Windows Vista 2006  A totally new OS; Some Features
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The Windows Vista User Experience represents a new design philosophy that delivers a compelling user experience from the moment that you start interacting with the computer to the moment that you leave it.

In the past, Windows focused heavily on discoverability, time to task, and task completion. The Windows Vista User Experience continues to deliver on discoverability, time to task, and task completion. From folders to animations, thumbnail views to the glass look of interface elements, Windows Vista is nothing short of stunning.

Visualizations
Working with Windows Vista is all about seeing, finding, organizing, and confidently controlling your information and your computer desktop. Together, the new Windows Vista user interface is streamlined, useful, and efficient to work with.

Windows Vista provides a solid visual experience, free of flicker, redrawing, hesitation, latency, and visual artifacts. New productivity tools bring clarity to information on your computer?you can see what your files contain without opening them, find applications and files instantly, navigate efficiently among open windows, and traverse wizards and dialog boxes more confidently and surely. And the visual sophistication of the Windows Vista environment streamlines the experience across the board by minimizing and refining common visual elements to minimize distracting interface and focus on content, information, messages, and choices.

Glass and Animations
Windows Vista includes refinements that make your experience smooth and sophisticated. In computers that can use the new Windows Vista Display Driver Model (WVDDM), windows are translucent, meaning that it's easier to focus on the content of a window rather than the window itself. This feature (along with other window design enhancements on all Windows Vista computers) reduces distraction and streamlines your work while making windows easier to manage.

Overall, the Windows Vista experience is more polished, smooth, and refined on all computers. Even details such as how windows move when they are minimized have been improved-when minimized, a window now clearly minimizes to a thumbnail on the taskbar where it resides, making it easier to locate later.

Flip and Flip 3D
Windows Vista provides two entirely new features to manage windows codenamed "Flip" and "Flip 3D". Flip allows you to flip through open windows (by using Alt+Tab) providing a live thumbnail of each window rather than just a generic icon and filename. Live thumbnails make it easier to quickly identify the window you want, particularly when multiple windows of the same kind are open. With Flip 3D,you can use the scroll wheel on your mouse to flip through open windows in a stack, and quickly locate and select the one you want to work with. This feature is even handier when you use it with the new Flip 3D key that manufacturers are adding to many keyboards.

Thumbnails
New scalable thumbnails are used throughout Windows to show you the actual first page for documents, the actual photo for photos, a screen capture for videos, and album art for individual songs. By previewing the actual contents of a file at a glance, you'll find what you want more quickly without the trial-and-error of opening files to preview them.

You'll find thumbnails in the Explorers as live icons; when you rest the mouse pointer over a minimized window on the Task Bar; and when you flip through open windows using the features codenamed "Flip" and "Flip 3D"

Although desktop search is a much-needed tool for effective information management, it does not solve most information-management needs. Windows Vista provides you with more flexibility in how you choose to interact, organize, search, and access your files. New controls, like the Quick Search box and Enhanced Column Headers, make it simple for you to manage large amounts of on-screen data. With Windows Vista, organizing and finding the files on your computer has never been easier.

Windows Sidebar
Windows Sidebar is a future technology that connects your desktop with powerful yet easy to use "gadgets"-mini-applications that help you to be more productive in your daily life at work, at home, or on the go. For example your gadgets might include local weather, a photo slideshow, a dictionary, news headlines, even a convenient way to control Windows Media Player. Gadgets are organized in an easy-to-use panel-the Windows Sidebar-that discreetly docks on the side of your Windows desktop. Alternately, gadgets can "float" on the desktop wherever you like. Developers will be able to build an endless variety of gadgets, which you can use to customize your Windows Vista desktop however you want. In addition, gadgets can also be built for the new Windows Side Show tm platform which allows you to extend critical PC-based data to a range of connected devices including second displays in laptops or displays built into keyboards, remote controls, and even cell phones. For more information go to Microsoft gadgets.com.

