1.
Microsoft Windows
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Microsoft Windows is a metafamily of graphical operating systems developed, marketed, and sold by Microsoft. It consists of families of operating systems, each of which cater to a certain sector of the computing industry with the OS typically associated with IBM PC compatible architecture. Active Windows families include Windows NT, Windows Embedded and Windows Phone, defunct Windows families include Windows 9x, Windows 10 Mobile is an active product, unrelated to the defunct family Windows Mobile. Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20,1985, Microsoft Windows came to dominate the worlds personal computer market with over 90% market share, overtaking Mac OS, which had been introduced in 1984. Apple came to see Windows as an encroachment on their innovation in GUI development as implemented on products such as the Lisa. On PCs, Windows is still the most popular operating system, however, in 2014, Microsoft admitted losing the majority of the overall operating system market to Android, because of the massive growth in sales of Android smartphones. In 2014, the number of Windows devices sold was less than 25% that of Android devices sold and this comparison however may not be fully relevant, as the two operating systems traditionally target different platforms. As of September 2016, the most recent version of Windows for PCs, tablets, smartphones, the most recent versions for server computers is Windows Server 2016. A specialized version of Windows runs on the Xbox One game console, Microsoft, the developer of Windows, has registered several trademarks each of which denote a family of Windows operating systems that target a specific sector of the computing industry. It now consists of three operating system subfamilies that are released almost at the time and share the same kernel. Windows, The operating system for personal computers, tablets. The latest version is Windows 10, the main competitor of this family is macOS by Apple Inc. for personal computers and Android for mobile devices. Windows Server, The operating system for server computers, the latest version is Windows Server 2016. Unlike its clients sibling, it has adopted a strong naming scheme, the main competitor of this family is Linux. Windows PE, A lightweight version of its Windows sibling meant to operate as an operating system, used for installing Windows on bare-metal computers. The latest version is Windows PE10.0.10586.0, Windows Embedded, Initially, Microsoft developed Windows CE as a general-purpose operating system for every device that was too resource-limited to be called a full-fledged computer. The following Windows families are no longer being developed, Windows 9x, Microsoft now caters to the consumers market with Windows NT. Windows Mobile, The predecessor to Windows Phone, it was a mobile operating system
2.
Windows 7
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Windows 7 is a personal computer operating system developed by Microsoft. It is a part of the Windows NT family of operating systems, Windows 7 was released to manufacturing on July 22,2009, and became generally available on October 22,2009, less than three years after the release of its predecessor, Windows Vista. Windows 7s server counterpart, Windows Server 2008 R2, was released at the same time, Windows 7 continued improvements on Windows Aero with the addition of a redesigned taskbar that allows applications to be pinned to it, and new window management features. Other new features were added to the system, including libraries, the new file sharing system HomeGroup. A new Action Center interface was added to provide an overview of system security and maintenance information. Windows 7 also shipped with updated versions of several applications, including Internet Explorer 8, Windows Media Player. Windows 7 was a success for Microsoft, even prior to its official release. Originally, a version of Windows codenamed Blackcomb was planned as the successor to Windows XP, major features were planned for Blackcomb, including an emphasis on searching and querying data and an advanced storage system named WinFS to enable such scenarios. However, an interim, minor release, codenamed Longhorn, was announced for 2003, by the middle of 2003, however, Longhorn had acquired some of the features originally intended for Blackcomb. Development of Longhorn was also restarted, and thus delayed, in August 2004, a number of features were cut from Longhorn. Blackcomb was renamed Vienna in early 2006, as such, adoption of Vista in comparison to XP remained somewhat low. In July 2007, six months following the release of Vista, it was reported that the next version of Windows would then be codenamed Windows 7. Bill Gates, in an interview with Newsweek, suggested that Windows 7 would be more user-centric, Gates later said that Windows 7 would also focus on performance improvements. Senior Vice President Bill Veghte stated that Windows Vista users migrating to Windows 7 would not find the kind of device compatibility issues they encountered migrating from Windows XP, an estimated 1,000 developers worked on Windows 7. These were broadly divided into core operating system and Windows client experience, in October 2008, it was announced that Windows 7 would also be the official name of the operating system. The first external release to select Microsoft partners came in January 2008 with Milestone 1, at PDC2008, Microsoft demonstrated Windows 7 with its reworked taskbar. On December 27,2008, the Windows 7 Beta was leaked onto the Internet via BitTorrent. According to a performance test by ZDNet, Windows 7 Beta beat both Windows XP and Vista in several key areas, including boot and shutdown time and working with files, such as loading documents
3.
Windows Vista
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Windows Vista is an operating system by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops, tablet PCs and media center PCs. Development was completed on 8 November 2006, and over the three months, it was released in stages to computer hardware and software manufacturers, business customers. On 30 January 2007, it was released worldwide and was available for purchase. It was succeeded by Windows 7, which was released to manufacturing on 22 July 2009, 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. Windows Vista included version 3.0 of the. NET Framework, Microsofts primary stated objective with Windows Vista was to improve the state of security in the Windows operating system. One common criticism of Windows XP and its predecessors was their commonly exploited security vulnerabilities and overall susceptibility to malware, viruses, Microsoft stated that it prioritized improving the security of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 above finishing Windows Vista, thus delaying its completion. While these new features and security improvements have garnered positive reviews, Vista has also been the target of much criticism, as a result of these and other issues, Windows Vista had seen initial adoption and satisfaction rates lower than Windows XP. In May 2010, Windows Vistas market share had a range from 15% to 26%. On 22 October 2010, Microsoft ceased sales of copies of Windows Vista. As of March 2017, Vistas market share was 0. 72%, Microsoft stopped providing mainstream support for Windows Vista on 10 April 2012. Extended support will end on 11 April 2017, Microsoft began work on Windows Vista, known at the time by its codename Longhorn, in May 2001, five months before the release of Windows XP. It was originally expected to ship sometime late in 2003 as a step between Windows XP and Blackcomb, which was planned to be the companys next major operating system release. Gradually, Longhorn assimilated many of the important new features and technologies slated for Blackcomb, in some builds of Longhorn, their license agreement said For the Microsoft product codenamed Whistler. Many of Microsofts developers were also re-tasked to build updates to Windows XP, faced with ongoing delays and concerns about feature creep, Microsoft announced on 27 August 2004, that it had revised its plans. Longhorn became known as Vista in 2005, the early development stages of Longhorn were generally characterized by incremental improvements and updates to Windows XP. After several months of relatively little news or activity from Microsoft with Longhorn, Microsoft released Build 4008 and it was also privately handed out to a select group of software developers. An optional new taskbar was introduced that was thinner than the previous build, the most notable visual and functional difference, however, came with Windows Explorer. The incorporation of the Plex theme made blue the dominant color of the entire application, the Windows XP-style task pane was almost completely replaced with a large horizontal pane that appeared under the toolbars
4.
