Windows Vista: under the hood

There are many other smaller improvements made to Vista that will improve the experience of the OS. For example, fewer reboots should be needed when DLLs and drivers are upgraded, NTFS volumes can be shrunk on-the-fly, NTFS can repair corruption automatically in the background (eliminating the need to reboot to run chkdsk), and improved backups based on volume shadow copy can be made, along with many others. Together, these improvements make for an extremely compelling upgrade. Vista is not simply XP with a new skin; core parts of the OS have been radically overhauled, and virtually every area has seen significant refinement. In terms of the magnitude and extent of these changes, Vista represents probably the biggest leap that the NT platform has ever seen. Never before have significant subsystems been gutted and replaced in the way they are in Vista. As such, it's a hugely important release.