Best or latest features of windows vista

Microsoft hosted a Web gallery for users to download and install additional gadgets. A common issue in previous Windows versions was that competing applications doing common tasks each tried to associate themselves as the default for a certain file type using their own custom user interface.

The default application information for a particular file type was stored in the registry on a per-machine basis, resulting in applications changing another user's default program when one user's defaults were changed and each application querying several different registry values when launched. In Windows Vista onwards, file type associations and protocol handlers can be set on a per-user basis using the new Default Programs API, meaning default programs for file types and tasks can be different for each individual user.

There is an API for calling a common user interface so applications no longer need to maintain their own file association UI. Applications only need to registered at install time to be part of Default Programs. Flip 3D can also be scrolled with the scroll wheel of a mouse. Taskbar buttons in Windows Vista when Windows Aero is enabled also display a dynamic thumbnail of each window when the user hovers over them with the mouse cursor.

Automatic scheduling of file backups is not available in Vista Home Basic. Internet Explorer 7 adds support for tabbed browsing , Atom , RSS , internationalized domain names , a search box, a phishing filter, an anti-spoofing URL engine, fine-grained control over ActiveX add-ons, thumbnails of all open tabs in a single window called Quick Tabs , page zoom, and tab groups. Tab groups make it possible to open a folder of Favorites in tabs with a single click.

Importing bookmarks and cookies from other web browsers is also supported. On Windows Vista, Internet Explorer operates in a special "Protected Mode", which runs the browser in a security sandbox that has no access to the rest of the operating system or file system, except the Temporary Internet Files folder.

This feature aims to mitigate problems whereby newly discovered flaws in the browser or in ActiveX controls hosted inside it allowed hackers to subversively install software on the user's computer typically spyware. The new version has better support for IPv6 , and handles hexadecimal literals in the IPv6 address.

It also includes better support for Gzip and deflate compression, so that communication with a web server can be compressed and thus will require less data to be transferred. NET Framework extensibility; the new version includes a completely modular Web server engine with optional modules to offer specific features—instead of being a monolithic server that automatically includes all features.

The administration interface additionally is rewritten and uses the Microsoft Management Console for asynchronous operation and other features, with ASP. NET configuration being more prominent. All Web server configuration information is stored in XML files instead of in the metabase.

A global configuration file stores default settings of the server, with optional additions from Web document roots and subdirectories optionally augmenting or supplanting these.

There are additional new features dedicated to backward compatibility, deployment, performance, and security. Magnifier in Windows Vista can view vector drawings and text of Windows Presentation Foundation applications without blurring the magnified content—it performs resolution-independent zooming—when the Desktop Window Manager is enabled; [24] the release of.

NET Framework 3. There is a new interface feature for magifier docking options. Paint has been updated with a new set of colors in the color box, and an updated color box location—upward instead of download—to facilitate access to colors and options when editing photos. Users can now crop photos or undo a total of 10 consecutive actions instead of only 3 actions.

The magnifier feature has been enhanced to allow users to incrementally zoom in or zoom out of a photo instead of zooming based on a percentage value. Snipping Tool of Experience Pack for Windows XP Tablet PC Edition is included in Windows Vista as a screen-capture tool that allows taking screenshots snips of free-form areas, rectangular areas, and windows, which can be annotated, emailed, and saved.

Sound Recorder has been rewritten for Windows Vista and supports recording clips of any length and saving them as WMA , with options in the Common Item Dialog to modify and write metadata when saving recordings. Windows Calendar is an integrated calendar application in Windows Vista that supports creating, managing, publishing, sharing, and subscribing to calendars across the Internet or network shares; the popular iCalendar format is among the calendar formats supported.

Windows Fax and Scan , available in the Business, Ultimate and Enterprise Windows Vista editions is a faxing and scanning application that supports sending and receiving faxes, faxing or emailing scanned documents, and forwarding faxes as email attachments.

Users can preview documents before faxing them and directly fax or email documents after scanning. Windows Mail replaces Outlook Express , the email client of previous Windows versions. It incorporates a Phishing Filter like the one found in IE7 as well as Bayesian junk mail filtering which is updated monthly via Windows Update. Also, e-mail messages are now stored as individual files rather than in a binary database to reduce frequent corruption and make messages searchable in real-time.

