Trilight Zone

[tricore]

There's a lot of confusion about Windows Vista these days. Many online discussion forums have a great number of users who express no desire to upgrade to Vista. Sure, we've all seen the screenshots and maybe a video or two of Vista in action, but for many it only seems like new tricks for an old dog. Yeah, it's got some fancy 3D effects in the interface, but OS X has been doing that for years now, and it's still Windows underneath, right? The sentiment seems to be that Vista is another Windows ME—an avoidable upgrade that isn't really going to breathe new life into your computer.

Perhaps part of the problem is that people just don't know what Vista has in store for them. Microsoft has gone big on the very high-level marketing with slogans like "Bringing Clarity to Your World" and has delivered detailed nitty-gritty explanations of the underpinnings to the enthusiast press, but it has done so in a slipshod fashion. We're here to pull it all together and tell you why we're excited about Vista. Here's a list of what's new and improved in Microsoft's next generation OS and why you should care about it.

Of course, Vista is far from finished with probably six months of heavy-duty development left, and a lot of things tend to come together at the end (you should have seen Windows XP six months before release). We're not saying Windows Vista will be the greatest OS ever—it's too early for that. But we're excited about its promise, and we think once you know about all the cool stuff going into it, you will be too

Well, that's sort of what Microsoft is doing with Vista. Rewriting the kernel completely would break too many applications, so that's not really an option. While the kernel in Vista is still primarily the same one as in Windows 2000 and XP, there have been some significant changes to tighten up security. Fewer parts of the OS as a whole run in Kernel mode - most drivers run in User mode, for instance. Things that run in Kernel mode are prevented from installing without verified security certificates, and even then they require administrator-level user permission. 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. In theory, you practically have to invite one in. Of course, the security of the kernel is unproven and will remain so until the OS ships and is out "in the wild," but it's encouraging that Microsoft has done everything they can to enhance stability and security while maintaining backward compatibility, which is no easy task.

That's not all, of course. Microsoft has made it their aim to make life easier on developers by improving and simplifying the way software interfaces with the system and the underlying hardware. Naturally, performance has been a major concern, too.