Windows Vista Home Premium SupportWindows Aero Vistas premium user interface. As you know, the Graphical User Interface, or GUI, in. Windows Vista has undergone a major overhaul. The most prominent example of. Windows Aero, which Microsoft describes as the premium visual. Windows Vista, because it features a transparent glass design. Windows Aero is only available in four of the five primary. Windows Vista product editions. The Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, and. Ultimate editions provide Windows Aero. Home Basic will provide the Windows. Basic user interface. Keep in mind that, like Aero, Basic will offer all the. Start. menu and the new Explorers, but just without the visual experience of Aero. Even if you have one of the four Windows Vista editions that. Windows Aero, you have to have a system capable of displaying it. For. example, the minimum hardware requirements for Windows Aero are a 1 GHz 3. GB RAM, and 1. 28. MB video RAM along with a Direct. X 9 class. graphics processor that supports a Windows Display Driver Model Driver, Pixel Shader 2. In this edition of the Windows Vista Report, Ill take a. Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit' title='Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit' />Windows 7 Home Basic vs Home Premium The most recent operating system from Microsoft, Windows 7, comes in a wide variety to suit the needs and budgets of the. Note This operating system may be installed over previous versions of Windows XP and Windows Vista by completing a clean installation, or Windows 7, and Windows 8. WP19sQI13_o/Tu_S7UCId8I/AAAAAAAAACI/4aY1gOnqG1I/s1600/4gev05l%255B7%255D.jpg' alt='Windows Vista Home Premium' title='Windows Vista Home Premium' />A detailed guide that shows you how to easily upgrade Vista to Windows 7. Find great deals on eBay for windows 7 home premium and windows 7 home premium 64 bit. Shop with confidence. Windows Vista Home Premium Service Pack 1Windows 7 Home Premium. Free Download Windows 7 Home Premium Build 7601. Try Windows 7 before Windows 8 is officially released. Windows Vista, microsoft memory test, Windows Vista install, Windows Vista upgrade, Windows Vista reinstall, Windows Vista Professional, installing windows Vista. Windows 7 home, premium and ultimate is the worst operating system in the world. Windows Aero user interface. The Aero name. Before we get into the features, lets take a moment to look. Aero name. The most obvious take. Aerodynamic and connotes a. While this sounds very plausible, the official. Jim Alchin, on the Windows Vista Team. Windows Vista Home Premium' title='Windows Vista Home Premium' />Blog is that Aero is really an acronym that stands for Authentic, Energetic. Reflective and Open. Alchin adds that the 4. RTM version are also a big part of the Aero. The glass effect. The most notable feature of Windows Aero is the glass effect. Figure A shows the Windows Color and Appearance tool on the. Notice that the Enable Transparency check box is selected by default. Ive adjusted the Color Intensity to its lowest setting. As you can see, Ive. Windows Color and Appearance tool over top of the Windows Sidebar. Clock and a pair of icons to allow you to see the effect of the translucent. Figure AWith the Color Intensity set to low, you can really see the effect of the. Figure B contains a series of images that show off the. Minimize, Maximize and Close buttons. In the. first image, the window is in the background, or overlaid by another window. As you can see, none of the buttons show color. In the. second image, none of the buttons are actually pointed to, but the close button. For the next three images, I hovered the. Minimize, Maximize, and Close buttons respectively. Figure BDynamic reflections are used to indicate the windows position as well as. When it comes to the animations, the most notable example. Since I cant actually show. In Windows XP, the animation used in minimizing and maximizing. In Windows Vista, the act of minimizing and maximizing. And, it moves slow. Windows Flip and Flip 3. DTwo more neat features are brought to Vista by the Windows. Aero user interfaceWindows Flip and Flip 3. D. To begin with, Windows Flip is. AltTab and is designed to. The interface is a much nicer. Windows versions in that it includes both an icon and a live. Figure C. As you can see, in addition to. Windows Flip also shows an. Figure CWindows Flip offers a much nicer interface than its predecessors. Flip 3. D provides you with an angled, three dimensional view. Figure D. To. access Windows Flip 3. D, you can press WindowsTab. Once you do you can the cycle through all the open programs by continuing to press. WindowsTab, using the arrow keys to move back and. No matter what method you. Figure DWindows Flip 3. D is the icing on the cake when it comes to moving between. Live Taskbar Thumbnails. While not as breathtaking as Windows Flip 3. D, the Live. Taskbar Thumbnails feature is still very cool. The Live Thumbnails feature. You just hover your mouse pointer over any button on the Taskbar and. And best of all, because the. Figure E. Figure EWith the Live Taskbar Thumbnails feature, youll be able to keep track of. Conclusion. Vistas Windows Aero user interface takes the visual. Microsofts newest operating system up a few notches. If you have. comments or information to share about features of Vistas Windows Aero user. Discussion area and let us hear. Criticism of Windows Vista Wikipedia. This article is about the criticism that applies specifically to Vista. For criticism applying to several or all versions of Microsoft Windows, see Criticism of Microsoft Windows. Windows Vista, an operating system released by Microsoft for consumers on January 3. Due to issues with privacy, security, performance, driver support and product activation, Windows Vista has been the subject of a number of negative assessments by various groups. SecurityeditDriver signing requirementeditFor security reasons, 6. Windows Vista and of Windows 7 as well allow only signeddrivers to be installed in kernel mode. Because code executing in kernel mode enjoys wide privileges on the system, the signing requirement aims to ensure that only code with known origin execute at this level. In order for a driver to be signed, a developersoftware vendor will have to obtain an Authenticode certificate3 with which to sign the driver. Authenticode certificates can