Windows Server 2008
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Windows Server 2008 is one of Microsoft Windows server line of operating systems. Released to manufacturing on February 4,2008, and officially released on February 27,2008, it is the successor to Windows Server 2003, a second release, named Windows Server 2008 R2, was released to manufacturing on July 22,2009. Originally known as Windows Server Codename Longhorn, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates announced its official title during his address at WinHEC16 May 2007. Beta 1 was released on 27 July 2005, Beta 2 was announced and released on 23 May 2006 at WinHEC2006, Release Candidate 0 was released to the general public on 24 September 2007 and Release Candidate 1 was released to the general public on 5 December 2007. Windows Server 2008 was released to manufacturing on 4 February 2008, processors and memory devices are modeled as Plug and Play devices, to allow hot-plugging of these devices. Windows Server 2008 includes a variation of installation called Server Core, Server Core is a significantly scaled-back installation where no Windows Explorer shell is installed. All configuration and maintenance is done entirely through command-line interface windows, however, Notepad and some control panel applets, such as Regional Settings, are available. Server Core does not include the. NET Framework, Internet Explorer, Server Core can also be used to create a cluster with high availability using failover clustering or network load balancing. Active Directory roles are expanded with identity, certificate, and rights management services and this role of Active Directory is being renamed as Active Directory Domain Services. Identity and certificate services allow administrators to manage accounts and the digital certificates that allow them to access certain services. Identity Integration Feature Pack is included as Active Directory Metadirectory Services, each of these services represents a server role. Windows Server 2008 offers high availability to services and applications through Failover Clustering, most server features and roles can be kept running with little to no downtime. In Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2, the way clusters are qualified changed significantly with the introduction of the cluster validation wizard, the cluster validation wizard is a feature that is integrated into failover clustering in Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2. With the cluster validation wizard, an administrator can run a set of focused tests on a collection of servers that are intended to use as nodes in a cluster and this feature is only available in Enterprise and Datacenter editions of Windows Server. The operating system now features S. M. A. R. T, detection techniques to help determine when a hard disk may fail. Hyper-V is hypervisor-based virtualization software, forming a part of Microsofts virtualization strategy. It virtualizes servers on an operating systems kernel layer and it can be thought of as partitioning a single physical server into multiple small computational partitions. Hyper-V includes the ability to act as a Xen virtualization hypervisor host allowing Xen-enabled guest operating systems to run virtualized
5.
Task Manager (Windows)
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Task Manager, previously known as Windows Task Manager, is a task manager, system monitor, and startup manager included with Microsoft Windows systems. The Task Manager can also be used to set priorities, processor affinity, forcibly terminate processes. Windows Task Manager was introduced with Windows NT4.0, previous versions of Windows NT included the Task List application, which had far fewer features. The task list was capable of listing currently running processes and killing them, in Windows XP only, a Shutdown menu is also present that allows access to Standby, Hibernate, Turn off, Restart, Log Off, and Switch User. Windows 3. x and Windows 9x had a known as tasks to display the programs currently running. This file was executed by running the taskman. exe file from the Windows folder, the Applications tab in Task Manager shows a list of programs currently running. A set of rules determines whether a process appears on this tab or not, most applications that have a taskbar entry will appear on this tab, but this is not always the case. Right-clicking any of the applications in the list allows switching to that application, ending the application, choosing to End Task from the Applications tab causes a request to be sent to the application for it to terminate. This is different from what happens when End Process is chosen from the Processes tab, the Processes tab shows a list of all running processes on the system. This list includes Windows Services and processes from other accounts, prior to Windows XP, process names longer than 15 characters in length are truncated. Beginning with Windows XP, the Delete key can also be used to terminate processes on the Processes tab, right-clicking a process in the list allows changing the priority the process has, setting processor affinity, and allows the process to be ended. Choosing to End Process causes Windows to immediately kill the process, choosing to End Process Tree causes Windows to immediately kill the process, as well as all processes directly or indirectly started by that process. Unlike choosing End Task from the Applications tab, when choosing to End Process the program is not given warning nor a chance to clean up before ending. However, when a process that is running under a security context different from the one of the process which issued the call to TerminateProcess, the use of the KILL command line utility is required. By default the processes tab shows the user account the process is running under, the amount of CPU, there are many more columns that can be shown by choosing Select columns. The performance tab shows overall statistics about the performance, most notably the overall amount of CPU usage. A chart of recent usage for both of these values is shown, Details about specific areas of memory are also shown. There is an option to break the CPU usage graph into two sections, kernel mode time and user mode time, many device drivers, and core parts of the operating system run in kernel mode, whereas user applications run in user mode
6.
Performance Monitor
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Performance Monitor is a system monitoring program introduced in Windows NT3.1. It monitors various activities on a such as CPU or memory usage. This type of application may be used to determine the cause of problems on a local or remote computer by measuring the performance of hardware, software services, and applications. In Windows 9x, System Monitor is not installed automatically during Windows setup and it has few counters available and offers little in the way of customization. In contrast, the Windows NT Performance Monitor is available out-of-the-box and has over 350 performance measurement criteria available, Performance Monitor can display information as a graph, a bar chart, or numeric values and can update information using a range of time intervals. The categories of information that can be monitored depends on which networking services are installed, but they always include file system, kernel, other possible categories include Microsoft Network Client, Microsoft Network Server, and protocol categories. The System Monitor naming was kept in Windows XP, some third-party publications referred to it as Performance Monitor however, even in Windows 2000 or XP contexts. A new feature added to the Performance Monitor in Windows Vista is Data Collector Set, which allows sets of accounting parameters to be easily manipulated as a group
7.
International Standard Book Number
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The International Standard Book Number is a unique numeric commercial book identifier. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an e-book, a paperback and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, the method of assigning an ISBN is nation-based and varies from country to country, often depending on how large the publishing industry is within a country. The initial ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 based upon the 9-digit Standard Book Numbering created in 1966, the 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108. Occasionally, a book may appear without a printed ISBN if it is printed privately or the author does not follow the usual ISBN procedure, however, this can be rectified later. Another identifier, the International Standard Serial Number, identifies periodical publications such as magazines, the ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 in the United Kingdom by David Whitaker and in 1968 in the US by Emery Koltay. The 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108, the United Kingdom continued to use the 9-digit SBN code until 1974. The ISO on-line facility only refers back to 1978, an SBN may be converted to an ISBN by prefixing the digit 0. For example, the edition of Mr. J. G. Reeder Returns, published by Hodder in 1965, has SBN340013818 -340 indicating the publisher,01381 their serial number. This can be converted to ISBN 0-340-01381-8, the check digit does not need to be re-calculated, since 1 January 2007, ISBNs have contained 13 digits, a format that is compatible with Bookland European Article Number EAN-13s. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an ebook, a paperback, and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, a 13-digit ISBN can be separated into its parts, and when this is done it is customary to separate the parts with hyphens or spaces. Separating the parts of a 10-digit ISBN is also done with either hyphens or spaces, figuring out how to correctly separate a given ISBN number is complicated, because most of the parts do not use a fixed number of digits. ISBN issuance is country-specific, in that ISBNs are issued by the ISBN registration agency that is responsible for country or territory regardless of the publication language. Some ISBN registration agencies are based in national libraries or within ministries of culture, in other cases, the ISBN registration service is provided by organisations such as bibliographic data providers that are not government funded. In Canada, ISBNs are issued at no cost with the purpose of encouraging Canadian culture. In the United Kingdom, United States, and some countries, where the service is provided by non-government-funded organisations. Australia, ISBNs are issued by the library services agency Thorpe-Bowker
8.