Folders & Virtual Folders
Folders are a big part of the storage model in Windows Vista. In Windows Vista, you can still opt to save content in folders, but Windows Vista makes using folders fundamentally better by enabling new tools that provide dramatic improvements when it comes to finding files.

Windows Vista introduces a new organizational concept called a Virtual Folder, which is simply a saved search that is instantly run when you open the folder. Subsequently, any time you click on this Virtual Folder, Windows Vista runs the search and provides results almost immediately. Windows Vista will ship with many standard, preconfigured Virtual Folders, but you can create your own as well.

Properties
With Windows Vista, you no longer have to remember where you stored a certain file. File properties or metadata, such as the author of a document, artist of a song, or a keyword on a picture, can be added to your files and be used to find and organize content. In fact, if you can remember almost anything about a file, Windows Vista can find it.

Navigation & Preview Panes
In addition to properties, Windows Vista provides other ways to tag files, including the Navigation Pane and the Preview Pane. The Navigation Pane shows both folders and Virtual Folders intermingled on one control. You can select one or more items and drag them into any Virtual Folder, instantly tagging those files with a given property. You can add metadata as you save a file, or you can manually change a file's proprieties at any time in the Preview Pane.

Quick Search Box and Column Headers
The Explorer Quick Search box and Column Header controls help you efficiently narrow down large selections of data. With the Quick Search Box, you can start typing the name or the first few letters of any displayed property, and the displayed files quickly filter down to just the matching terms. The dynamic new Column Header drop down menus let you easily choose your filter values. The Column Headers also feature the Stack View, which sorts data based on a specific column.

Internet Explorer Quick Tabs / RSS
Windows Vista includes major enhancements to Internet Explorer. In addition to the security and privacy features Windows Vista Internet Explorer offers an early glimpse of how Microsoft is redesigning Internet Explorer to make everyday tasks easier through features such as tabbed browsing, inline search and shrink-to-fit printing. It also provides new tools to give users direct access to the information they want with built-in support for Web Feeds known as RSS (Really Simple Syndication).

Windows Vista is the most reliable version of Windows ever, right out of the box. It is also more resilient and better at recovering from problems, which results in fewer disruptions. With Windows Vista, you can use your time at the computer doing what you want to do.

Fewer Application Restarts
Applications written for Windows Vista will keep running-with less chance of hanging or becoming unresponsive than with earlier versions of Windows. Windows Vista is measurably more resilient to application problems and can recover better from problems that do occur.

Windows Vista's improved real-time error reporting (optional for end users) gives developers the information they need to fix unresponsive applications terminated by users.

Windows Vista also contains new capabilities that will improve reliability. For example, Windows Vista supports synchronous cancellation of I/O requests. This feature enables applications to recover when a required resource is in use by another application, thus eliminating a common cause of unresponsive applications.

Detects Impending Failures
Windows Vista built-in diagnostics can proactively detect problems with system components such as hard disks, memory, and networks. Windows Vista notifies you and walks you through the problem resolution. Consider the following scenarios:

Although you don't know it, your hard disk is about to fail. Windows disk diagnostics detect the impending failure and guides you through data backup. You've escaped a disaster from which it might have taken weeks to recover.
You are a mobile computer user in an enterprise setting, and you've been on the road and have forgotten to back up your data for a few weeks. When you return home and connect to your enterprise network, an event indicating an impending disk failure is forwarded from your computer to your IT support center. Your administrator notifies you of the impending problem and schedules a repair at a convenient time.
Windows Vista diagnoses a number of problems out-of-the-box, including impending hard drive failures, memory failures, potential resource exhaustion conditions, and networking problems. In each case, Windows Vista detects the problem proactively and helps you avoid data loss and system downtime.

Automatic Recovery
Windows Vista can recover from even serious system problems. For example, if the system fails to start, the Startup Repair Tool (StR) attempts to automatically recover the system. If it can't, it provides IT staff with easy-to-use diagnostic information and support options to get the system running again.

