Windows Vista Ultimate - Part 1

We are sure anyone who is reading this article must have come across not less than 10 reports a day on Microsoft’s latest consumer effort, Vista. It does not matter what media you frequent, be it radio, online print or TV, Vista is the flavor of the season. After all it’s not every day that Microsoft releases a new OS. It is an event which will affect virtually most PC users right across the globe, will influence hardware and software development till the end of this decade and will ultimately be the cornerstone of the entire PC industry for some time to come.

Faffs side, Vista has spent a long time in development. Since its first public appearance way back in early 2003, Longhorn, as it was known then, promised to deliver a PC experience that would literally “blow your mind”. There were tons of new features promised from a brand new file system called WinFS which was to succeed the now decade old NTFS, to integrated search and collaboration features that would bring business together in ways never imagined before. The basis for all these new features was to be Windows XP itself… i.e. the code-base of Windows XP would be built and improved upon and the new OS would ship by Jan 2004… or so Microsoft hoped. Well we all know that didn’t happen. The features and changes Microsoft hoped to make, were just too radical and varied to be combined altogether. Yes! Microsoft overreached itself and found itself staring at delays and cost overruns that were beginning to affect its bottom line.

Keeping this in mind, Microsoft decided to reboot the Longhorn project in Q2 2004. However Longhorn was inordinately delayed and would not ship before 2006. By mid-2005 Longhorn was beginning to look rather long in the tooth having been in development for nearly 4 yrs by now. It was re-named to Vista. Later in the same year we began to see an accelerated number of beta builds which ultimately, by Nov 2006, reached the much coveted gold status. Vista was finally ready to ship. Initially introduced to large enterprises and MSDN/Techconnect users on November 30th, Vista finally shipped worldwide to consumers on Jan 30th 2007 - the result of a $3 billion expenditure and millions of man hours in research and development.
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Microsoft has chosen to fragment the Windows Vista Family into several releases. This was done to address the widely varied customer base that exists now. From the lowly Windows Vista starter edition, to the almighty Windows Vista Ultimate which is the product been reviewed reviewing today - there is an edition for everyone.

Before we proceed further into our exploration of Vista, let us sort out the new releases. Here Microsoft thoughtfully demarcated the line between business editions and consumer releases. Overall there are 8 editions in both 32 and 64 bit flavors, there are only 4 editions that apply to consumers. The Windows Vista business editions we will be addressing in a separate article.

The four Vista editions that apply to the normal consumer are**:**

1) Windows Vista Starter: This is a bottom-end release that has been made for developing countries. This is not available in retail and most of our readers have probably never even set eyes on this edition. Not much is known about its capabilities.

2) Windows Vista Home Basic: This is the successor to Windows XP Home. In fact its inclusion surprises us here. This is a bit of an oddball release, as it offers no great upgrade from Windows XP and feels more like a service pack for the XP.

3) Windows Vista Home Premium: This is the dark horse and the one version that will probably sell the most. It is the logical successor to Windows XP and adds a slew of new features such as the new graphical interface Windows Aero, media center functionality, integrated search and Windows Flip 3D.

4)Windows Vista Ultimate: This is the big daddy of them all. It not only includes all the features of Windows Vista Home Premium but bundles the best of all the features that Windows Vista Business editions offer, such as EFS (Encrypted File system) and Windows Shadowcopy.
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The Windows Vista Home Premium is the ideological successor to Windows XP Professional and offers a decent amount of functionality over its predecessor. It was only when we began to compile our notes on how best to approach this article, did we realize that we would need to use Windows Ultimate as that offers all the functionality of both business and consumer editions and would be the best representative of this new OS family.

Once that decision was reached, the next question that popped up was on how best to structure this review. After all with such a wide variety of changes, upgrades and new features, we would not do justice if we were to skip or gloss over any feature. Therefore while we have mentioned virtually all the changes in here, there are certain points that will be examined in greater detail in subsequent articles.

The changes in the Vista family as compared to previous generation OS’ start occurring from the Windows Installer itself. In a major move forward, Microsoft has bundled all the versions of the Vista family into a single DVD ISO image. On install time, depending on the license you have purchased, the appropriate version will be installed with its particular set of options. This move may seem strange at first but it serves another purpose. Microsoft offers a new feature called “Anytime Upgrade”, which will allow you to upgrade to a more advanced version of Windows should you feel the need. We will address this topic in detail later.

Our install machine took around 35 minutes from start to finish. One good thing, we noticed when were installing the OS, is that Microsoft no longer insists that you need a floppy drive to install the OS on a RAID setup. The RAID drivers can now be retrieved during the install from a variety of media ranging from the HDD itself to DVD-ROMS and memory sticks.

The install process also has been automated to a great extent. It offers you a nice GUI to install the OS in and is quite quick. The only negative point we found here, is that due to the all the OS’ being present in one DVD the new install takes up a rather large 8.5 GB of space, which for an OS install is a lot of space.
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The first point anyone will examine when he/she sits down to a new software review such as this is, is the changes that have occurred in the software’s UI. Therefore it should come as no surprise that this marks the beginning of our review.

The UI is the one place where Vista has changed the most from its predecessors. As we have mentioned earlier, since XP’s inception the graphical market has exploded and has seen a rise in its processing power bringing stunning 3D graphics down even to the onboard level market. Seeking to take advantage of this, Microsoft taking a leaf out of arch-rival Apple’s OSX decided to build a new interface which it christened Aero, which is hardware accelerated and has introduced innovations such as transparency, window animations and other visual effects.

When news of this interface and its intentions first filtered into public consciousness,there was a big hue and cry raised in various quarters on how this would affect system performance and cause users to upgrade unnecessarily. Keeping this in mind Microsoft not only decided to offer Aero for a full blown 3d experience, but has offered basic UI’s that were tuned up to closely resemble the beautiful Aero. It also introduced 2 system ratings that would allow the end-user to determine what version of Vista would run on their existing setup.

The two ratings introduced are Windows Vista Capable and Windows Vista Premium

A Windows Vista Capable PC
A modern processor (at least 800MHz).
512 MB of system memory.
A graphics processor that is DirectX 9 capable.

Windows Vista Premium Ready PC includes at least:
1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor.
1 GB of system memory.
Support for DirectX 9 graphics with a WDDM driver, 128 MB of graphics memory (minimum), Pixel Shader 2.0 and 32 bits per pixel.
40 GB of hard drive capacity with 15 GB free space.
DVD-ROM Drive.
Audio output capability.
Internet access capability.

As you can see, the system ratings required to actually get the Vista Premium experience in reality are not really that steep. Most PC’s and laptops sold post 2005 will easily be able to run Windows Vista Ultimate and its younger brothers without too many issues.

Here is a list of the various UIs and how they differ…

Windows Aero: This is the new gorgeous UI that forms the cornerstone of many of the changes that has occurred in Windows Vista. It is hardware accelerated UI that offers beautiful “Glass” like transparency features, incredible dynamic animations and spruced up eye candy such as the translucent Start Menu and taskbar, Windows Flip 3D, and Live Taskbar Thumbnails. It also changes the default font to Segoe which replaces the long time favorite Tahoma. Windows Aero is actually an acronym for Authentic, Energetic, Reflective and Open i.e. it is in Microsoft’s words intended to be a