Microsoft TechNet
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Microsoft TechNet is a Microsoft web portal and web service for IT professionals. On July 1,2013, it was announced that Microsoft is discontinuing the TechNet subscription service, with the purchase, TechNet also included a web-based TechNet Magazine which is discontinued since October 2013. Past issues are available for reading. TechNets primary web presence is a collection of sites for IT professionals that provide information, documentation, the main website, and most of its constituent applications below are available in 12 languages, generate traffic from 11.5 million per month and host approx. Similar to the MSDN Library which contains information for software developers. The technical content is available on the web and on CDs and DVDs. In January 2014, Microsoft announced that Microsoft Security Bulletins and Advisories would be merged into the TechNet Library, TechNet Forums are the web-based forums used by the community to discuss a wide variety of IT professional topics. TechNet has their own blogging platform, which hosts the blogs of Microsoft employees only, the TechNet Wiki is a technical resource inspired by Wikipedia. Wiki is a community site and does not offer official documentation from Microsoft, anyone who joins the community can contribute new topics, edit and enhance existing topics, provide comments and friend other registered users. The goals of the wiki include providing broader and more in-depth solutions content from a variety of authors with less publishing friction than traditional mechanisms. The goal of the social bookmarking application is to provide a method whereby members of the IT professional community can, by filtering on one or more tags, users can discover popular or recent links and subscribe to a feed of those links. Find and follow experts recommended sites, each profile page includes a feed of the users contributions. Users can be discovered through a menu on each bookmark. Demonstrate their expertise through the links displayed in their profile, the initial release of the application provides standard features for the genre, including a bookmarklet and import capabilities. The TechNet web site is also starting to incorporate feeds of social bookmarks from experts, TechNet also did provide access to Microsoft software for evaluation purposes through the TechNet subscription. The subscription provided access to Microsofts software, product keys, however, expired after the duration of the subscriptions, the subscription was sold on an annual basis. The Standard subscription provided access to most of the software except specific enterprise-oriented software, the Professional subscription was more expensive and provided access to all software, including two free professional support calls and two collections of Microsoft E-learning. The last day to purchase a TechNet Subscription was August 31,2013, subscribers could activate purchased subscriptions through September 30,2013
9.
Microsoft
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Its best known software products are the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, Microsoft Office office suite, and Internet Explorer and Edge web browsers. Its flagship hardware products are the Xbox video game consoles and the Microsoft Surface tablet lineup, as of 2016, it was the worlds largest software maker by revenue, and one of the worlds most valuable companies. Microsoft was founded by Paul Allen and Bill Gates on April 4,1975, to develop and it rose to dominate the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by Microsoft Windows. The companys 1986 initial public offering, and subsequent rise in its share price, since the 1990s, it has increasingly diversified from the operating system market and has made a number of corporate acquisitions. In May 2011, Microsoft acquired Skype Technologies for $8.5 billion, in June 2012, Microsoft entered the personal computer production market for the first time, with the launch of the Microsoft Surface, a line of tablet computers. The word Microsoft is a portmanteau of microcomputer and software, Paul Allen and Bill Gates, childhood friends with a passion for computer programming, sought to make a successful business utilizing their shared skills. In 1972 they founded their first company, named Traf-O-Data, which offered a computer that tracked and analyzed automobile traffic data. Allen went on to pursue a degree in science at Washington State University. The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics featured Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systemss Altair 8800 microcomputer, Allen suggested that they could program a BASIC interpreter for the device, after a call from Gates claiming to have a working interpreter, MITS requested a demonstration. Since they didnt actually have one, Allen worked on a simulator for the Altair while Gates developed the interpreter and they officially established Microsoft on April 4,1975, with Gates as the CEO. Allen came up with the name of Micro-Soft, as recounted in a 1995 Fortune magazine article. In August 1977 the company formed an agreement with ASCII Magazine in Japan, resulting in its first international office, the company moved to a new home in Bellevue, Washington in January 1979. Microsoft entered the OS business in 1980 with its own version of Unix, however, it was MS-DOS that solidified the companys dominance. For this deal, Microsoft purchased a CP/M clone called 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products, branding it as MS-DOS, following the release of the IBM PC in August 1981, Microsoft retained ownership of MS-DOS. Since IBM copyrighted the IBM PC BIOS, other companies had to engineer it in order for non-IBM hardware to run as IBM PC compatibles. Due to various factors, such as MS-DOSs available software selection, the company expanded into new markets with the release of the Microsoft Mouse in 1983, as well as with a publishing division named Microsoft Press. Paul Allen resigned from Microsoft in 1983 after developing Hodgkins disease, while jointly developing a new OS with IBM in 1984, OS/2, Microsoft released Microsoft Windows, a graphical extension for MS-DOS, on November 20,1985. Once Microsoft informed IBM of NT, the OS/2 partnership deteriorated, in 1990, Microsoft introduced its office suite, Microsoft Office
10.
PC World
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PC World, stylized PCWorld, is a global computer magazine published monthly by IDG. Since 2013 it has been an online-only publication and it offers advice on various aspects of PCs and related items, the Internet, and other personal-technology products and services. The current editor of PC World is Jon Phillips, formerly of Wired, in August 2012, he replaced Steve Fox, who had been editorial director since the December 2008 issue of the magazine. Fox replaced the magazines veteran editor Harry McCracken, who resigned that spring, after some rocky times, PC World is published under other names such as PC Advisor and PC Welt in some countries. PC Worlds company name is IDG Consumer & SMB, and it is headquartered in San Francisco, some of the non-English PC World websites now redirect to other IDG sites, for example, PCWorld. dk is now Computerworld. dk. PC Magazine was also acquired by Ziff Davis, the magazine was founded by David Bunnell and Cheryl Woodard, and its first editor was Andrew Fluegelman. Many well-known technology writers have contributed to PC World, including Steve Bass, Daniel Tynan, Christina Wood, dvorak, Stephen Manes, Lincoln Spector, Stewart Alsop, David Coursey, James A. Martin, and others. Editorial leadership has included Harry Miller, Richard Landry, Eric Knorr, Phil Lemmons, Cathryn Baskin, Kevin McKean, in 2005 the show Digital Duo was slightly rebranded and relaunched as PC Worlds Digital Duo and ran for an additional 26 episodes. As of 2006, PC Worlds audited rate base of 750,000 made it the largest-circulation computing magazine in the world, on July 10,2013 owner IDG announced that the magazine would cease its 30-year print run. The August 2013 issue was the last printed of PC World magazine, PC Advisor in Ireland and the United Kingdom. PC Welt, is the German-language edition, info Komputer, is the Indonesian-language edition. Thế Giới Vi Tính, is the Vietnamese-language edition, mikro - PC World, is the Serbian-language edition. Мир ПК, is the Russian-language edition, in May 2007, McCracken resigned abruptly under controversial circumstances. According to sources quoted in Wired, McCracken quit abruptly because the new CEO of PC World, Colin Crawford, tried to kill an unfavorable story about Apple, Crawford responded, calling media reports of McCrackens resignation inaccurate. CNET later reported that McCracken had told colleagues that IDG was pressuring him to avoid stories that were critical of major advertisers, on May 9, Crawford was transferred to another department and McCracken returned to PC World until his departure in 2008
11.
