A comprehensive look at the changes in the design and operation of the Windows Vista operating system. This seminar is ideal for someone who already understands the internals of previous versions of Windows and wants to get up to date with Windows Vista.

Level

Intermediate

Audience

Applications developers; systems software developers; device driver developers; system administrators; system integrators; hardware OEMs; I.T. support personnel

Description

In this seminar you will learn the “internals” of the most important areas of the Windows Vista operating system, and how they are different from previous versions of Windows. This course will “update” the attendee on the changes made to Vista, and relies upon the attendee’s existing knowledge of Windows 2000, Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 internals.

While many of the core operating system features and functions visible to users have remained unchanged since Windows 2000, Windows Vista has made substantial improvements in the implementation of almost every major area of the operating system.

With the removal of DOS compatibility, the installation and booting of Windows Vista is now quite different.  We will look at how Vista is packaged, installed, and boots.

Security is a prime focus of Windows Vista, and we will examine all of the major changes in how Windows security operates, including BitLocker, Data Execution Prevention, Encrypting File System, Integrity Levels, PatchGuard, Privilege Isolation, Network Access Protection, and more.

In addition to Vista being more secure, it is also more robust than previous Windows versions, so we will examine the features and mechanisms that make Vista much more reliable than past operating systems.

You will also learn how the operation and performance of each system mechanism we describe is reflected in the various system monitoring tools. And while this is not specifically a debugging or troubleshooting seminar, the information here is essential for any type of problem analysis.

Topics

• Installation and booting

• Security features

• Reliability

• Networking

• 640bit features

• Performance improvements

• Memory mangement

• Scheduler

• Backwards compatibility

• New device driver models

• User interface

• System administration

Prerequisites

All attendees must have attended one of our INT201 Windows Internals seminars, or have equivalent experience.  This seminar builds on, and does not repeat, material presented in our INT201: Windows Internals seminar.

Windows versions

Windows Vista

Duration and formats

3 days with labs
2 days lecture only

Labs

We strongly recommend the hands-on labs version of this seminar:

As in all of our seminars, we have carefully designed a series of demonstrations, lab exercises, and problems that illustrate, help present, and build on the information presented. For this seminar, we follow nearly every point discussion of an operating system mechanism, principle, or concept with a lab exercise. We have you exercise or manipulate the part of the system described, and then examine displays that confirm the expected results. We also have you look for interactions with, and effects on, the rest of the system. This of course results in greatly increased comprehension and retention of the material.

In the lecture-only version, the lab exercises are replaced with brief demonstrations by the instructor.