Backing up and restoring account setup information, configuration and mail store is now made easier. It does however omit some features of Outlook Express, such as identities and a "Block sender" for Usenet access. Windows Mail is replaced with Windows Live Mail. Windows Media Center in Windows Vista, available in the Home Premium and Ultimate editions, has been upgraded significantly, including a considerable overhaul of the user interface.

Each button in the main menu, which contains sections such as "Music", "Videos", and "TV", gets encased in a box when selected, and for each selection, a submenu comes up, extending horizontally. When any of the options is selected, the entries for each are presented in a grid-like structure, with each item being identified by album art, if it is an audio file, or a thumbnail image if it is a picture, a video or a TV recording, and other related options, such as different views for the music collection if "Music" is selected, extend horizontally along the top of the grid.

Similarly, other items are identified by suggestive artwork. The grid displaying the items is also extended horizontally, and the selected item is enlarged compared to the rest. Other features of Windows Media Center include:. Windows Media Player 11 features a revised interface. Media Library is now presented without the category trees which were prominent in the earlier versions. Rather, on selecting the category in the left pane, the contents appear on the right, in a graphical manner with thumbnails—a departure from textual presentation of information.

Missing album art can be added directly to the placeholders in the Library itself though the program re-renders all album art imported this way into pixel ratio, x resolution JPEG images. Entries for Pictures and Video show their thumbnails. Search has been upgraded to be much faster. Windows Meeting Space is a peer-to-peer collaboration application, the replacement for NetMeeting.

Users can share applications or their desktops with other users on the local network, or over the Internet. Distribution and collaborative editing of documents, as well as passing notes to other participants is supported. New effects and transitions have been added. Windows Photo Gallery is a photo and video library management application consisting of a toolbar for photo commands, a navigation tree for dates, folders, ratings, and tags, and a control bar with options to change view modes, navigate between photos, rotate photos, start slide shows, and zoom photos; preview thumbnails appear when users hover over photos with the mouse cursor.

Users can adjust color, exposure, saturation, temperature, and tint, crop or resize, lessen red-eye, rotate, print, rate, or tag photos. RAW photos are supported and users can view any format for which there is an installed Windows Imaging Component codec. The photo import process now relies on the Media Transport Protocol, which introduces capabilities such as importing photos from mobile phones or wireless cameras. A Slide Show Screen Saver option can create screensavers based on photos with specific ratings or tags "all four-star photos" with an option to exclude specific tags "all four-star photos tagged beach, but not tagged private".

An Online Print Wizard enables users to order prints of photos over the Internet for delivery to an address by mail or for local pickup at a nearby store.

The Photo Print Wizard now supports borderless prints, international photo sizes, larger paper sizes, and includes more templates than Windows XP.

WordPad now supports the Text Services Framework , on which Windows Speech Recognition is implemented, which allows users to dictate text into the application.

Microsoft announced a Trustworthy Computing initiative in ; Windows Vista was built with the underlying ethos of "secure by default, secure in deployment, secure by design" to make it a more secure operating system than its predecessors. All existing code was refactored and reviewed in an effort to improve security. Windows Firewall is significantly improved, with the new ability to block and filter outbound connections, as well as to provide granular configuration policies.

Windows Vista introduces new features and technologies that aim to assist and facilitate system management. Some notable changes include a complete replacement for NTLDR ; a rewritten Task Scheduler ; enhanced Remote Desktop functionality including per-application sessions; and the Windows Imaging Format , a new image-based deployment format. There is also a range of new Group Policy settings for the new features.

The Desktop Window Manager is the new windowing system which handles the drawing of all content to the screen. Instead of windows drawing directly to the video card's memory buffers, contents are instead rendered to back-buffers technically Direct3D surfaces , which are then arranged in the appropriate Z-order, then displayed to the user. This drawing method uses significantly more video memory than the traditional window-drawing method used in previous versions of Windows, which only required enough memory to contain the composite of all currently visible windows at any given time.