With Windows Vista, most services have a recovery policy. If a service fails, Windows Vista can likely restart it automatically. You might not even know the problem occurred.

File Shadow Copies
Shadow Copies for Shared Files is a technology included in Microsoft Windows Server 2003 that allows you to recover prior versions of an accidentally overwritten or deleted file without backup. Windows Vista incorporates this technology to enable you to recover prior versions of files on the PC without needing a server.

Faster Startup
Get productive faster with Windows Vista's quick startup. Login scripts and startup applications and services process in the background while you get on with your work. And you'll restart less often because you can use the new Sleep state instead of shutting down to save both time and energy.

Multi-tiered Data Protection
Advanced data protection technologies in Windows Vista reduce the risk that data on laptops or on other computers will be viewed by unauthorized people, even if the laptop is lost or stolen.

Windows Vista supports full-volume encryption to prevent disk access to files by other operating systems. It also stores encryption keys in a Trusted Platform Model (TPM) v1.2 chip. The entire system partition is encrypted-both the hibernation file and the user data. It also stores encryption keys in a Trusted Platform Model (TPM) v1.2 chip, if one is available on the PC.

Rapid Reflexes
With superior memory management, Windows Vista is responsive?often more responsive than Windows XP on the same computer. In particular, it's faster doing the tasks that are most noticeable?opening the Start menu, for example, or right-clicking a file in Windows Explorer to display a shortcut menu.

Data Synchronization
More and more people connect their PCs to multiple data sources. Today, keeping data synchronized across multiple locations is at best a challenging if not disjointed experience. Windows Vista improves synchronization performance, and provides a single consistent way to keep data synchronized across all connected PCs and servers.

Windows Vista is the most reliable version of Windows ever, right out of the box. It is also more resilient and better at recovering from problems, which results in fewer disruptions. With Windows Vista, you can use your time at the computer doing what you want to do.

Fewer Application Restarts
Applications written for Windows Vista will keep running-with less chance of hanging or becoming unresponsive than with earlier versions of Windows. Windows Vista is measurably more resilient to application problems and can recover better from problems that do occur.

Windows Vista's improved real-time error reporting (optional for end users) gives developers the information they need to fix unresponsive applications terminated by users.

Windows Vista also contains new capabilities that will improve reliability. For example, Windows Vista supports synchronous cancellation of I/O requests. This feature enables applications to recover when a required resource is in use by another application, thus eliminating a common cause of unresponsive applications.

Detects Impending Failures
Windows Vista built-in diagnostics can proactively detect problems with system components such as hard disks, memory, and networks. Windows Vista notifies you and walks you through the problem resolution. Consider the following scenarios:

Although you don't know it, your hard disk is about to fail. Windows disk diagnostics detect the impending failure and guides you through data backup. You've escaped a disaster from which it might have taken weeks to recover.
You are a mobile computer user in an enterprise setting, and you've been on the road and have forgotten to back up your data for a few weeks. When you return home and connect to your enterprise network, an event indicating an impending disk failure is forwarded from your computer to your IT support center. Your administrator notifies you of the impending problem and schedules a repair at a convenient time.
Windows Vista diagnoses a number of problems out-of-the-box, including impending hard drive failures, memory failures, potential resource exhaustion conditions, and networking problems. In each case, Windows Vista detects the problem proactively and helps you avoid data loss and system downtime.

Automatic Recovery
Windows Vista can recover from even serious system problems. For example, if the system fails to start, the Startup Repair Tool (StR) attempts to automatically recover the system. If it can't, it provides IT staff with easy-to-use diagnostic information and support options to get the system running again.

With Windows Vista, most services have a recovery policy. If a service fails, Windows Vista can likely restart it automatically. You might not even know the problem occurred.

File Shadow Copies
Shadow Copies for Shared Files is a technology included in Microsoft Windows Server 2003 that allows you to recover prior versions of an accidentally overwritten or deleted file without backup. Windows Vista incorporates this technology to enable you to recover prior versions of files on the PC without needing a server.

