If Sven Hallauer ever has a moment to reflect in his Redmond office, he can feel quietly pleased with himself.

As the release manager for Vista, he had overall responsibility during the development period for the success of the ‘Most Secure Windows Ever’ project.

For Hallauer, however, the flexibility of the new operating system is just as important as the security features. In particular, Vista is equipped with far better admin tools than previous versions. Previously, administrators were forced to add tools from Resource Kits, but now Vista comes with a lot of tools already on board, as we’ll explain later.

You can tell just by looking at the increased minimum hardware requirements that there’s a lot more in the new version of Windows. It used to be possible to keep an installation of Windows 95 under 200MB, but Vista requires 40 times more hard disk space. Even in comparison to Windows XP, Vista needs five times more space.

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Microsoft, Windows Vista, Tools, Article