International Data Group
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International Data Group, Inc. is an American-based media, data and marketing services and venture capital organization. IDG evolved from International Data Corporation which was founded in 1964 in Newtonville, Massachusetts, IDC provides market research and advisory services and is now a subsidiary of IDG. IDG operates in 97 countries and is headquartered in Boston, IDGs brands include CIO, Computerworld, PCWorld and Macworld. IDG produces these and its publications on a national level in each country. IDGs subsidiary IDG World Expo produces large-scale events, such as conventions and these are typically conventions for technology businesses. IDG World Expo runs E for All, Macworld Conference & Expo, IDG also has its own international news agency, IDG News Service. It is headquartered in Boston and has bureaus in cities such as New York, Beijing, Amsterdam and it provides news, images, video and other editorial content to IDGs web sites and print publications worldwide. In 2005, several investors, including IDG, attempted to purchase BlogCN, IDG Books, which was a public company spun off from the privately held IDG, published the popular self-help. For Dummies books. The. For Dummies range was limited to computer related fields. The series is now published by John Wiley & Sons, IDG Books/Hungry Minds — as IDG Books was briefly renamed before being sold to Wiley in 2001 — no longer exists as a separate company. In 2014, the founder and then-owner died, leaving the corporation to the McGovern Foundation, in 2016, the corporation retained Goldman Sachs to explore a possible sale. Also at the time, International Data Group published publications such as Computerworld magazine, on March 29, China Oceanwide Holdings Group announced the close of the acquisition of International Data Group, Inc. IDG Connect, a division of International Data Group, produces, publishes and distributes local IT and business information. Founded in 2006, it has offices in Framingham, Massachusetts, IDG Ventures was founded in 1996. It is a network of venture capital funds with approximately $3.6 billion under management. The IDG Ventures network comprises five independent partnerships managing funds in North America, each partnership makes investments on behalf of its limited partners, including IDG. The latest San Francisco fund, formed in 2007, accepted other institutional investors in addition to IDG, following the successful launch of the San Francisco fund, IDG organized its non-publishing investments in China into venture funds. In 2009, IDG Ventures China renamed itself IDG Capital Partners to reflect the breadth of its half dozen funds encompassing start-up venture through growth investments, in 2000, IDG started a fund in Europe, this fund is now closed
12.
Cmd.exe
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Command Prompt, also known as cmd. exe or cmd, is the command-line interpreter on Windows NT, Windows CE, OS/2 and eComStation operating systems. It is the counterpart of COMMAND. COM in DOS and Windows 9x systems, the initial version of Command Prompt for Windows NT was developed by Therese Stowell. Command Prompt interacts with the user through a command-line interface, in Windows, this interface is implemented through Win32 console. Command Prompt may take advantage of available to native programs of its own platform. For example, in OS/2, it can use real pipes in command pipelines, as a result, it is possible to redirect the standard error stream. In Windows, Command Prompt is compatible with COMMAND. COM but provides the following extensions over it, in the OS/2, errors are reported in the chosen language of the system, their text being taken from the system message files. The HELP command can then be issued with the error message number to obtain further information, supports using of arrow keys to scroll through command history. This function was available to COMMAND. COM via an external component called DOSKEY. Adds command-line completion for file and folder paths Treats the Caret character as the character, in other words. There special characters in Command Prompt and COMMAND. COM that are part of the syntax and, if specified without caret, supports delayed variable expansion, fixing DOS idioms that made using control structures hard and complex. The extensions can be disabled, providing a stricter compatibility mode, internal commands have also been improved, The DelTree command was merged into the RD command, as part of its /S switch. SetLocal and EndLocal commands limit the scope of changes to the environment, changes made to the command line environment after SetLocal commands are local to the batch file. EndLocal command restores the previous settings, the Call command allows subroutines within batch file. The Call command in COMMAND. COM only supports calling external batch files, File name parser extensions to the Set command are comparable with C shell. The Set command can perform expression evaluation, an expansion of the For command supports parsing files and arbitrary sets in addition to file names. The new PushD and PopD commands provide access past navigated paths similar to forward, the conditional IF command can perform case-insensitive comparisons and numeric equality and inequality comparisons in addition to case-sensitive string comparisons. This was available in DR-DOS but not in PC DOS or MS-DOS
13.
Control Panel (Windows)
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Additional applets can be provided by third party software. The Control Panel has been an inherent part of the Microsoft Windows operating system since Windows 2.0, physically, these applets are stored as. cpl files. For example, the Add or Remove Programs applet is stored under the name appwiz. cpl in the SYSTEM32 folder, many of the individual Control Panel applets can be accessed in other ways. For instance, Display Properties can be accessed by right-clicking on an empty area of the desktop, the classic view consists of shortcuts to the various control panel applets, usually without any description. The categories are seen if the user use Details view, the category view consists of categories, which when clicked on display the control panel applets related to the category. In Windows Vista, the category used applets below the name of the category, the Control Panel can be accessed quickly by typing control in the Run dialog box. HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Explorer\ControlPanel\Namespace This contains the location of the CLSID variables for all the panels not included as cpl files and these are commonly folders or shell applets, though Windows Vista allows physical programs themselves to be registered as well. The CLSID then allows items such as the icon, infobox and category to be set, the control panel then uses these lists to locate the applets and load them into the control panel program when started by the user. In addition to using the panel, a user can also invoke the applets manually via the command processor. For instance, the syntax Control. exe inetcpl. cpl or control. exe /name Microsoft. InternetOptions will run the internet properties applet in Windows XP or Vista respectively, while both syntax examples are accepted on Windows Vista, only the former one is accepted on Windows XP. These are options in the panel that show devices connected to the computer. They do not actually offer a direct interface to control these devices, such applets include, Scanners and Cameras Game Controllers Portable Media Devices Third-party software vendors have released many applets. Although it is impossible to mention all of them, some of them are listed here, System Preferences – same purpose program on macOS How to run Control Panel tools by typing a command at Microsoft. com
14.
Device Manager
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Device Manager is a Control Panel applet in Microsoft Windows operating systems. It allows users to view and control the hardware attached to the computer, when a piece of hardware is not working, the offending hardware is highlighted for the user to deal with. The list of hardware can be sorted by various criteria, in NT-based versions, it is included as a Microsoft Management Console snap-in. A disabled device has either been disabled by a user or by some way of error. In Windows 95 through XP, this is denoted by a red X, in Windows Vista and Windows 7, this was replaced by a grey downward pointing arrow in the lower right-hand corner of the devices icon. There are many reasons why hardware may not work properly, if Windows recognizes a problem with a device, it is denoted by a black exclamation point on a yellow triangle in the lower right-hand corner of the devices icon. Hardware may not be recognized if it is not installed properly or not compatible with your system and this is denoted by a yellow question mark in place of the devices icon. Note that this does not indicate a problem or disabled state, Device Manager error codes are numerical codes, each accompanied by an error message, which help users determine what kind of issue Windows is having with a piece of hardware. The driverquery command-line program generates lists of installed devices and drivers, similar to the Device Managers output and this is useful for note-taking and for reporting problems to remote third parties such as technical support personnel. Device driver Microsoft Management Console Troubleshooting The DevCon utility
15.
Disk Cleanup
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Disk Cleanup is a computer maintenance utility included in Microsoft Windows designed to free up disk space on a computers hard drive. The utility first searches and analyzes the hard drive for files that are no longer of any use, the option of removing hibernation data may not be ideal for some users as this may remove the hibernate option. Aside from removing unnecessary files, users also have the option of compressing files that have not been accessed over a set period of time and this option provides a systematic compression scheme. Infrequently accessed files are compressed to free up disk space while leaving the frequently used files uncompressed for faster access times. If after file compression, a user wishes to access a compressed file, the access times may be increased and vary from system to system
16.
