Windows Vista Reaches Consumers

Windows Vista reached retail consumers on January 30, 2007. Microsoft promoted a redesigned Aero interface, improved search, stronger security, and new multimedia features, but the public launch quickly became dominated by questions about hardware requirements and compatibility.

Vista’s new Windows Display Driver Model was designed to make graphics more stable by moving parts of driver behavior away from the kernel and allowing the GPU to be scheduled more intelligently. User Account Control tried to prevent everyday applications from automatically receiving administrator privileges. Both ideas were technically important, yet early drivers and older software often behaved badly under the new rules.

The result was a release whose underlying engineering was more influential than its reputation suggested. Windows 7 later kept much of Vista’s architecture while refining performance and compatibility, showing that the problem was not simply that Vista had introduced the wrong foundations.