Many users view Windows XP (and Windows 2000, and previous Windows versions) as unsafe. No matter how many patches and updates Microsoft releases, the foundation of the OS itself?the kernel?is designed and built in a way that prevents it from being truly secure. The only solution, it is argued, is to redesign and rebuild the kernel with a focus on security and stability.
Well, that’s exactly what Microsoft is doing with Vista. The whole kernel has been reorganized and rewritten to help prevent software from affecting the system in unsavory ways. In Vista, it should be much more difficult for unauthorized programs (like Viruses and Trojans) to affect the core of the OS and secretly harm your system. Best of all the root file system and memory management of Vista is a new technology called SuperFetch. SuperFetch learns which applications and bits and pieces of the OS you use most and preloads them into memory, so you don’t have to wait for a bunch of hard drive paging before your apps or documents load. Microsoft has developed a pretty sophisticated prioritization scheme that can even differentiate which applications you are most likely to use at different times (on the weekend vs. during the week, or late at night vs. in the middle of the afternoon).
The scheme is also smart enough to make sure background tasks like virus scanners don’t get priority over the foreground tasks you’re working on. In fact, the whole I/O system now has a priority structure not that different from services, so your computer shouldn’t bog down when some peer-to-peer file trading program has to do a hash check on a big file or something. SuperFetch also takes advantage of external memory devices?plug in that spare 256MB USB key (any size will work, really) and Windows can cache a lot of the working set to it. It’s not as fast as your system RAM, but it’s much faster than randomly grabbing small bits of data from all over your hard drive. There are also a lot of other essential improvements such as Power Management, Heap Fragmentation Prevention, Improved Network Support, New Driver Models, Good 64-bit support, and many others. They’ve also made life easier on developers by improving and simplifying the way software interfaces with the system and the underlying hardware.
This is a dramatic, whole-hog upgrade of the Windows platform. If you got anything out of this article, I hope it’s the realization that Vista is not simply the Windows XP/2000 code base that has been slowly evolving over the years with some fancy graphics and icons slapped onto it. It should be clear that Vista is really the next generation of operating system from Microsoft, every bit as significant as the leap from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 or the jump from Mac OS 9 to OS X.
I like the sound of thenew sleep thing. is combines hibernate and sleep, keeping the data in the ram, but also saving it in the hdd. this mean that should power fail, you’ve still got what you were working on, but it boots up again really quickly from ram.
i’v also emailed Maxwell about it (our schoool IT head) and he says hold your horses, we’re going to let it bed in before supporting it 🙁