Disk Defragmenter (Windows)
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Disk Defragmenter is a utility in Microsoft Windows designed to increase access speed by rearranging files stored on a disk to occupy contiguous storage locations, a technique called defragmentation. Defragmenting a disk minimizes head travel, which reduces the time it takes to read files from, beginning with Windows XP, Disk Defragmenter also reduces system startup times. As of Windows 10, the program has been renamed to Defragment, Microsofts MS-DOS did not defragment hard disks. Several third party software developers marketed defragmenters to fill this gap, Windows NT, however, did not offer a Defrag utility, and Symantec was suggested as a possible source of the utility. Initial releases of Windows NT lacked a defragmentation tool, versions through Windows NT3.51 did not have an application programming interface for moving data clusters on hard disks. Microsoft included file system control commands to move clusters in the Windows NT4.0 kernel, however, Windows NT4.0 did not provide a graphical or command-line user interface. Disk Defragmenter also shipped as part of Windows 95, Windows 98 and it could be scheduled using a Maintenance Wizard and supported command line switches. This version had the limitation that if the contents of the drive changed during defragmentation, it rescanned the drive, the Disk Defragmenter in Windows 2000 was a stripped-down licensed version of Diskeeper, licensed from Diskeeper Corporation. It uses the techniques, Moving all the index or directory information to one spot. Moving this spot into the center of the data, i. e. one third of the way in, Moving infrequently used files further from the directory area. Obeying a user-provided table of file descriptions to emphasize or ignore, making files contiguous so that they can be read without unnecessary seeking. In Windows 2000 and later operating systems, Disk Defragmenter has the following limitations, in particular, this includes the registry, page file and hibernation file. Prior to the Windows Vista release, only one volume could be analyzed or defragmented at a time, only local volumes can be defragmented, network volumes are not supported. The GUI version prior to Windows Vista cannot be scheduled, however, the command line utility since Windows XP and later can be scheduled. Unlike previous versions, the GUI version in Windows Vista does not display a map of disk fragmentation, in addition, the Windows 2000 version has the following limitations which were removed in Windows XP, Defragmenting NTFS volumes with cluster sizes larger than 4 kilobytes is not possible. It is not possible to perform fine-grained movement of uncompressed NTFS file data in Windows 2000, Moving a single file cluster also moves the 4 KB part of the file that contains the cluster. EFS encrypted files are not defragmented, Windows Disk Defragmenter was updated to alleviate some restrictions. It no longer relies on the Windows NT Cache Manager, which prevented the defragmenter from moving pieces of a file that cross a 256KB boundary within the file, NTFS metadata files can also be defragmented
17.
Driver Verifier
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Driver Verifier is a tool included in Microsoft Windows that replaces the default operating system subroutines with ones that are specifically developed to catch device driver bugs. Once enabled, it monitors and stresses drivers to detect illegal function calls or actions that may be causing system corruption and it can simulate certain conditions such as low memory, I/O verification, pool tracking, IRQL checking, deadlock detection, DMA checks, IRP logging, etc. The verifier works by forcing drivers to work with minimal resources, each new Windows version has since introduced several new, more stringent checks for testing and verifying drivers and detecting new classes of driver defects. Driver Verifier is not normally used on machines used in productive work and it can cause undetected and relatively harmless errors in drivers to manifest, especially ones not digitally signed by Windows Hardware Quality Labs, causing blue screen fatal system errors. It also causes resource-starved drivers to underperform and slow general operation if the constraints imposed by Verifier are not reversed after debugging, Microsoft recommends not all drivers should be verified at the same time
18.
Event Viewer
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Event Viewer is a component of Microsofts Windows NT line of operating systems that lets administrators and users view the event logs on a local or remote machine. In Windows Vista, Microsoft overhauled the event system, an example is the Administrative Events field under Custom Views which can have over a thousand errors or warnings logged over a months time. Windows NT has featured event logs since its release in 1993, applications and operating-system components can use this centralized log service to report events that have taken place, such as a failure to start a component or to complete an action. The Event Viewer uses event IDs to define the uniquely identifiable events that a Windows computer can encounter, for example, when a users authentication fails, the system may generate Event ID672. Windows NT4.0 added support for defining event sources, Windows 2000 added the capability for applications to create their own log sources in addition to the three system-defined System, Application, and Security log-files. Windows 2000 also replaced NT4s Event Viewer with a Microsoft Management Console snap-in, Windows Server 2003 added the AuthzInstallSecurityEventSource API calls so that applications could register with the security-event logs, and write security-audit entries. Versions of Windows based on the Windows NT6.0 kernel no longer have a 300-megabyte limit to their total size, discontinued after XP. eventcreate - a command to put custom events in the logs. Eventtriggers - a command to create event driven tasks, discontinued after XP, replaced by the Attach task to this event feature. Event Viewer consists of a rewritten event tracing and logging architecture on Windows Vista, the XML representation of the event can be viewed on the Details tab in an events properties. It is also possible to all potential events, their structures, registered event publishers and their configuration using the wevtutil utility. There are a number of different types of event logs including Administrative, Operational, Analytic. Selecting the Application Logs node in the Scope pane reveals numerous new subcategorized event logs, Events are published asynchronously to reduce the performance impact on the event publishing application. Event attributes are much more detailed and show EventID, Level, Task, Opcode. Users can filter event logs by one or more criteria or by a limited XPath 1.0 expression, open Windows Event Log Expand out Windows Logs Select the log file that is of interest to you Right-click on the Event Log and select Filter Current Log. Change the selected tab from Filter to XML Check the box to Edit query manually Paste your query into the text box and you will find sample queries below.0. The Event Collector service can automatically forward event logs to other systems, running Windows Vista. Event logs can also be viewed from other computers or multiple event logs can be centrally logged and monitored agentlessly. Events can also be associated with tasks, which run in the redesigned Task Scheduler and trigger automated actions when particular events take place
19.
IExpress
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IExpress is a Microsoft utility bundled with various editions of Windows operating systems that is used to create a single self-extracting package from a set of files. Such packages can be used to install applications, executables, drivers, other system components, or setup bootstrappers. It is bundled with the editions of Windows that are, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10 and Windows Server 2012. It was also included as part of all Internet Explorer Administration Kit releases 4,5 and 6, IExpress can be used for distributing self-contained installation packages to multiple local or remote Windows computers. It creates a self-extracting executable or a compressed Cabinet file using either the front end interface. SED files can be modified with any plain text/ASCII editor, like Notepad, all self-extracting files created by IExpress use CAB compression algorithms, are compressed using the MakeCab tool, and are extracted using the WExtract tool. IEXPRESS. EXE is located in the SYSTEM32 folder of both Windows 32 and 64-bit installations, the front end interface can be started by manually navigating to the respective directory and opening the executable, or by typing IExpress into the Run window of the Start Menu. It asks what the package should do, extract files and then run a program, if the option to create an archive and run a program is selected, then there will be an additional step, prompting the user to select the program that will be run upon extraction. The self-extracting packages created with IExpress have vulnerabilities which allow arbitrary code execution due to the way they handle their installation command, additionally, due to the way Windows user account control handles installers, these vulnerabilities allow a privilege escalation
20.