With the entire contents of windows being stored in video memory, a user can move windows around the screen smoothly, without having "tearing" artifacts be visible while the operating system asks applications to redraw the newly visible parts of their windows. Windows Vista includes Direct3D 10, which adds scheduling and memory virtualization capabilities to the Windows graphics subsystem, as well as support for unified pixel shaders , gemortry shaders, and vertex shaders.

Significant is the elimination of "capability bits" of previous versions of Direct3D, which previously were used to indicate which features were active on the graphics hardware; instead, Direct3D 10 defines a minimum standard of hardware capabilities that must be supported for a system to be regarded as compatible with the new infrastructure.

Microsoft's goal with this design was to create an environment for developers, designers, and gamers that would assure them that their input would be rendered exactly the same across all compatible graphics cards. However, Direct3D 10 is not backward compatible with previous versions; the same game will not be compatible with both Direct3D 10 and Direct3D 9 or earlier, which means that developers who wish to use Direct3D 10 and provide support for older versions of Windows would need to create separate versions of the same game in order to target both Windows Vista and earlier versions.

Windows Vista does, however, contain a backward compatible implementation of Direct3D 9. Direct3D 10 functionality also requires the WDDM and new graphics hardware, which will allow the hardware to be pre-emptively multithreaded—to allow multiple threads to use the GPU in turns—and provide paging operations to graphics memory. Direct3D 9 in Windows Vista is called Direct3D 9Ex and also uses the WDDM, which allows Direct3D applications to access new features available in Windows Vista including advanced gamma functions, cross-process shared surfaces, device removal management, managed graphics memory, prioritization of resources, and text anti-aliasing.

Also, the DDI functions are directly available to callers and need not be mediated by the video renderer. DXVA 2. Even decoder pipelines or post-processing pipelines can be exposed as MFTs, which can be used by the Media Foundation topology loader to create a full media playback pipeline. High priority content is retained in memory by detection of troublesome memory usage patterns. Windows Vista is expected to have a ready boost, a flash device that extends disk caching capabilities.

This will enable use of USB 2. This innovation is expected to lend a performance level that is times higher than at present. A touch screen is expected to be a part of Vista. Disk partitions in Vista are designed to prevent data loss. The task manager as well as task scheduler in Vista is being revamped to provide better computing.

Extensive focus is on security which has been a problem with Microsoft operating systems. In Vista the aim is to provide security at all levels of operation and the system includes an advance security firewall, a defender, as well as a phishing filter among other security measures. The innovations are all set to give a new definition to windows security.

Vista's premier interface, Windows Aero will lend 3D graphics, great animation, visual effects, and translucence to videos, games, and other applications that have graphics. The Vista developer technologies are many and are expected to include.

Net framework version 3. Vista based on a new interface will support many features like WIM image format, group policy settings, and network file systems, that will ease the working of businesses While techies and others are waiting to see how Vista functions, in actuality there are several concerns surfacing regarding costs, user account control, hardware requirements, digital rights management, security, and the similarities to the Mac OS X.

Editorials » Technology » Microsoft ». Chris : As soon as I saw all the rectangles and squares I thought: "I am in deep trouble. You know it's not a good sign when a version of Windows lasts less than a year. Windows Millennium Edition is truly a perfect name for a poorly aged of-its-time piece of software. Seriously, ME is so , its installation CD was holographic. Information superhighway, here we come!!

It was, in the sense that it collected all the bugs and problems of those versions and combined them into one perfectly crappy operating system. In practice it looked about the same as Windows 98, and none of the new features it introduced did much to compensate for the infamous instability. ME crashed. It crashed a lot. It made Windows 95 look stable. At least, that was the experience for a lot of people—if you scored the driver and hardware lottery, it may have run just as well as Windows It ended a groundbreaking era of Windows with a whimper, but XP came in with a bang just barely a year later.

That's what I associate with Windows ME. A lot of anime VCDs were watched in that thing. It also had that amazing skin that was a green face with speakers for ears and a visualizer in the brain case.

Wes: Basically all I remember about ME is that a family friend had a computer running it, and it reliably crashed pretty much every time I used it.

