Windows of opportunity

Posted at: Friday 26th January 2007 by James Morris

James Morris investigates Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system, and asks if you need it at all.

The arrival of a new version of Microsoft Windows is always surrounded by fanfare. Windows 95 was the biggest news of that year (and the OS only just managed to make it out by the end of the year), and Windows XP was a massive leap for consumers when it arrived in 2001. Casting off the last vestiges of Windows' 16-bit DOS past, Windows XP was the final realisation of the Cairo/Windows NT project started nearly ten years earlier in 1992.

However, Windows XP is now beginning to sing the last few bars of its swansong, as Windows Vista is now upon us. Versions of the code in various stages of completion have been floating around for more than a year, and the final release was rolled out to business customers in November 2006. We got our hands on the gold code in time to run some benchmarks last month. This month, though, we'll provide the complete low-down on what's new, whether you need to upgrade and whether you can run Vista without having to shell out on expensive new hardware.

Cleaning Windows

For people already using Windows 2000, Windows XP mainly added some consumer-friendly eye candy. Like Windows 2000, XP was a continuation of the full 32-bit operating system that first saw the light of day as Windows NT. At first glance, Windows Vista might look like a further prettification of the same code base, but delve deeper, and it becomes clear that Windows Vista is a much bigger upgrade than Windows XP.

In some respects, Vista is still a continuation of NT, and you can find many elements in common at certain levels, for which we're thankful, as having to learn an entirely new interface could be the death of a new operating system. But while XP integrated new developments in computing, these were bolted on, rather than fundamentally changing the operating system at its lowest level.

For example, the importance of 3D acceleration and the problems of Internet security and protected content weren't major considerations when the NT architecture was conceived in the early 1990s. Windows XP's particular problems with security are well known, and the controversy regarding online content was still in the future when XP first arrived in 2001. Graphics drivers are also a major source of Windows XP instability, as much of DirectX runs in the kernel, so if it crashes, there's a good chance that the whole operating system will go with it.

Driver me crazy

Clearly, Windows needed redesigning from the ground up. The whizzy Aero interface is the part of Windows Vista that receives the most attention, as it's the most easy to illustrate in pictures, but underneath, it's far more than just eye candy.

If you know a bit about Windows, you'll remember that Windows XP came out when a new driver architecture called the Windows Driver Model came of age. This was a unified system that replaced the virtual device drivers (VxDs) of Windows 3.1 and 95, and the different architecture used by Windows NT. It was first used in Windows 98 and 2000 but, since Windows 98 could still support Windows 95 drivers, Windows XP was the first OS that forced consumers to either find WDM drivers for their hardware, or not use it, thus prompting a wholesale upgrade to the new architecture.