If you continue to use Windows Vista now that support has ended, your computer will still work but it might become more vulnerable to security risks and viruses. Last updated: May 2017. Every Windows product has a lifecycle. The lifecycle begins when a product is released and ends when it's no longer supported. NOTE: This article is updated whenever Microsoft releases a new product to MSDN, TechNet or Microsoft. The Power Toys for Windows XP were very popular to the point that Microsoft made you pay for the ones in Vista and called them Ultimate Extras, but unlike their XP. Windows 7 To Be Release This Coming October. For once, the release date is confirmed by Microsoft. Here are some of the new features and benefits. Development of Windows Vista occurred over the span of five and a half years, starting in earnest in May 2001, prior to the release of Microsoft's Windows XP. As the release date draws near for Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system, new details are emerging every day. From the start, Microsoft has been stressing that when. What is Microsoft Windows? The GUI- based OS was introduced in. Microsoft got its start with the partnership of Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1. Gates and Allen co- developed Xenix (a version of Unix) and also collaborated on a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8. The company was incorporated in 1. By submitting your personal information, you agree that Tech. Target and its partners may contact you regarding relevant content, products and special offers. You also agree that your personal information may be transferred and processed in the United States, and that you have read and agree to the Terms of Use and the Privacy Policy. Microsoft became famous with the release of MS DOS, a text- based command line- driven operating system. DOS was mostly based on a purchased intellectual property, QDOS. GUI- based operating systems of that time included Xerox's Alto, released in 1. Apple’s LISA and Macintosh systems, which came later. Microsoft’s die- hard fans referred to such systems derogatorily as WIMPs, which stood for “windows, icons, mouse and pull- down menus (or pointers).”However, Bill Gates saw the potential in GUI- based systems as much as Steve Jobs had and thus began his idea for a project he called Interface Manager. Gates thought he could bring the graphical user interface to the masses at a lower cost than the $9,0. LISA. The rest of Microsoft supported this idea as well but weren’t satisfied with the name. Ironically, given their disparagement of WIMPs, the team selected Windows as the new system’s name. With Windows development, Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Steve Ballmer had begun perhaps the single- most influential collaboration in computer software history. The Windows OS has always had competition, some of which has been free, and some of which has had an edge in style. However, no other operating system is as well known to so many computer users all over the world or so consistently dominant in market share. Microsoft has maintained this position with a steady roll- out of new versions over the years to support and exploit advances in hardware. Before the system’s first release, however, Steve Jobs and Apple filed suit claiming that Windows stole from LISA. Microsoft claimed that both operating systems derived inspiration from Xerox’s Alto and that this was the source of their similarities. The matter was settled with an agreement that Windows 1. Windows versions through the years. Windows 1. 0. 19. Windows 2. 0- 2. 1. Windows 3. 0. Windows 3. The system supported 1. Windows 3. 0 was faster, being more fully optimized for the 3. The system also included the casual games familiar to most Windows users: Solitaire, Minesweeper and Hearts. However any heavier gaming was still run directly on MS DOS, rather than through Windows, which still ran on top of DOS. Exiting to DOS meant that the games had direct hardware access and also access to system resources that Windows would have tied up. So popular was this version that Microsoft decided to release Windows 3. Windows 3. 1 features included support for True. Type fonts and peer- to- peer networking. Windows NT1. 99. 5: Windows 9. Windows 9. 5 was a huge sales success, Microsoft’s breakthrough system and one that introduced huge numbers of people around the world to computers and the Internet. Advertising used the Rolling Stones “Start Me Up” to celebrate bringing the start button to the masses. Windows 9. 5 facilitated hardware installation with plug and play. It also brought more colors, enhanced multimedia capabilities and TCP/IP network support. Direct X began to make Windows gaming possible for more demanding games. Windows 9. 8Windows 9. USB support and quick launch made their first appearance. DOS gaming began to disappear as Windows gaming improved. Towards the end, however, the system was increasingly plagued by malware, a trend that has grown in late stages of life Windows systems. Windows 9. 8 expressed Microsoft's belief that users want and should have a global view of their potential resources and that Web technology should be an important part of the user interface. Although building Microsoft's own Web browser into the user desktop was one of the defining issues in the U. S. Justice Department's antitrust suit against Microsoft in the 1. Windows 9. 