Microsoft Management Console
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Microsoft Management Console is a component of Windows 2000 and its successors that provides system administrators and advanced users an interface for configuring and monitoring the system. The management console can host Component Object Model components called snap-ins, most of Microsofts administration tools are implemented as MMC snap-ins. Third parties can also implement their own using the MMCs application programming interfaces published on the Microsoft Developer Networks web site. Snap-ins are registered in the \ and registry keys, a snap-in combined with MMC is called a management saved console, which is a file with. msc extension and can be launched using this syntax, mmc path \ filename. msc. The most prolific MMC component, Computer Management, appears in the Administrative Tools folder in the Control Panel, under System and Security in Category View. MMC1.1, shipped with SQL Server 7.0 and Systems Management Server 2.0, new features, Snap-in taskpads Wizard-style property sheets Ability to load extensions to a snap-in at run-time HTML Help support MMC1.2, shipped with Windows 2000. Also downloadable for Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003 SP1, new features, A new Actions pane, displayed on the right-hand side of the MMC user interface that displays available actions for currently-selected node Support for developing snap-ins with the. List of Microsoft Windows components Microsoft Windows Windows PowerShell Microsoft Management Console documentation at the Microsoft Developer Network
21.
Recovery Console
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The Recovery Console is a feature of the Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 operating systems. It provides the means for administrators to perform a range of tasks using a command line interface. Its primary function is to enable administrators to recover from situations where Windows does not boot as far as presenting its graphical user interface, the recovery console is used to provide a way to access the hard drive in an emergency through the command prompt. The Recovery Console has a simple command-line interpreter, many of the available commands closely resemble the commands that are normally available in CMD. EXE, namely attrib, copy, del, and so forth. This can be changed by changing Security Policies to enable access to the complete file system including copying files from removable media. Although it appears in the list of commands available by using the command, and in many articles about the Recovery Console. No protocol stacks are loaded, so there is no way to connect to a folder on a remote computer as implied. Description of the Windows XP Recovery Console, description of the Windows 2000 Recovery Console. Primer, Creating A Windows XP Recovery Console CD Image
22.
Sysprep
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Sysprep is Microsofts System Preparation Tool for Microsoft Windows operating system deployment. Sysprep was originally introduced for use with Windows NT4.0, later versions introduced for Windows 2000 and Windows XP are available for download from Microsoft and included in the Windows CD. Windows Vista marks the first version of Microsofts NT operating system to include a hardware abstraction layer independent version of Sysprep in the out of box installation, desktop deployment is typically performed via disk cloning applications. Sysprep can be used to prepare a system for disk cloning. Windows operating system include many unique elements per installation that need to be generalized before capturing and deploying a disk image to multiple computers. Administrators can use such as SetupMgr. exe or the Windows Automated Installation Kit to generate answer files that Sysprep will process on new computer deployments. Mark Russinovich of Sysinternals created an alternative to Sysprep, named NewSID. However, after his own analysis and research, Russinovich concluded that the issue with having duplicate SIDs was unnecessary. Description of New Features in Sysprep for Windows XP - Archived January 21,2007, informational guide on how to use Sysprep for deploying Windows 2000/XP Sysprep for Windows 2008 R2 Microsoft, TechNet, Windows Sysinternals, NewSID v4.10 SelfImage wiki, Post-cloning operations
23.
MSConfig
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MSConfig is a system utility to troubleshoot the Microsoft Windows startup process. It can disable or re-enable software, device drivers and Windows services that run at startup and it is bundled with all versions of Microsoft Windows operating systems since Windows 98 except Windows 2000. Windows 95 and Windows 2000 users can download the utility as well, MSConfig is often used for speeding up the Microsoft Windows startup process of the machine. According to Microsoft, MSConfig was not meant to be used as a management program. Some of its functionality varies by Windows versions, In Windows 98 and Windows Me and it can also launch common system tools. In Windows 98, it can back up and restore startup files, in Windows Me, it has also been updated with three new tabs called Static VxDs, Environment and International. A Cleanup button on the Startup tab allows cleaning up invalid or deleted startup entries, in Windows Me and Windows XP versions, it can restore an individual file from the original Windows installation set. On Windows NT-based operating systems prior to Windows Vista, it can set various BOOT. INI switches, in Windows XP and Windows Vista, it can hide all operating system services for troubleshooting. An update is available for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 that adds the Tools tab and it also allows configuring various switches for Windows Boot Manager and Boot Configuration Data
24.
System Policy Editor
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System Policy Editor is a graphical tool provided with Windows 95, Windows NT4.0, and Windows 98. System policies are made up from a set of entries that control the computer resources available to a user or group of users. These registry entries can be applied to users, groups of users. It works by manipulating Registry and security settings, user-specific settings are stored in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER registry hive. Likewise, machine-specific settings are written under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, ADM files are template files that are used by System Policy Editor to describe where registry-based policy settings are stored in the registry. They also describe the interface presented to System Policy administrators. In Windows 2000, the System Policy Editor was replaced with the Group Policy snap-in for Microsoft Management Console
25.
System Restore
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First included in Windows ME, it has been included in all following desktop versions of Windows released since, excluding the Windows Server. In Windows 10, System Restore is turned off by default, in prior Windows versions it was based on a file filter that watched changes for a certain set of file extensions, and then copied files before they were overwritten. In System Restore, the user may create a new restore point manually, roll back to an existing restore point, moreover, the restore itself can be undone. Old restore points are discarded in order to keep the volumes usage within the specified amount, for many users, this can provide restore points covering the past several weeks. Users concerned with performance or space usage may also opt to disable System Restore entirely, files stored on volumes not monitored by System Restore are never backed up or restored. System Restore backs up system files of certain extensions and saves them for later recovery and it also backs up the registry and most drivers. Starting with Windows Vista, System Restore takes a snapshot of all volumes it is monitoring. xml, the amount of disk space System Restore consumes can be configured. Starting with Windows XP, the space allotted is configurable per volume. File are stored using NTFS compression and a Disk Cleanup handler allows deleting all, System Restore can be disabled completely to regain disk space. It automatically disables itself if the free space is too low for it to operate. The operating system deletes older restore points per the configured space constraint on a first in, there are considerable differences between how System Restore works under Windows XP and later Windows versions. Configuration UI - In Windows XP, there is a slider to configure the amount of disk space allotted to System Restore. In Windows Vista, the GUI to configure the space is not available. Using the command-line tool Vssadmin. exe or by editing the registry key. Starting with Windows 7, the slider is available once again. Maximum space - In Windows XP, System Restore can be configured to use up to a maximum of 12% of the space for most disk sizes, however. Restore points over 90 days old are automatically deleted, as specified by the registry value RPLifeInterval default value of 7776000 seconds, in Windows Vista and later, System Restore is designed for larger volumes. By default, it uses 15% of the volumes space, file paths monitored - Up to Windows XP, files are backed up only from certain directories
26.
