Optimize Your Desktop Infrastructure: Get the Details

With Windows Vista, you can increase productivity and decrease support costs with enhanced networking solutions, diagnostic capabilities, and desktop management tools. The new operating system helps you reduce information technology costs because it's easier to deploy, manage, and support.

Reducing deployment costs and complexity

Deploying an operating system throughout your company can be expensive because your IT department needs to create, test, and maintain separate operating-system images for each type of computer and each language used in the enterprise. That's a labor-intensive task.

With the new imaging technology in Windows Vista, your IT team can deploy a single OS image to different types of computer hardware and in different languages—significantly reducing deployment costs. These simplified requirements free up time for your IT people, allowing them to focus on strategic initiatives critical to success of your business.

Before deploying Windows Vista, it is important to make sure your business software will run properly on the new operating system. To simplify the testing process, the Application Compatibility Toolkit v5 assists in creating and delivering compatibility modifications. The toolkit helps you analyze your application portfolio, prioritize and rationalize applications that need compatibility enhancements, and assists in creating and delivering compatibility modifications.

Feature chart

	Feature Name	Function

	Program Compatibility Assistant	Protects your investments in applications and saves time by automatically setting an appropriate "compatibility mode" for applications that have been designed for previous versions of Windows.
	Hardware and Language Independence for OS images	Makes it possible—using Windows Imaging Technology (WIM)—for organizations to address a range of hardware configurations with a single installation image. This format allows multiple images to be stored in one file and provides for efficient compression, thus reducing file size significantly.
	Offline Patching and Updating of OS Images	Makes servicing offline images possible—using WIM—including adding and deleting optional components, patches, and drivers without having to create a new image from scratch. All of these properties of WIM together reduce the number of images an organization must maintain, significantly reducing the cost of desktop management.
	Next-Generation TCP/IP Stack	Scales and auto-tunes network stack for improved file transfer speeds, and includes support for IPv4 and IPv6.
	Native Wi-Fi	Enhanced, more secure, extensible native wireless client which can be managed across the organization regardless of hardware brand.

Easier desktop management

Windows Vista includes new tools to simplify desktop management so that users can work without disruption to produce the results that your business needs. User Account Control (UAC) makes it easier to limit administrative privileges, preventing unwanted and costly configuration changes. Enhancements to Group Policy include over 500 new settings, including the ability to control access to removable storage devices and to configure PC power settings. The new Event Viewer includes richer data and documentation to help IT professionals view, prioritize, and respond to changes; and the updated Task Scheduler simplifies automation.

Feature chart

	Feature Name	Function

	User Account Control	Increases security and improves total cost of ownership by reducing the need for users to work in administrator mode to be productive.
	Expanded Group Policy Settings	Reduces administrator time, saves money, and limits security risks by configuring wireless network settings, network quality of service, network security settings, removable storage devices, printers, Internet Explorer, and even power management settings using Group Policy.
	Event Viewer	Allows support professional to view all the operational information about a computer from a single place.
	Task Scheduler	Increases the IT administrator's ability to automate tasks, reducing the time needed to manage the desktop and decreasing the likelihood of manual errors.
	Policy-Based Quality of Service	Prioritizes and/or limits the amount of bandwidth a user or application can use.
	Network Diagnostics	Diagnoses network problems when they occur and automatically resolve the problems or suggest solutions.

Reduce support costs

Reducing the labor needed to support your systems ultimately drives down costs. With new diagnostic, self-help, and remote assistance tools, Windows Vista significantly decreases branch office and help-desk support expenses—and reduces user interruptions. Windows Vista can detect many problems automatically, including hardware failures, networking problems, client performance issues, resource exhaustion, power transition issues, unbootable systems, and service crashes. When it can, Windows Vista will fix problems automatically or help users resolve issues with easy-to-follow instructions.

Feature chart

	Feature Name	Function

	Built-In Diagnostics	Contains built-in diagnostics that look for problems such as hardware failures, network problems, and slow performance so that problems can be resolved before they affect a user's productivity.
	Reliability Monitor	Displays stability problems at the operating system, application, and hardware level to help IT professionals better manage the stability of computers in their organization.
	Remote Assistance	Uses less bandwidth, is faster, and is highly configurable using Group Policy so that support center personnel can resolve problems more quickly while viewing and controlling a remote computer's desktop across the network.
	Guided Help	Provides interactive, step-by-step support to show users exactly how to accomplish a task. Guided Help can also automatically complete tasks while users watch each step animated on the screen—making it easy for users to learn how to complete common task.