Microsoft's next-generation operating system: WindowsVista

The frequency of Microsoft's new operating system was high, such as Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me, and Windows XP, which basically released a new operation every other year. system. However, since the release of the Windows XP operating system in 2001 and the release of the server operating system Windows Server 2003 in 2003, Microsoft has not released a new operating system. Recently, I finally got the news of the next-generation operating system, which is the original operating system codenamed Longhorn. I will meet you in 2006 under the name of Windows Vista. Although it was released in 2006, it has already started testing. We also got the beta version of Vista in the first place. This article will introduce you to this operating system in detail.

Vista is available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions, and both versions were released in this Beta 1 release. The following will introduce you to the 32-bit version. The entire installation file has a volume of 2.41GB. It is expected that when Vista is officially released, it is estimated that the DVD will be the main medium. You may be surprised, how the size of the Windows installation files has increased so much. In fact, this is mainly because Vista's installation files contain a large number of hardware device drivers. In the past, Windows has saved its own driver in a file named drivers.cab under the I386 folder, and this file is only about 70M. However, Vista is different. In the root directory of the CD, there is a folder named “Drivers” to save the driver, and the volume of this folder is 1.26GB! Presumably, Vista's hardware support will reach an unprecedented level.

New user interface —— Aero Vista uses a new user interface: Aero. If your graphics card supports DirectX 9, and has at least 64MB of video memory and an LDDM driver installed, Vista may already be enabled by default. After Vista is enabled, the borders of all windows will be translucent (see Figure 1), and the borders can also be blurred to see what is covered under the window. Not only that, the window's maximization, minimization, closing and opening operations also show some dynamic effects, but unfortunately this dynamic effect can not be reflected in the picture.

Explorer to open the & ldquo; Computer & rdquo; (that is, older versions of Windows & ldquo; My Computer & rdquo;), you will see a new interface (Figure 2): An indicator is displayed next to all drives, according to which the driver's usage can be seen at a glance. If there is more space available, the indicator will be displayed in green; if there is too little free space, the indicator will turn red. At the same time, the familiar menu bar and status bar are gone. Instead, the button bar below the address bar and the preview panel below the window.

If you look closely you will find the address bar, and older versions of Windows is different from the address bar, address bar, the name of each file in the folder of Vista into a clickable button. For example, when we enter the folder “c:\\windows\\system32”, then in the address bar, the three folder names will be “"c:\\”,“windows”,<quo;system32” It becomes a button that can be clicked, and after clicking, it can enter the corresponding directory. Not only that, when you put the mouse pointer on a button, a small arrow will appear next to the button. After clicking, a menu will pop up, listing all the other folders in the directory where the folder is located. 3), this design is more convenient for us to enter any folder.

virtual folders that you must have had this experience: the need to manage documents more and more, there are documents used to work, downloading online MP3, there are illuminated during the last few years to play out Photo. In the old version of Windows, we may have to create different folders for different types of files, and then put all the files that need to be managed in different subfolders according to certain rules, which is not only troublesome, but also a long time. I also forget the location of a file.

It's much simpler in Vista because Vista uses a concept called "virtual folder". A virtual folder is not a real folder. It is just a link. After clicking, it can display all files that meet certain conditions. For example, several virtual folders that come with Vista: music, photos, and videos can be displayed to display all the music files, graphic files, or video files saved on the computer. At the same time, the virtual folder can also be dynamically updated. For example, when you save some new photos to your computer today, open the photo virtual folder and the newly saved file will be displayed immediately. With virtual folders, you won't have to worry about where the files are stored. As long as you know what files you need to find, you can use the corresponding virtual folder.

(Figure 4) shows the contents of a virtual folder. Pay attention to the blue folder on the left side of the window. These are virtual folders. We are viewing the music files saved by ourselves. Therefore, according to the general attributes of the music files, we can follow the singer, album name, genre and other information in different View all your music collections in a virtual folder.

Internet Explorer 7 This is probably the most we look forward to an update, because the content of lax security updates and other Microsoft software in the browser's market share has been snatched away FireFox A lot, many people have switched to other browsers because of the lack of IE functionality and security. Microsoft naturally won't sit idly by, so the first beta version of IE 7 also met with everyone in Vista.

The biggest feature of IE 7 is the support for tabbed browsing (Figure 5). This feature allows us to open multiple web pages in a similar tab in an IE window. However, after trials, the feature is still relatively poor, and there is no comparability with the specialized tag browsers such as Maxthon. I hope that there will be improvements in future versions, otherwise people will never buy it.


while IE 7 also began to support RSS. When the webpage we open contains the link to the RSS feed, the RSS icon on the IE toolbar will turn red. After clicking, we can view the content of the RSS separately. Of course, we can also add the RSS to the favorites so that Subscribe. Again, this feature is poor and still requires a lot of improvement.

As for the new IE 7 protection against phishing and security improvements, it is not very useful at present, so I won't mention it for the time being.

User Account Protection This is a more important update. In older versions of Windows, if a user logged into the system as an administrator, all programs run by that user would have administrator privileges. This is a very dangerous thing, because if you open an email attachment that contains a virus, the automatically running virus will also have administrator privileges and can easily endanger the security of the system.

Vista changed this situation, introducing a mechanism called User Account Protect (UAP) in Vista. After UAP is enabled, even a user logs in as an administrator. System, but his permissions are still limited. When you want to make changes to the system settings, or when you do something, the system asks the user for the password (Figure 6). And the password is not saved, which means that each time you perform an operation, even if the interval between the two operations is less than 1 minute, the system will repeatedly ask you for the password, so that although not too Convenient, but the security has improved a lot.

parental control at home with the child's parents certainly want to be able to limit the time children use the computer to play games, but this is not well implemented in older versions of Windows. Although you can limit your child's time to use your computer, now more and more children need to use their computers to complete their homework, or even learn a new course. How can they be balanced?

The parental control feature in Vista does just that. To use this feature, you first need to create a restricted account for your child so that the child cannot install new programs or modify the settings for parental controls. The setup program for the parental control function can then be opened in the control panel. First, we need to choose a game grading system, and the system determines which games the child can play and which games cannot be played according to the selected system and the grading information that comes with the game. This feature will take effect after saving the settings.

In addition to determining which games a child can play through the game's rating information, we can also restrict the children to play games according to the content of the game (for example, restricting children who are too young to play games containing bloody and violent horror content). Not only that, but you can also specifically limit your child to play a game. For example, we restrict children to play the Heart Wars. When using the child's account to log in to the system, a lock appears on the game icon of the Heart Wars, and the corresponding error message is also seen when double-clicking (see Figure 7).

New features in Windows Vista, of course, not only that, for example, file filtering, file search, voice commands and so on, each is very good. However, due to the length of the relationship, I will not say more here, and I will give you a detailed introduction.