How stuff works windows

If you live in the United States, you've probably heard recently about the impending energy crunch that is facing Americans. In the next 20 years, U. The DOE also says that energy supplies will be unable to meet demand for the next two decades. For consumers, this means paying higher prices for electricity, natural gas and oil. While much of the country is concentrating on ways to increase its energy supply, some researchers have been working on new low-power-consuming technologies.

Many elements of the Aero GUI, including the Start menu and the windows themselves, incorporate new search capabilities. While a computer is running, Vista scans the disc drive for changes and maintains a running index of its files.

You can search this index from multiple locations within the GUI. For example, rather than moving your mouse through a series of cascading windows in the Start menu, you can simply type in the program or file you're looking for. You can also create search folders -- saved searches that you can return to when you need to find particular files or folders.

Adding metadata , or tags, to your files can make these searches more efficient. When you search for a file, the computer examines filenames, tags and document contents to find relevant results. In addition to the GUI, Vista comes with several new applications.

Different versions include different features, but here's a sample of what's new:. We'll look at these requirements and explore how Vista creates the 3-D desktop next.

While developing Windows Vista, Microsoft planned to incorporate a new file system called. Short for Windows Future System, stored data in a relational database. Rather than storing information in a series of folders and subfolders, would create indexes of a drive's data.

In August , Microsoft announced that would not be part of Vista. The company instead added new search capabilities to its existing file structure. Windows Vista's desktop environment requires considerably more computer resources than previous versions of the OS. For this reason, and to make the OS more stable, Vista's graphics subsystem is different from its predecessors.

Previous Windows graphics drivers ran in kernel mode. They had direct access to the graphics hardware, and their performance could affect the operating system. This is why graphics errors could cause the entire system to stop responding. WDDM, however, runs primarily in user mode. It has little direct access to the graphics hardware or to critical parts of the operating system.

Microsoft instituted a similar change to Vista's audio subsystem as well. These changes should help make the OS more stable. It allocates the video memory required for different tasks, and it prioritizes applications that need access to the GPU. In other words, it helps budget the computer's video processing resources. This is particularly important, since the OS and applications that use lots of 3-D graphics have to share the computer's graphics resources.

This driver is responsible for updating what you see on the desktop. The DWM draws all of the objects you see on your screen and holds them in a buffer until you need them. By keeping different desktop views in a buffer, the DWM should help prevent the blank square of space that often appears when programs stop responding. The DWM creates the thumbnails used in Flip and Flip-3D, and it can scale on-screen images to fill high-resolution monitors. Although the WDDM is central to creating the windows you use to access your applications, it doesn't communicate with those programs directly.

Instead, it interacts with programs through an application programming interface API. APIs help hardware and software communicate more efficiently by providing sets of instructions for complex tasks.

All this 3-D rendering requires lots of processing power. To use Aero and some of the more hardware-intensive features of Windows Vista, a computer must be Premium Ready. It has to have enough system and graphics memory to handle constant creation and manipulation of 3-D images.

This is why the requirements for a Premium Ready computer sound like what you'd expect from a 3-D game. It must have:. Microsoft has a list of all of the necessary components for a Premium Ready system.

If you're considering upgrading to Windows Vista and want to use the Aero interface, you should keep in mind that these are the minimum requirements. If your computer meets exactly these specifications, it will be able to create the 3-D interface.

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