Windows Error Reporting
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Windows Error Reporting is a crash reporting technology introduced by Microsoft with Windows XP and included in later Windows versions and Windows Mobile 5.0 and 6.0. Not to be confused with the Dr, no data is sent without the users consent. When a dump reaches the Microsoft server, it is analyzed, Solutions are served using Windows Error Reporting Responses. Windows Error Reporting runs as a Windows service and can optionally be entirely disabled, if Windows Error Reporting itself crashes, then an error report that the original crashed process produced cannot be sent at all. Kinshuman is the designer of Windows Error Reporting in Vista which is the same design. Microsoft first introduced Windows Error Reporting with Windows XP, Windows Error Reporting was improved significantly in Windows Vista. Most importantly a new set of public APIs have been created for reporting failures other than application crashes, developers can create custom reports and customize the reporting user interface. The new APIs are documented in MSDN, the architecture of Windows Error Reporting has been revamped with a focus on reliability and user experience. WER can now report errors even when the process is in a bad state for example if the process has encountered stack exhaustions, PEB/TEB corruptions, heap corruptions. In earlier OSs prior to Windows Vista, the process terminated silently without generating an error report in these conditions. A new Control Panel applet, Problem Reports and Solutions was also introduced, keeping a record of system and application errors and issues, the Problem Reports and Solutions Control Panel applet was replaced by the Maintenance section of the Windows Action Center on Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2. Client-side software detects an error condition, generates a report, labels the bucket. The WER service records the occurrence and then, depending on information known about the particular error, might request additional data from the client. Programmers access the WER service to retrieve data for specific error reports, errors collected by WER clients are sent to the WER service. The service is provisioned to receive and process well over 100 million error reports per day, in the Microsoft Windows Error Reporting system, crash reports are organized according to buckets. Buckets classify issues by, Application Name, Application Version, Application Build Date, Module Name, Module Version, Module Build Date, OS Exception Code/System Error Code, ideally, each bucket contains crash reports that are caused by the same bug. However, there are two forms of weakness in the WER bucketing, weaknesses in the condensing heuristics, which result in mapping reports from a bug into too many buckets. For example, if you compile your application one more time without any changes Module Build Date will changes however, and weaknesses in the expanding heuristics, which result in mapping more than one bug into the same bucket
27.
Windows Installer
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Windows Installer is a software component and application programming interface of Microsoft Windows used for the installation, maintenance, and removal of software. Windows Installer contains significant changes from its predecessor, Setup API, new features include a GUI framework and automatic generation of the uninstallation sequence. Windows Installer is positioned as an alternative to stand-alone executable installer frameworks such as versions of InstallShield. Important features such as rollback and versioning depend on a consistent internal database for reliable operation, furthermore, Windows Installer facilitates the principle of least privilege by performing software installations by proxy for unprivileged users. A package describes the installation of one or more products and is universally identified by a GUID. A product is made up of components, grouped into features, Windows Installer does not handle dependencies between products. A single, installed, working program is a product, a product is identified by a unique GUID providing an authoritative identity throughout the world. The GUID, in combination with the number, allows for release management of the products files. A package includes the package logic and other metadata that relates to how the package executes when running, for example, changing an EXE file in the product may require the ProductCode or ProductVersion to be changed for the release management. However, merely changing or adding a condition would still require the PackageCode to change for release management of the MSI file itself. A feature is a group of components. A feature may contain any number of components and other sub-features, smaller packages can consist of a single feature. More complex installers may display a custom setup dialog box, from which the user can select which features to install or remove, the package author defines the product features. A word processor, for example, might place the programs core file into one feature, a component is the basic unit of a product. Each component is treated by Windows Installer as a unit, the installer cannot install just part of a component. Components can contain files, folders, COM components, registry keys. The user does not directly interact with components, components are identified globally by GUIDs, thus the same component can be shared among several features of the same package or multiple packages, ideally through the use of Merge Modules. A key path is a file, registry key, or ODBC data source that the package author specifies as critical for a given component
28.
PowerShell
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PowerShell is a task automation and configuration management framework from Microsoft, consisting of a command-line shell and associated scripting language built on the. NET Framework. Initially a Windows component only, PowerShell was made open-source and cross-platform on 18 August 2016, in PowerShell, administrative tasks are generally performed by cmdlets, which are specialized. NET classes implementing a particular operation. Sets of cmdlets may be combined into scripts, executables, or by instantiating regular. NET classes and these work by accessing data in different data stores, like the file system or registry, which are made available to the PowerShell runtime via PowerShell providers. PowerShell also provides a hosting API with which the PowerShell runtime can be embedded inside other applications and these applications can then use PowerShell functionality to implement certain operations, including those exposed via the graphical interface. Other Microsoft applications including Microsoft SQL Server 2008 also expose their management interface via PowerShell cmdlets, PowerShell includes its own extensive, console-based help, similar to man pages in Unix shells, via the Get-Help cmdlet. Local help contents can be retrieved from the Internet via Update-Help cmdlet, alternatively, help from the web can be acquired on a case-by-case basis via the -online switch to Get-Help. Every released version of Microsoft DOS and Microsoft Windows for personal computers has included a command-line interface tool, the shell is a command line interpreter that supports a few basic commands. For other purposes, a console application must be invoked from the shell. The shell also includes a language, which can be used to automate various tasks. In Windows Server 2003, the situation was improved, but scripting support was considered unsatisfactory. Microsoft attempted to address some of shortcomings by introducing the Windows Script Host in 1998 with Windows 98. It integrates with the Active Script engine and allows scripts to be written in languages, such as JScript and VBScript. Different versions of Windows provided various special-purpose command line interpreters with their own command sets, none of them were integrated with the command shell, nor were they interoperable. By 2002 Microsoft had started to develop a new approach to command line management, the shell and the ideas behind it were published in August 2002 in a white paper titled Monad Manifesto. Monad was to be a new extensible command shell with a design that would be capable of automating a full range of core administrative tasks. Microsoft first showed off Monad at the Professional Development Conference in Los Angeles in October 2003, a private beta program began a few months later which eventually led to a public beta program. Microsoft published the first Monad public beta release on June 17,2005, Beta 2 on September 11,2005, and Beta 3 on January 10,2006. Not much later, on April 25,2006 Microsoft formally announced that Monad had been renamed Windows PowerShell, Release Candidate 1 of PowerShell was released at the same time
29.
Windows Update
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Windows Update, a service offered by Microsoft, provides updates for Windows components. The service provides different kinds of updates, security updates or critical updates protect against vulnerabilities to malware and security exploits. Other updates correct errors unrelated to security, or enhance functionality, Windows Vista and later provide a Control Panel to configure update settings and check for updates. The Windows Update Control Panel also has the function of downloading Windows Ultimate Extras, for previous versions of Microsoft Windows, users can download updates from the Windows Update website, using Internet Explorer. Windows Update was introduced as an Internet web site with the launch of Windows 95, a link to Windows Update on the Start Menu gave access to additional downloads for the operating system. At the time of Windows 98s release, Windows Update offered additional desktop themes, games, device driver updates, fixes to Windows 98 to resolve the Year 2000 problem were distributed using Windows Update in December 1998. Microsoft attributed the success of Windows 98 in part to Windows Update. The first version of the Windows Update web site did not require any personally-identifiable information to be sent to Microsoft, as the number of updates offered by Windows Update grew, this resulted in performance concerns. Arie Slob, writing for the Windows-help. net newsletter in March 2003, noted that the size of the update list had exceeded 400KB, which caused delays of more than a minute for dial-up users. It also narrowed down the list of updates for the operating system and related components by sending details of what operating system version, service pack. German technology web site tecchannel. de published an analysis of the Windows Update communication protocol in February 2003, the check was performed by querying the server for a file, cucif. cab, which contains a list of all the critical updates released for the users operating system. An analysis done by security researcher H. D. Moore in early 1999 was critical of this approach, describing it as horribly inefficient and susceptible to attacks. In a posting to BugTraq, he explained that, every single Windows 98 computer that wishes to get an update has to rely on a single host for the security. If that one server got compromised one day, or an attacker cracks the MS DNS server again, the scope of this attack is big enough to attract crackers who actually know what they are doing. The Critical Update Notification tool continued to be promoted by Microsoft through 1999, initial releases of Windows 2000 shipped with the tool, but Windows 95 and Windows NT4.0 were not supported. It was superseded by Automatic Updates in Windows Me and Windows 2000 SP3, with the release of Windows ME in 2000, Microsoft introduced Automatic Updates as a replacement for the Critical Update Notification tool. Unlike its predecessor, Automatic Updates includes the ability to download, instead of the five-minute schedule used by its predecessor, the Automatic Updates client checks the Windows Update servers once a day. The user is given the option to download available updates then prompt the user to install them, after Windows Me is installed, the user is prompted via a notification balloon to configure the Automatic Updates client
30.
