Welcome to Windows Vista Secrets, the latest in the bestselling Windows Secrets series!
We’ve
rewritten this book from the ground up in response to this
major release of Microsoft Windows. We hope you enjoy combing
through this book as much as we enjoyed digging through Windows
Vista to find these nuggets of valuable information.
chapter 1 :
I n this preliminary chapter we give you a crash
course in some of the major new features of Vista. Give us 15
minutes and we’ll show you the biggest changes in the operating system —
before you may have to grapple with them yourself.
The Value of Vista
We waited more than five years for Vista. As you may
recall, Windows XP was released with much fanfare in October 2001. But
instead of the next Windows version shipping in just a couple of years,
as originally expected, Microsoft lost its way in the development
process. Vista didn’t make it to consumers until early 2007.
Was it worth the wait?
The short answer is, “Yes.” We believe Vista is a major
advance on Microsoft’s previous operating systems. If you’re buying a
new PC today, we don’t hesitate to recommend that you get Vista
rather than requesting XP or another, older operating system.
(If you’re upgrading an older PC to Vista, by contrast, be sure to
first read our tips in Chapter 3.)
In 2001, Microsoft executives
widely claimed that XP was “the most secure operating system we have
ever delivered.” In fact, XP and its new Web browser, Internet Explorer
6.0, were full of maddening security holes that previous operating
systems didn’t suffer from.
ActiveX exploits, drive-by downloads, and
many other kinds of weaknesses were quickly exploited by black-hat
hackers. Microsoft has been issuing patches for XP and IE 6.0 ever
since....