be obtained from certificate authorities trusted by Microsoft. Microsoft trusts the certificate authority to verify the applicants identity before issuing a certificate. If a driver is not signed using a valid certificate, or if the driver was signed using a certificate which has been revoked by Microsoft or the certificate authority, Windows will refuse to load the driver. The following criticismsclaims have been made regarding this requirement It disallows experimentation from the hobbyist community. The required Authenticode certificates for signing Vista drivers are expensive and out of reach5 for small developers, usually about 4. Verisign. citation neededMicrosoft allows developers to temporarily or locally disable the signing requirement on systems they control by hitting F8 during boot or by signing the drivers with self issued certificates or by running a kernel debugger. At one time, a third party tool called Atsiv7 existed that would allow any driver, unsigned or signed to be loaded. Atsiv worked by installing a signed surrogate driver which could be directed to load any other driver, thus circumventing the driver signing requirement. Since this was in violation of the driver signing requirement, Microsoft closed this workaround with hotfix KB9. Flaws in memory protection featureseditSecurity researchers Alexander Sotirov and Mark Dowd have developed a technique that bypasses many of the new memory protection safeguards in Windows Vista, such as address space layout randomization ASLR. The result of this is that any already existing buffer overflow bugs that, in Vista, were previously not exploitable due to such features, may now be exploitable. This is not in itself a vulnerability as Sotirov notes, What we presented is weaknesses in the protection mechanism. It still requires the system under attack to have a vulnerability. Without the presence of a vulnerability these techniques dont really accomplish anything. The vulnerability Sotirov and Dowd used in their paper as an example was the 2. CVE 2. 00. 7 0. One security researcher Dino Dai Zovi claimed that this means that it is completely game over for Vista security1. Sotirov refuted this, saying that The articles that describe Vista security as broken or done for, with unfixable vulnerabilities are completely inaccurate. One of the suggestions I saw in many of the discussions was that people should just use Windows XP. In fact, in XP a lot of those protections were bypassing such as ASLR dont even exist. Digital rights managementeditAnother common criticism concerns the integration of a new form of digital rights management DRM into the operating system, specifically the Protected Video Path PVP, which involves technologies such as High bandwidth Digital Content Protection HDCP and the Image Constraint Token ICT. These features were added to Vista due to licensing restrictions from the HD DVD consortium and Blu ray association. This will concern only the resolution of playback of protected content on HD DVD and Blu ray discs, but it has not been enabled as of 2. A lack of a protected channel does not stop playback. Audio plays back as normal but high definition video downsamples on Blu ray and HD DVD to slightly better than DVD quality video. The Protected Video Path mandates that encryption must be used whenever content marked as protected will travel over a link where it might be intercepted. This is called a User Accessible Bus UAB. Additionally, all devices that come into contact with premium content such as graphics cards have to be certified by Microsoft. Before playback starts, all the devices involved are checked using a hardware functionality scan HFS to verify if they are genuine and have not been tampered with. Dark Sonic Mugen'>Dark Sonic Mugen. Devices are required to lower the resolution from 1. HDCP. Additionally, Microsoft maintains a global revocation list for devices that have been compromised. This list is distributed to PCs over the Internet using normal update mechanisms. The only effect on a revoked drivers functionality is that high level protected content will not play all other functionality, including low definition playback, is retained. Notable criticseditPeter Gutmann, a computer security expert from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, has released a whitepaper1. Adding encryption facilities to devices makes them more expensive, a cost that is passed on to the user. If outputs are not deemed sufficiently protected by the media industry, then even very expensive equipment can be required to be switched off for example, SPDIF based, high end audio cards. Some newer high definition monitors are not HDCP enabled, even though the manufacturer may claim otherwise. The added complexity makes systems less reliable. Since non protected media are not subject to the new restrictions, users may be encouraged to remove the protection in order to view them without restrictions, thus defeating the content protection schemes initial purpose. Astra 8900 Option Software. Pc Games Under 10Mb. Protection mechanisms, such as disabling or degrading outputs, may be triggered erroneously or maliciously, motivating denial of service attacks. Revoking the driver of a device that is in wide use is such a drastic measure that Gutmann doubts Microsoft will ever actually do so. On the other hand, they may be forced to because of their legal obligations to the movie studios. The Free Software Foundation conducted a campaign called Bad. Vista against Vista on these grounds. Reaction to criticismeditEd Bott, author of Windows Vista Inside Out, has published a three part blog which rebuts many of Gutmanns claims. Botts criticisms can be summarized as follows Gutmann based his paper on outdated documentation from Microsoft and second hand web sources. Gutmann quotes selectively from the Microsoft specifications. Gutmann did no experimental work with Vista to prove his theories. Rather, he makes mistaken assumptions and then speculates wildly on their implications. Gutmanns paper, while presented as serious research, is really just an opinion piece. Technology writer George Ou states that Gutmanns paper relies on unreliable sources and that Gutmann has never used Windows Vista to test his theories. Gutmann has responded to both Bott and Ou in a further article,1. Gutmanns article has not been refuted and the response of Bott is disinformation.