Faster Startup
Get productive faster with Windows Vista's quick startup. Login scripts and startup applications and services process in the background while you get on with your work. And you'll restart less often because you can use the new Sleep state instead of shutting down to save both time and energy.

Multi-tiered Data Protection
Advanced data protection technologies in Windows Vista reduce the risk that data on laptops or on other computers will be viewed by unauthorized people, even if the laptop is lost or stolen.

Windows Vista supports full-volume encryption to prevent disk access to files by other operating systems. It also stores encryption keys in a Trusted Platform Model (TPM) v1.2 chip. The entire system partition is encrypted-both the hibernation file and the user data. It also stores encryption keys in a Trusted Platform Model (TPM) v1.2 chip, if one is available on the PC.

Rapid Reflexes
With superior memory management, Windows Vista is responsive?often more responsive than Windows XP on the same computer. In particular, it's faster doing the tasks that are most noticeable?opening the Start menu, for example, or right-clicking a file in Windows Explorer to display a shortcut menu.

Data Synchronization
More and more people connect their PCs to multiple data sources. Today, keeping data synchronized across multiple locations is at best a challenging if not disjointed experience. Windows Vista improves synchronization performance, and provides a single consistent way to keep data synchronized across all connected PCs and servers.

Security is fundamental to the Windows Vista architecture. With Windows Vista, you can connect to whomever you want and do the things that you want to do, confident that Windows Vista is keeping your information and your computer safe.

Windows Vista security features protect against the latest generation of threats, such as worms, viruses, and spyware. In the unlikely event of a successful attack, Windows Vista ensures that the effect is minimal.

Parental Controls
Windows Vista introduces a rich set of parental control features, providing powerful tools to help parents monitor, manage, and administer their children's computer usage to keep them safe.

User Account Protection
Windows Vista User Account Protection bridges the gap between user and administrative privileges by allowing you to run applications under a standard user account. When you need to perform an administrative task, such as install software or drivers, Windows Vista prompts you to confirm your intentions or to provide your credentials.

For example, if you're on the road and download a game that is really a Trojan horse, Windows Vista prevents the game from performing malicious tasks because you lack sufficient privileges to install it. When you need to install a printer driver for the hotel printer, Windows Vista prompts you to verify that you really want to install the printer.

This protection, combined with the new protected mode features in Internet Explorer, reduces the impact of viruses, spyware, and other types of malicious software (collectively known as "malware").

Custom Authentication Mechanisms
For many organizations, authenticating users with a user name and password is no longer sufficient to ensure the necessary level of security. Windows Vista has improved Smart Card support and makes it simpler for developers to implement custom authentication mechanisms such as biometrics and tokens.

Firewall
Windows Vista provides outgoing as well as incoming filtering, which can be centrally managed via Group Policy. This lets administrators control which applications are allowed to or are blocked from communicating on the network. Controlling network access is one of the most important ways to mitigate security risks.

Internet Explorer
Windows Vista will build upon the User Account Protection initiative to limit Internet Explorer to just enough privileges to browse the Web, but not enough to modify user files or settings by default. This Windows Vista-only feature, known as Protected mode, will be in Beta 2. As a result, even if a malicious site attacks a potential vulnerability in Internet Explorer, the site's code won't have enough privileges to install software, copy files to the user's Startup folder, or hijack the settings for the browser's homepage or search provider.

Data Protection
Theft or loss of corporate intellectual property is an increasing concern for organizations. Windows Vista has improved support for data protection at the document, file, directory, and machine level. The integrated Rights Management client allows organizations to enforce policies around document usage. The Encrypting File System, which provides user-based file and directory encryption, has been enhanced to allow storage of encryption keys on Smart Cards, providing better protection of encryption keys. In addition, the new full volume encryption enterprise feature adds machine-level data protection.

