Windows Vista

Windows Vista is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on November 8, 2006, and became generally available on January 30, 2007, on the Windows Marketplace, the first release of Windows to be made available through a digital distribution platform. Vista succeeded Windows XP (2001); at the time, the five-year gap between the two was the longest time span between successive Windows releases.

Microsoft began developing Vista under the codename "Longhorn" in 2001, shortly before the release of XP. It was intended as a small upgrade to bridge the gap between XP and the next major Windows version, codenamed Blackcomb. As development progressed, it assimilated many of Blackcomb's features and was repositioned as a major Windows release. Vista introduced the updated graphical user interface and visual style Aero, Windows Search, redesigned networking, audio, print, and display sub-systems, and new multimedia tools such as Windows DVD Maker among other changes. Vista aimed to increase the level of communication between machines on a home network, using peer-to-peer technology to simplify sharing files and media between computers and devices. Vista included version 3.0 of the .NET Framework, allowing software developers to write applications without traditional Windows APIs. It removed support for Itanium and devices without ACPI.

While its new features and security improvements garnered praise, Vista was the target of significant criticism, such as its high system requirements, more restrictive licensing terms, lack of compatibility, longer boot time, and excessive authorization prompts from User Account Control. It saw lower adoption and satisfaction rates than XP, and it is generally considered a market failure. However, Vista usage did exceed Microsoft's pre-launch two-year-out expectations of achieving 200 million users, with an estimated 330 million internet users in January 2009. On October 22, 2010, Microsoft ceased sales of retail copies of Windows Vista, and the original equipment manufacturer's sales for Windows Vista ceased the following year.

Vista was succeeded by Windows 7 (2009), which retained and refined many of the features that Vista introduced. Microsoft ended mainstream support for Vista on April 10, 2012, and extended support on April 11, 2017. In retrospect, Vista is often described as one of the worst versions of Windows, but also an important one that laid the foundation for future releases.