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The whys, whats and whens of Vista

Ina Fried CNET News.com

Published: 01 Aug 2005 13:25 BST

What are the key hurdles between now and the final launch, and what aspects are the most challenging?
There are several changes that we are going to make that are going to take a lot of focused testing. They are things that customers have really wanted, but they are complex. ]One of these is a feature internally known as LUA — Least User Access.] It's basically running users [in standard-user mode], not in [administrator mode, which makes it easy to add new programs and make other changes, but also to allow major changes to be made by malicious software].

If you are running as a standard user, then we have a lot to do in terms of application compatibility and also getting the user experience right so that users aren't surprised. That's a hurdle. We have most of the work done, frankly, but we expect there is going to be a time frame to hone it.

We have changed the way setup works, basically [end-to-end]. We have a component-based setup now. We just need more time to get that tested with customers, which is why it's probably the most important thing coming out in Beta 1. I worry about everything. We have a lot of code coming in this summer, a lot of code. We'll see how that goes.

Vista marks a change when it comes to shutting off a PC and turning it back on. Today there are a variety of options: shutting down completely, suspending and hibernating. How do you expect that to change with Vista?
We didn't turn on that new technology in Beta 1, that new way of approaching it. What we did in Beta 1 is, there is new code in the system so that the number of times that you have to reboot is minimised. We also put in new technologies for hang protection. What's coming in Beta 2 is we are going to encourage people to conceptually leave their machines on more. That's because we will drop the power usage... so that you will have a better instant-on experience. And then at the same time, when we do save and have to shut down, conceptually, standby and hibernate will be unified.

What we hope — this is not yet final, but what we hope is — you'll just mainly think about two states, off and on, and the system will do the right things, given how long it's been in off state. It may save out more things because there will be different levels of "offness", but to the user, all they'll see is off and on.

We've done some calculations of power savings that we expect. I saw a number that showed basically when 100 million machines are running Vista, the power savings around the world, it is unbelievable.

So I'm not going to quote those now, but we have made those calculations. It actually gets people pumped here, because we feel like, well, we could actually help society in a different way there, which is burning less energy.