Email
The Windows Vista e-mail client addresses serious concerns such as spam and attachment viruses, while adding features to enable you to search and manage the increasingly large number of messages you receive.

The e-mail client includes a built-in spam filter which is effective from day one and does not require you to train or configure it. You'll find e-mail intuitively and almost instantly with the powerful, embedded Quick Search box. You can also search your e-mail alongside other files in the Search Explorer. All messages are maintained in a new message store which provides significantly improved reliability over Outlook Express.

Protection from Malware
IT departments and individual users spend significant time and resources solving problems caused by malware as well as trying to detect and prevent problems before they happen. Windows Vista includes powerful features that can prevent, detect, and remove malware before it causes problems. The result: improved computer performance, fewer support calls, and improved security.

Note that the built-in anti-malware detection, cleaning, and real-time blocking are primarily targeted at individual users. Windows Vista does not include enterprise management for anti-malware via group policy beyond enabling or disabling the protection.

Network Access Protection
Viruses and worms can attack a protected internal network through mobile computers that do not have the latest updates, security configuration settings, or virus signatures downloaded. Mobile users may connect to unprotected networks at hotels, airports, or coffee shops, where their computers can become infected by malware or a virus. The Network Access Protection agent in Windows Vista, along with the Network Access Protection infrastructure, which will be included with Longhorn Server, will prevent computers from connecting to an internal network until configured system health criteria (such as the latest operating system or virus signature updates or security configuration settings) are met.

Windows Services Hardening
In the unlikely event that an attacker identifies and exploits a vulnerable service, Windows Service Hardening limits the damage. It does so by preventing a compromised service from changing important configuration settings in the file system or registry or from infecting other computers on the network. For example, the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) service can be kept from replacing system files or modifying the registry.

Windows Vista makes it easier for you to use computers and networks while on the go. Connecting the computer to a variety of different hardware and networks is faster, easier, and more secure, and synchronizing data between computers and devices is simple. Windows Vista incorporates many new features that are targeted specifically at laptop users who are always on the go with their computers.

Power Management
As a mobile user, you might often find it difficult to quickly assess your remaining battery life, and you may be unaware of simple steps you can take to extend it. The Windows Vista power management user experience includes an updated, easy-to-find battery meter that tells you at a glance if you have enough battery life to get through the next few meetings-and to easily change power plans to meet your needs.

Mobile Settings
Mobile users often have to repeatedly reconfigure computer settings for conference room presentations. To ease this inconvenience, Windows Vista includes a group of presentation settings that you can invoke with a simple click when you connect to a display device.

Networked Projection
The networked projection feature allows a Windows Vista computer to detect a nearby projector that is a network-connected device and lets you establish a connection through a wired or wireless, ad hoc, or infrastructure network.

Windows Mobility Center
As mobile users change locations, networks and activities, they will be able to quickly configure their mobile PCs to fit the situation. Key mobile-related system settings are aggregated in one easy-to-find, easy-to-use place. Settings include display brightness, power plan, volume, wireless networking on/off, external display settings, display orientation, and synchronization status. PC manufacturers can customize the Windows Mobility Center to include other hardware specific settings.

Group Collaboration
With Windows Vista, small group collaboration is now possible and practical in any place and at any time. Over corporate LANs and ad hoc wireless networks, mobile users can easily and securely transfer files and broadcast presentations and documents directly to each other's personal computers - making meetings more productive and efficient.

Tablet PC
The Tablet PC enables a new era of mobile computing: a single, fully functioning PC that works great at the desk but is also practical and comfortable while on the go. With integrated pen support, digital ink input, handwriting recognition technologies and innovative hardware, the Tablet PC is usable, comfortable and productive in any place and at any time.

In Windows Vista, the Handwriting Recognition Personalization Tool allows users to tailor recognition results to their own personal handwriting style. Pen Flicks make the pen more powerful through a series of user-configurable actions that can be assigned to movements in eight different directions. And support is added for touch screens, including the new Touch Pointer - a special tool for targeting small pieces of UI with the finger and accessing right-click menus.