This was the version of Windows for chumps, while those in the know landed on the rock solid Windows until XP came along and got its first few patches. These days I think people look back on Vista with some sympathy. As Linus Tech Tips argued , Vista didn't entirely deserve its bad rap. There were certainly some painful performance issues at the start; Vista was certainly more demanding than Windows XP, and some systems that were touted as being able to run Vista really couldn't… or they only could if you turned off all the graphical niceties, like the Aero transparency effects.

And Vista was such a major overhaul of the OS coming from XP, Vista needed entirely new drivers which were slow to arrive. That meant some hardware just didn't work on Vista and many games ran far worse than they did on XP. It was a terrible launch. Oh, and the wonderful User Account Control pop-ups! Yeah, everyone hated those, and no one understood why Vista was taking over your entire screen to warn you every time you tried to change a setting in the control panel or launch a program.

But underneath those very glaring flaws, Vista introduced a huge slew of new features and looked cutting edge compared to XP. It overhauled practically every Windows system from XP. It was a big step forward! In return for that step, you just had to put up with your games running worse, your printer not working, and pop-ups nagging you all the time.

The best thing that can be said for Vista is that most of its fundamental improvements returned practically unchanged in Windows 7 just a few years later… and everybody loved them. Jody: I bought a laptop that came with Vista pre-installed, and it really shouldn't have.

That damn OS made it run like arse. Took forever to boot, or do anything really, even with all the swishy nonsense turned off.

I'm still mad at Vista like 12 years later. Morgan: Like Jody, my first laptop ever came with Vista. I remember staring at the little clock widget on my desktop while I waited seconds for Minecraft to open. I do not recommend trying to game on a bottom-of-the-line Dell laptop running Vista.

Evan: It's inseparable from the darkness and suffering of Games for Windows Live, for me. GfWL came a year later, in I'd peg it as one of the lowest points in PC gaming's history—Microsoft at its least-competent as a steward for the platform, and at its most meddlesome.

Never again. Wes : I was somewhat obsessed with the glassy "Aero" aesthetic of Windows Vista and its glossy take on the taskbar and Start button. It looked so high tech at the time because, whoa, transparency! I definitely installed a Windows XP skin to mimic Vista's aesthetic, but I held out from actually using the OS for awhile, because it had some fairly heavy system requirements at the time.

One of my friends upgraded just to play Halo 2 for PC, which was exclusive to Vista. It wasn't worth it. Tyler: Like Wes, I was really into the look here. I'd always loved the idea of having little widgets on my desktop, even though I did not then and have never needed a larger clock sitting on the desktop, which I never look at. I guess I just wanted my PC to feel like a control center for, I don't know, someone important. In the early days, Windows was not popular.

Or particularly good. The Macintosh OS was far more robust, and Windows only saw limited use with versions 1. Windows 3. Up until that point, PC users could do some things in Windows, but still had to switch over to the DOS prompt to run many applications. And Windows 3. You could do more than one thing at a time thanks to smarter memory management! It had Solitaire!

This was the point where Windows crossed the threshold from being a kinda-useful add-on to DOS, to being a better, easier way for most people to do things on their computer. Wes: Yes, youngling, but like most other '90s kids I feel like the OS practically didn't exist until Windows 3.

The prerequisite updates will be installed by the stand-alone installer if they are necessary. The following three updates are required before you install Windows Vista SP1. However, these updates are also recommended if you do not intend to install Windows Vista SP1. These updates help improve reliability and performance when you install future individual updates from Microsoft:. This update must be applied separately before you install Windows Vista SP1 to make sure that Windows Vista SP1 can be installed or removed from the computer.

This update will be available on the Windows Update Web site soon after the release of update and before the release of Windows Vista SP1. Update updates the Windows Vista installation software. For more information, see the "Update information" section. Update is a prerequisite package that contains updates to the Windows Vista installation software. The installation software is the component that handles the installation and the removal of software updates, language packs, optional Windows features, and service packs.

Update is available from the Windows Update Web site. To obtain this update, follow these steps:. Click Start , click Control Panel , and then click Security. Under Windows Update , click Check for updates.