8 was released as planned with its tightly integrated browser. Fun fact: Bill Gates encountered the blue screen of death (BSOD) when he demonstrated Windows 9. Comdex trade show. Windows MEWindows ME (Millennium Edition) was the last use of the Windows 9. ME was poorly received. Its most notable new feature was system restore. As many found the OS’s overextended code and the resulting vulnerabilities made their computers unstable, system restore was needed. ME was commonly accepted as the worst- to- date version of Windows and acknowledged as a mistake by Steve Ballmer and Microsoft. According to some critics, ME stood for “mistake edition.”However, in the same year the professional software Windows 2. This much more robust and updated software, based on Windows NT, provided a comparatively stable environment. Displeasure with ME saw some home users installing Windows 2. Plug and play support was increased over NT, further facilitating the home use of Windows 2. Windows XPWindows XP was released as the first NT- based system with a version aimed squarely at the home user. XP was rated highly by both users and critics. The system improved Windows’ appearance with themes, and offered a stable platform. XP was also the end of gaming in DOS, for all intents and purposes. Direct X enabled features in 3. D gaming that Open. GL had trouble keeping up with at times. Future versions of Windows would be compared to XP for gaming performance for some time. XP offered the first Windows support for 6. However, 6. 4- bit computing was not very well supported in XP, and also lacked drivers or much software to run. As it turned out, Windows XP was one of the most popular versions. In combination with the unpopularity of the upcoming Vista system, that would eventually lead to update- related problems. Windows Vista. 20. Windows 7. Windows 7 is built on the Vista kernel. Windows 7 had the visuals of Vista with better start up and program speed. It was easier on memory and more reliable. To many end users, the biggest changes between Vista and Windows 7 are faster boot times, new user interfaces and the addition of Internet Explorer 8. The system plays games almost as well as XP. With true 6. 4- bit support and an increasing separation in Direct X features that were not implemented in XP, that small performance difference benefit was further eroded. Windows 7 became the most used operating system on the Internet and also the most used for PC gaming. Windows 8. 20. 15: Windows 1. See a video presentation of Windows history. Development of Windows Vista - Wikipedia. Development of Windows Vista occurred over the span of five and a half years, starting in earnest in May 2. Vista's original codename, . Many of Microsoft's developers were also re- tasked with improving the security of Windows XP. Faced with ongoing delays and concerns about feature creep, Microsoft announced on August 2. Some previously announced features, such as Win. FS and NGSCB, were dropped or postponed. After . Between September 2. October 2. 00. 6, Microsoft released regular Community Technology Previews (CTP) to beta testers, and two release candidates to the general public. Development of Windows Vista came to a conclusion with the November 8, 2. Windows development, Jim Allchin. Early development. During this period, Microsoft was fairly quiet about what was being worked on, as their marketing and public relations focus was more strongly focused on Windows XP, and Windows Server 2. April 2. 00. 3. Occasional builds of Longhorn were leaked onto popular file sharing networks such as IRC, Bit. Torrent, e. Donkey and various newsgroups, and so most of what is known about builds prior to the first sanctioned development release of Longhorn in May 2. Most builds of Longhorn and Vista were identified by a label that was always displayed in the bottom- right corner of the desktop. A typical build label would look like . Higher build numbers didn't automatically mean that the latest features from every development team at Microsoft was included. Typically, a team working on a certain feature or subsystem would generate their own working builds which developers would test with, and when the code was deemed stable, all the changes would be incorporated back into the main development tree at once. At Microsoft, a number of . The lab in which any given build originated is shown as part of the build label, and the date and time of the build follows that. Some builds (such as Beta 1 and Beta 2) only display the build label in the version information dialog (Winver), and the icons are from Windows XP. Milestone 2. It was the first sighting of the . This feature later appeared in Windows 7. Milestone 3. This build was the first of several that had a working title of . Visually it was not significantly different from Windows XP. One of the notable changes was that the Windows logo was only white, not colored like all the versions of Windows before it. Also the templates in the My Documents and My Pictures were notably different as well as the Open and Save as dialog boxes also included the template, incorporating aesthetic changes and a few new user interface options. An option in this version of the sidebar also made it possible to move the Start button into it, and disable the traditional taskbar entirely. An early revision of Win. FS was also included, but very little in the way of a user interface was included, and as such it appeared to early testers to be nothing more than a service that consumed large amounts of memory and processor time. It was one of the first builds to include the Desktop Composition Engine (DCE), which later became the Desktop Window Manager (DWM). This build appeared on the Internet long after other builds from this time period, and included several of the changes that were first reported as being part of later milestone builds, including Internet Explorer 6. It included the DCE and some early hardware- accelerated alpha transparency and transition effects. As a demonstration of the DCE's capabilities, programs literally flipped into the taskbar and twisted as they were minimized. Also, when you first install this Build, you will get the Windows Longhorn setup with music from Windows XP. This is the only build that has this. New technology. As an evolutionary release over build 3. An optional . The incorporation of the Plex theme made blue the dominant color of the entire application. The Windows XP- style task pane was almost completely replaced with a large horizontal pane that appeared under the toolbars. A new search