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Windows Vista is the successor to Windows XP (Home and Professional). As such, it takes its place as the latest corporate desktop and workstation upgrade, and additionally sets its sights on the home office and even home entertainment/gaming console. That's quite a lot of product ambition under one hood. Perhaps that is why it has taken so many years to produce. Originally codenamed Longhorn, the "Long" part of the name turned out to be more prophetic than anyone could have known.

The goal Microsoft set for Windows Vista was so ambitious that it might explain the incredibly protracted time it took to get it to market. Vista came later than Godot. We've been waiting since 2003 (in 2000, Microsoft rumored Longhorn would arrive by then). To be more precise, at that time, Bill Gates promised a version of Windows that was more advanced even than Vista, dubbed Blackcomb. However, within 12 months of that announcement, Microsoft realized that this was not feasible and that a scaled-down version of Blackcomb (Longhorn) needed to be released to fill the gap. The market (and Microsoft) could not wait as long as Blackcomb would take to write.

As time passed, however, more and more features worked their way into Longhorn, and the project was becoming increasingly unwieldy. Despite attempts to control the size of this stopgap operating system, Longhorn was actually growing into the original vision of Blackcomb. The code was ballooning, and the process couldn't be stopped. The upshot was that this pushed out the delivery date of Longhorn, first to 2005, then to early 2006, and finally to late 2006.

Some talk circulated at Microsoft about delivering a stopgap version of Vista (which some called Shorthorn) between XP Service Pack 2 and Vista, but that idea was scrubbed. The upshot is that we have waited 5 years for a new operating system from Microsoft, and Microsoft execs have publicly sworn that nobody will ever have to wait this long for a Windows operating system upgrade. We have our doubts.

Anyway, let's move on to talk about what Vista is and is not.

Following in the footsteps of Windows XP Professional and Windows XP Home Edition, Windows Vista comes in five flavors (actually as many as seven, depending on how finely you split the hairs):

Vista Home Basic

Vista Home Premium

Vista Business

Vista Enterprise

Vista Ultimate

In addition to these flavors, available at purchase, Vista lets you "roll your own" and upgrade its features to suit your computing needs and environment. This is a first for Microsoft, which previously steered users into one of two discrete camps, business or home. But as the definition of "workplace" has become increasingly sketchy (as in small office, home office, café office, multimedia office), computer and software makers have had to adapt their marketing strategies and product designs accordingly, building in a maximum of flexibility. Just like at Burger King, now you can have Vista your way.

Similar to Windows XP, which was the first Windows operating system to be erected upon a unified code base for both home and business users, Vista flavors benefit from being very much the same under the hood. Recall that between 1993 and the release of XP, there were very separate home-oriented (Windows 3.x/9x/Me) and corporate-oriented (Windows NT/2000) versions with drastically different internal designs. The common core of all the Vista versions makes program and device driver development much easier because device drivers and software programs need to be created just once rather than twice.

Admittedly, Vista's design mandate was ambitious: to create a more secure, flashy-looking, reliable, easy-to-use operating system with a functionality ranging from that of an excellent gaming and home entertainment platform all the way to a full-blown highly secure, mission-critical business networking machine. It needed to be more attractive, more capable, and much more robust than XP; incorporate all the latest technologies; and be far less susceptible to incursions from viruses, phishing attacks, spam, and the like. These malware infiltrations have kept legions of IT professionals in business, but they have grown nightmarish for all Windows-based IT departments.

Even though new technologies such as USB2, Bluetooth, TV recording (similar to TiVo), and ever-evolving versions of Windows Update, Windows Defender, and the like were being sort of Scotch-taped into XP through online downloads or later market-niche releases, these were really stopgap, piecemeal add-ins. Of course, Vista incorporates all these evolving technologies but goes further: The kernel of the operating system has been rewritten to correct inherent design flaws and vulnerabilities in the XP model that could not otherwise be addressed.

Vista also offered a seriously redesigned interface, while still being familiar enough for users upgrading from Windows 9x or Windows Me. Gone are many of the menus XP users have grown accustomed to, replaced by a much more web-like view of the computer, with phrase-like links that imply their function—for example, "See what happens when I press the Power button."

Windows XP was designed to provide application and hardware compatibility with products made for older versions of Windows, and even MS-DOS game and graphics applications. Vista carries over this same compatibility in its 32-bit versions, but Windows Vista 64-bit versions have abandoned those legacy programs. The time has come to put those old dogs to rest. There are ways around this, using Virtual PC, for example, so you don't have to jettison your favorite Windows 9x or DOS programs in Vista 64. We'll talk about Virtual PC in Chapter 2, "Installing and Upgrading Windows Vista."