There’s not long now. In just one week from today Windows 7 will be released into the wild, ready for anyone to use it. Of course people like me have been using it since that painful day in January when the first beta was released. But behind the success that Windows 7 will be is another operating system by the name of Vista. I thought today I would touch on the memory of that, soon to be superseded by its energy efficient brother.

Both Windows Vista and Windows 7 have its roots in an Operating system called Longhorn. Originally, Longhorn was going to be a minor release between Windows XP and Windows Vienna (later to be known as Windows 7). Development started in May 2001, when XP was about to be released from the flood gates. Early versions of XP were very insecure, and therefore many members working on Longhorn were culled away to work on Windows XP SP2.

Development of Windows Longhorn continued to spiral out of control, with many new features being crammed in. Not only did this skew development, but also created numerous other bugs that would eventually need to be fixed. Eventually the Windows team decided to scrap work on Windows Longhorn and start fresh, basing it off the Server 2003 codebase.

Looking through the development of Windows Longhorn and Vista, one of the really exciting things thats great to look at is the development of the UI. These screenshots (taken from winportal.net aren’t hard to come by, and you can usually find them through a couple of Google searches. I’ve included some below to show how it’s grown from Lunar (the XP them) to aero (the Windows Vista theme)

Development for Windows Vista started again in 2003. The name, Windows Vista was decided in 2005 apparently because Windows 2006 sounded less exciting then Windows XP. We first saw Windows Vista beta 1 in 2005 which was vastly different to what was originally planned. What was once to be a minor stepping stone from XP to Windows 7 became a huge leap from the ageing giant. New security features and a revamped GUI are what I think are the two biggest points of Windows Vista.

But it was these new security features that spelt the demise of Vista. The UAC locked out programs wanting to use admin privileges and prompted you before it was allowed to run. Years of outdated and ancient programming that once opened easily now had a number of prompts which annoyed many people. Thanks to the restructured codebase, various drivers now had to be rewritten for this new OS. As expected this didn’t happen overnight, and many of the initial users (not beta testers) where plagued by problems.

As expected, many of these faults have since been fixed, and Vista is a joy to work with (providing you have the hardware to support it, which brings me to my next point). For some strange reason, Vista demanded a fairly heavy PC to operate, certainly much more than its predecessor. Rather than use the CPU for all of your shiney wiz-bang effects, Windows Vista relies on your computers GPU. This was great if you had one of the supported cards, but if you were like me and you had an Intel 915 integrated graphics card, you were out of luck and were stuck with a rather horrible looking version of Aero. Windows Vista also made proper use of your RAM for caching, which confused a great many of people thinking its using way more than it should. While it is true that Vista required more RAM then XP to run, it was making use of the rest of it to try and help your computer run faster.

All of the problems I just listed above where what many people had to endure. Sadly it is this early impression that stuck with Vista, and gave it bad name. But behind this grey cloud was a silver lining, it created low expectations for its successor. I believe that this was important for Microsoft though, as it allowed Vista to be its whipping boy, of sorts. Software developers have rewritten their software to be compatible with this new era of Windows, making future versions of Windows compatible with all of today’s software (and none of the hassle of the UAC).

Building directly on from Vista, Windows 7 is an extremely optimised and improved version of Windows Vista. Think of it as the stability and speed of Windows XP combined with the look and security of Vista. What you’re left with is an operating system that can be run on a dinosaur. Next week I’ll take a closer look at Windows 7 along with some of the technologies that never made it into Vista.