Boot Configuration Database (BCD) **Vista unifies the boot mechanism to be platform independent. The information stored in the boot.ini file is now replaced by the BCD, which abstracts the firmware and is unified across different OS installations. The BCD also uses Unicode strings to support internationalization. To help ensure... Read more

SuperFetch™ Everyone is probably familiar with Prefetch which was introduced in Windows XP. Prefetch really only handled single processes at process startup.   In Vista, SuperFetch™ prefetches across a set of applications and takes in to account the frequency of page usgae and the usage of the page in the... Read more

User-Mode Driver Framework (UMDF) Everyone has seen at least one Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) when it comes to buggy kernel-mode drivers causing a crash or allowing privilege escalation.   UMDF is Vista’s attempt to solve at least some of these problems and supports migration of some USB,... Read more

Port Improvement I/O completion ports allow threads to wait efficiently for completion of multiple I/O requests. Before Vista, each completion caused a context switch to the issuing thread. Now, the I/O completion is deferred to when the thread pulls off the completion port, which avoids the context switch. <h2... Read more

Resource Quotas Prior to Vista, quotas were system-wide. Vista supports per-user hard resource quotas that cover: CPU usage working set minimum page file usage nonpaged pool paged pool Process and thread creation have new extended attributes contained in the STARTUPINFOEX structure and new API functions: ProcThreadAttributeList. ... Read more