Safe Sleep & Quick Resume
The new sleep state in Windows Vista combines the speed of Standby mode and the data protection and low power consumption of Hibernate. Changing or removing a battery during sleep state is no problem, for example, because applications and data stored in memory have been safely written to the hard disk. And startup from sleep state requires just seconds.

Windows SideShow
Although your important information is in your laptop, sometimes it is impractical to open the machine and start it up just to check a message or address. In these cases, auxiliary displays can conveniently save you time (and battery life). The new Windows SideShow platform (formerly known as Auxiliary display) includes a hardware reference design, external display operating system, and API set to enable the display of PC-based information-such as meeting schedules, phone numbers and addresses, and recent e-mail messages-on a secondary or auxiliary display that you can see immediately whether the laptop is on, off, or in sleep mode.

This platform also enables hardware manufacturers to build auxiliary displays in a range of detached peripherals such as keyboards, LCD display casings, remote controls, media servers, and cell phones-with each device displaying relevant information it receives from the Windows Vista PC-so look for these devices in the future.

Wireless Networking
As wireless networks continue to proliferate, Windows Vista improves the wireless experience in a number of ways. You'll get a consistent and secure wireless connection experience even as you connect to the Internet via different wireless hotspot providers using different billing arrangements. And Windows Vista's new Network Location Awareness Service (NLA2) keeps your Windows Vista PC aware of and optimized for the network's changing capabilities.

Windows Vista includes new and enhanced functionality that eases the burden on IT professionals and help desks in the areas of assistance, upgrade, and backup. Windows Vista automatically detects and resolves known problems with minimal interaction, and often without you even knowing, to keep the computer running reliably. If there is a hard disk or storage failure, Windows Vista provides easy-to-use backup and restore techniques to get you up and running again.

User Assistance
In addition to greatly enhancing out-of-the-box characteristics of User Assistance, Windows Vista enables IT professionals to customize User Assistance to meet the specific needs of your organization. You can use the customization features in Windows Vista User Assistance to provide access to corporate-specific content, customize the escalation path, and customize the User Assistance entry screen.

By making corporate-specific Help content accessible through User Assistance, IT professionals can provide their corporate users with one-stop shopping for help information.

Remote Assistance
Remote Assistance allows an advanced user or support professional to take control of an end user's computer remotely. In Windows Vista, Remote Assistance is greatly enhanced, featuring faster performance and the ability to assist users at home, on the road, or from a remote location. Remote Assistance has been rewritten as a standalone application, providing markedly faster startup and connectivity. It has been optimized to use less network bandwidth and is able to transverse Network Address Translators (NATs). Another new features for Remote Assistance in Windows Vista is session logging (on both the helper's or the novice's machine).

Help & Feedback
Windows Vista delivers a number of features designed to streamline problem resolution, and is designed to reduce the cost of support by reducing the number of incidents, providing better user self-help, and improving centralized tools for support professionals.

Improved user assistance (UA) resources and tools provided with Windows Vista will help users help themselves within organizations, because IT professionals can integrate their own corporate Help content with Windows Vista UA.

Windows Vista itself detects, diagnoses, and helps users respond to common problems. But when incidents requiring support do occur, Windows Vista provides centralized support tools and resources to quickly diagnose and resolve issues. In Windows Vista, Remote Assistance is optimized for the enterprise, with faster performance; built-in diagnostic tools; and the ability to assist users at home, on the road, or from a remote location.

Windows Update
Windows Update delivers content aimed at fixing vulnerabilities for Windows, applications built on top of Windows, and improvements to those software products. Windows Vista delivers an extensible service update platform that provides an always-improving computer experience. The platform is constructed around two building blocks-the updating technology and the Windows Update and application update services. Windows Update delivers reliability without performance degradation due to upgrades, and the process is easy to understand and consistent for applications included in the service.
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News Source : http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/default.mspx