interface allowed for filtering of results, searching of Windows help, and natural- language queries that would be used to integrate with Win. FS. The animated search characters were also removed. File metadata was also made more visible and more easily editable, with more active encouragement to fill out missing pieces of information. Also of note was the conversion of Windows Explorer to being a . NET application. Milestone 5. A number of features Microsoft had been working on were rolled into this build, such as a range of parental controls, also moved and enlarged the Windows logo to the left side of the Start button a lot of additional configurability for the sidebar (including being able to put it below the start bar at the bottom of the screen), and the notion of . These libraries collected content from around the hard drive. The user could then filter this content and save it in a folder. Microsoft had originally intended to replace all special shell folders (My Documents, My Music, etc.) with virtual folders. However, this change was deemed too drastic and was dropped after Beta 1's release in mid- 2. Libraries were later included in Windows 7. This build was also notable for the debut of the boot screen progress bar that is seen in the final release (though 4. A new Download Manager shell location suggested that Internet Explorer would get a Mozilla- style download manager, though no such functionality was apparent. Significant memory leak problems with Windows Explorer and the Sidebar made this build difficult to use, which resulted in some third- party hacks to mitigate the problem. The back- end database of Outlook Express changed completely, and became dependent on Win. FS to store its email. Win. FS itself still had significant performance and memory usage issues, and so it became common for testers to disable Win. FS entirely, thus rendering Outlook Express inoperative. At the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (Win. HEC) conference in May 2. Microsoft gave their first public demonstrations of the new Desktop Window Manager and Aero. The demonstrations were done on a revised build 4. A number of sessions for developers and hardware engineers at the conference focused on these new features, as well as the Next- Generation Secure Computing Base (previously known as . Also at this conference, Microsoft reiterated their roadmap for delivering Longhorn, pointing to an . Traditional client bits, such as visual style and look, were present but disabled by default. Build 4. 02. 9 (build date of June 1. September 2. 3, 2. This build contained few of the technologies new to build 4. Windows Explorer went through a number of other changes. Larger image and video previews were displayed in a tooltip when the mouse hovered over a file, column- level filtering of results was introduced, and overall performance of Explorer was somewhat improved over build 4. There was also a new analog clock user interface. Batch image processing of images was also introduced, making it possible for a user to rotate a number of images at once. Build 4. 02. 9's name was displayed as . While some had presumed that screenshots of this build were fake because of this seemingly obvious mistake, Microsoft later explained that this was merely a test of some new code to locate and reduce the number of places in the operating system code that the name was defined. This build includes Phodeo, a 3. D view of displaying photos, and full DWM and glass. This was the last build to contain the Plex visual style. Milestone 7. However, the Aero glass from Build 4. It introduced the Slate theme, which debuted in 4. Lab. 06. This build also contained an updated version of Internet Explorer with a version number of 6. New features noted by reviewers included a Download Manager, pop- up blocker, add- on manager and a tool to clear browsing history. When Windows Sidebar was enabled, the word . Although this build identified itself as a . An updated version of Phodeo was included, as well as the Sidebar, a Mini- Windows Media Player and associated sidebar tiles, a functioning build of the Desktop Window Manager and the Jade theme. This build also replaced many XP icons with new Longhorn icons, some of which greatly resemble icons in the final version of Vista. This build was leaked on December 2. The technology, better known by its original code- name of . Ross Anderson, for example, published a paper, collating many of these concerns and criticisms as part of a larger analysis on Trusted Computing. Leaked in May 2. 00. This build introduced an improved Jade theme, although the Slate theme was retained and was the default. Also, the font Segoe UI was introduced for the Jade theme. Build 4. 08. 3 (build date of May 1. Leaked on November 1. Both Sidebar and Win. FS were dropped from this release. Considered highly unstable, including the absence of programs in the start menu and driver and installation issues. Build 4. 09. 3 (build date of August 1. It was one of the last builds compiled before the development reset. Considered highly unstable, it contained Sidebar, Win. FS, and an Avalon- based Windows Movie Maker, a preliminary version of Windows Anytime Upgrade, and the Microsoft Annaspeech synthesizer. There was an Avalon- based Display Properties control panel applet hidden in the \WINDOWS\SYSTEM3. Build 3. 68. 3. Mid- 2. Mid- 2. 00. 5: Development . Internally, some Microsoft employees were describing the Longhorn project as . It offered only a limited subset of features planned for Longhorn, in particular fast file searching and integrated graphics and sound processing, but appeared to have impressive reliability and performance compared to contemporary Longhorn builds. In December 2. 00. Allchin enlisted the help of two other senior executives, Brian Valentine and Amitabh Srivastava, the former being experienced with shipping software at Microsoft, most notably Windows Server 2.
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