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

Cycle Time Counter   Prior to Vista, the kernel accounted for CPU time based on the interval clock timer which had a resolution of between 10-15ms. This timing interval was not always fair or accurate since threads where charged for interrupts that occurred while they were running and a... Read more