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Microsoft Windows Vista is by far the most exciting operating system to hit the market since Windows 95 replaced Windows 3.11 back in the summer of 1995.

There is no denying that Vista will not be installable on every PC platform that once supported a Windows operating system. Most of us are used to upgrading our PCs in one way or another, adding a chunk of memory here or a mass of disk space there to make sure new games or business applications work as required. Vista is no different. Many PCs will, quite simply, not be up to the task. Nevertheless, a lot of computer systems will be upgradeable; some of them might just need a new processor, graphics card, and motherboard BIOS upgrade. However, some older machines (systems that might have also suffered under the weight of Windows ME, for example) might be coming to the end of their natural lives, and in these cases, you’ll need to buy a new system if you want Vista.

Microsoft has strived to make Vista the easiest operating system in the Windows family to install. As with most of the changes and enhancements to usability in Vista, Microsoft has placed an emphasis on making it easy for both home users and enterprise administrators to install, with new and improved installation mechanisms that simplify the process for single installations and with much improved deployment tools that help administrators get their builds ready to ship to thousands of PC systems across the globe.

There’s no denying it—Windows has had a makeover. The Vista interface is arguably the most graphically appealing and user-friendly PC interface available on the market; in addition, the graphics have been enhanced in such a way that they best expose the information on the screen, rather than simply look pretty.

Getting the very best from the Vista interface depends largely on how your hardware and software drivers interact with each other. As long as you have compatible drivers and are using a Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM)— compliant graphics card, Vista will do the hard part for you. Nevertheless, you should be aware of a few options as a user for customizing your system, and this chapter will reveal those options to you.

When you first log in to Vista, you’ll see a bare desktop aside from a couple of familiar icons, such as the Recycle Bin, and you’ll also see the Windows Sidebar on the right side of the screen.

Many of the facilities available to you in Vista for system administration have been improved. Access to these facilities, however, is still in keeping with the Windows legacy style, so this chapter teaches you how to do things the Vista way, covering how to get at the tools hidden in the Control Panel, how to use the new Backup and Restore Center (including system restore points), how to control system services, how to change User Account Control (UAC) settings, and how to use Network Access Protection (NAP).

The command line has been a fundamental component of Windows systems since the early days. With its roots growing from the earliest incarnations of MS-DOS, the use of the command line for running administrative commands, getting inside the system, and performing more esoteric functions has always been there. In fact, system administrators nearly always resort to using the command line for targeted administrative tasks since the immediacy of information available through the plethora of commands is unparalleled in the world of the graphical user interface.

Windows Vista has several new folder structures and elements that will make organizing and finding files, folders, and objects on your system even easier. In this chapter, we cover creating and using search folders, enabling and managing symbolic file system links from the command line, and using the Preview pane in Explorer windows.

The file system tries to get out of your way, but it’s still important to know how to control it. The two ways in which Windows Vista requires your attention are in setting permissions to restrict and filter access to a file and in restoring previous versions via the automatic backup system. In this chapter, we’ll cover permissions and the Previous Versions feature and show you what you need to know.