior
operating system already installed was going to cause irritation for
users who reinstall Windows on a regular basis. It has been revealed that an Upgrade copy of Windows Vista can be
installed clean without first installing a previous version of Windows.
On the first install, Windows will refuse to activate. The user must
then reinstall that same copy of Vista. Vista will then activate on the
reinstall, thus allowing a user to install an Upgrade of Windows Vista
without owning a previous operating system. As with Windows XP, separate rules still apply to OEM versions of Vista
installed on new PCs: Microsoft asserts that these versions are not
legally transferable (although whether this conflicts with the right of first sale has yet to be decided clearly legally).
Cost Initially the cost of Windows Vista was also a source of concern and
commentary. A majority of users in a poll said that the prices of
various Windows Vista editions posted on the Microsoft Canada website
in August 2006 make the product too expensive.
A BBC News report on the day of Vista's release suggested that, "there
may be a backlash from consumers over its pricing plans—with the cost
of Vista versions in the US roughly half the price of equivalent
versions in the UK." Since the release of Vista in 2006 Microsoft has reduced the retail,
and upgrade price point of Vista considerably. Originally Vista
Ultimate was priced at $399. and Home Premium Vista at $239. These
prices have since been reduced to $319 and $199 respectively.
Digital rights management Windows Vista supports additional forms of digital rights management restrictions. One aspect of this is the Protected Video Path, which is designed so that "premium content" from HD DVD or Blu-ray Discs
may mandate that the connections between PC components be encrypted.
Depending on what the content demands, the devices may not pass premium
content over non-encrypted outputs, or they must artificially degrade
the quality of the signal on such outputs or not display it at all.
Drivers for such hardware must be approved by Microsoft; a revocation
mechanism is also included which allows Microsoft to disable drivers of
devices in end-user PCs over the Internet. Peter Gutmann, security researcher and author of the open source cryptlib library, claims that these mechanisms violate fundamental rights of the user (such as fair use),
unnecessarily increase the cost of hardware, and make systems less
reliable (the "tilt bit" being a particular worry; if triggered, the
entire graphic subsystem performs a reset) and vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks. However despite several requests
for evidence supporting such claims Peter Gutman has never supported
his claims with any researched evidence. Proponents have claimed that
Microsoft had no choice but to follow the demands of the movie studios,
and that the technology will not actually be enabled until after 2010; Microsoft also noted that content protection mechanisms have existed in Windows as far back as Windows Me, and that the new protections will not apply to any existing content (only future content).
User Account Control Although UAC is considered an important part of Vista's security
infrastructure, as it blocks software from silently gaining
administrator privileges without the user's knowledge, it has been
widely criticized for generating too many prompts. This has led many
Vista UAC users to consider it annoying and tiresome, with some
consequently either turning it off or putting it in auto-approval mode. Responding to this criticism, Microsoft altered the implementation to reduce the number of prompts with SP1. Though the changes have resulted in some improvement, it has not alleviated the concerns completely.
The Mojave Experiment In July 2008, Microsoft introduced a web-based advertising campaign
called the "Mojave Experiment", that depicts a group of people who are
asked to evaluate the newest operating system from Microsoft, calling
it Windows 'Mojave'. Participants are first asked about Vista, if they
have used it, and their overall satisfaction with Vista on a scale of 1
to 10. They are then shown a demo of some of the new operating system's
features, and asked their opinion and satisfaction with it on the same
1 to 10 scale. After respondents rate "Mojave", they are then told that
they were really shown a demo of Windows Vista. The object was to test
"A theory: If people could see Windows Vista firsthand, they would like
it." According to Microsoft, the initial sample of respondents rated
Vista an average of 4.4 out of 10, and Mojave received an average of
8.5, with no respondents rating Mojave lower than they originally rated
Windows Vista before the demo.The experiment has been criticized for cherry-picking positive statements and not addressing all aspects of Vista.