Windows Insider
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The Windows Insider program by Microsoft allows users who own a valid Windows 10 license to sign up for early builds of the operating system previously only accessible to developers. It was announced on September 30,2014 along with Windows 10, by September 2015 over 7 million people took part in the Windows Insider Program. On February 12,2015, Microsoft started to test out previews of Windows 10 Mobile, Microsoft announced that the Windows Insider program would continue beyond the official release of Windows 10 for future updates. Dona Sarkar is the head of the Windows Insider program, similar to the Windows Insider program, the Microsoft Office, Bing and Xbox teams have set up their own Insider program. In February 2016 Microsoft introduced new rings for the Windows Insider preview, after many Windows Insiders hacked their non-Lumia phones by altering what model was displayed in order to downloaded the preview builds, Microsoft responded by blocking all unsupported models. Preview build 10080, released on May 14,2015, was the first to support a non-Lumia device and this was followed up by Xiaomi who, in partnership with Microsoft, released a ROM port of Windows 10 to its flagship Mi 4 handset on June 1,2015. At that time it was limited to registered users in China. Build 10080 and its follow-up build 10166 also added support for fourth-generation Lumia devices, as a result, all compatible Windows Phone 8 or later Lumia phones now support the preview. However, the company did not provide any information at the time on new devices will be added to the preview program. Microsoft instead focused on promoting new devices that come with Windows 10 Mobile, including their Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL flagships, and the low-cost Lumia 550 and Lumia 650. Since their release, these new Windows 10 devices became eligible to receive updates in advance via the Insider program. The Windows-based LG Lancet also received this version but has not been upgraded since, on February 19,2016, Microsoft released the first Windows 10 Mobile Redstone preview, build 14267. Starting with this build, future preview versions became available for devices that are already running a non-Insider preview of the OS. This was followed by build 14291, released for existing Windows 10 devices on March 17,2016 in conjunction with the official RTM release of Windows 10 Mobile to third and fourth-generation Lumias. The following week, it available to the newly upgraded older Lumias in addition to several other devices already on Windows 10 Mobile at the time
31.
Windows Preinstallation Environment
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Windows Preinstallation Environment is a lightweight version of Windows used for the deployment of PCs, workstations, and servers, or troubleshooting an operating system while it is offline. It is intended to replace MS-DOS boot disks and can be booted via USB flash drive, PXE, iPXE, CD-ROM, traditionally used by large corporations and OEMs, it is now widely available free of charge via Windows Automated Installation Kit. WinPE was originally intended to be used only as a platform for deploying Microsoft Windows operating systems. WinPE has the following uses, Deployment of workstations and servers in large corporations as well as pre-installation by system builders of workstations, Recovery platform to run 32-bit or 64-bit recovery tools such as Winternals ERD Commander or Windows Recovery Environment. Platform for running third-party 32-bit or 64-bit disk cloning utilities, the package can be used for developer testing or as a recovery CD/DVD for system administrators. Many customized WinPE boot CDs packaged with third-party applications for different uses are now available from volunteers via the Internet. The package can also be used as the base of an investigation to either capture a disk image or run analysis tools without mounting any available disks. It was originally designed and built by a team of engineers in Microsofts Windows Deployment team, including Vijay Jayaseelan, Ryan Burkhardt. Windows RE is installed along with Windows Vista and later, and may be booted from hard disks, optical media, a copy of Windows RE is included in the installation media of the aforementioned operating systems. It is a successor to Recovery Console, prior to Windows 8, this mode was known as Startup Repair. System Image Recovery, Restores the entire system to a state by restoring a disk image created by Backup. In Windows Vista, it was known as Complete PC Restore, Windows Memory Diagnostic Tool, Analyses the computer memory for defects. The program does not run inside WinRE, but instead reboots the system, memtest. exe cannot be run inside Windows. Windows Command Prompt, Gives command-line access to the file system and it can be used to run System File Checker against an offline Windows installation and repair missing or corrupt files. Tools like Robocopy, Diskpart and DISM can be used to various system tasks like recovering or backing up files, managing partitions. In order to use the command prompt, the user must sign in to an administrator account. Starting with Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8, the additional options are added, Refresh or Reset. The Refresh operation maintains files, settings, and Windows Store apps, while Reset performs a factory reset of Windows, optionally formatting the hard drive and performing disk wiping
32.
Computer program
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A computer program is a collection of instructions that performs a specific task when executed by a computer. A computer requires programs to function, and typically executes the programs instructions in a processing unit. A computer program is written by a computer programmer in a programming language. From the program in its form of source code, a compiler can derive machine code—a form consisting of instructions that the computer can directly execute. Alternatively, a program may be executed with the aid of an interpreter. A part of a program that performs a well-defined task is known as an algorithm. A collection of programs, libraries and related data are referred to as software. Computer programs may be categorized along functional lines, such as software or system software. The earliest programmable machines preceded the invention of the digital computer, in 1801, Joseph-Marie Jacquard devised a loom that would weave a pattern by following a series of perforated cards. Patterns could be weaved and repeated by arranging the cards, in 1837, Charles Babbage was inspired by Jacquards loom to attempt to build the Analytical Engine. The names of the components of the device were borrowed from the textile industry. In the textile industry, yarn was brought from the store to be milled, the device would have had a store—memory to hold 1,000 numbers of 40 decimal digits each. Numbers from the store would then have then transferred to the mill. It was programmed using two sets of perforated cards—one to direct the operation and the other for the input variables, however, after more than 17,000 pounds of the British governments money, the thousands of cogged wheels and gears never fully worked together. During a nine-month period in 1842–43, Ada Lovelace translated the memoir of Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea, the memoir covered the Analytical Engine. The translation contained Note G which completely detailed a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers using the Analytical Engine and this note is recognized by some historians as the worlds first written computer program. In 1936, Alan Turing introduced the Universal Turing machine—a theoretical device that can model every computation that can be performed on a Turing complete computing machine and it is a finite-state machine that has an infinitely long read/write tape. The machine can move the back and forth, changing its contents as it performs an algorithm
33.
Windows Calculator
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Windows Calculator is a software calculator included in all versions of Windows. A simple arithmetic calculator was first included with Windows 1.0, in Windows 98 and later, it uses an arbitrary-precision arithmetic library, replacing the standard IEEE floating point library. It offers bignum precision for basic operations and 32 digits of precision for advanced operations, the largest value that can be represented on the Windows Calculator is currently <1010,000 and the smallest is 10−9,999. In Windows 2000, digit grouping is added, degree and base settings are added to menu bar. In Windows 7, separate programmer, statistics, unit conversion, date calculation, furthermore, Calculators interface was revamped for the first time since its introduction. The base conversion functions were moved to the mode and statistics functions were moved to the statistics mode. Switching between modes does not preserve the current number, clearing it to 0, in every mode except programmer mode, one can see the history of calculations. The app was redesigned to accommodate multi-touch, standard mode behaves as a simple checkbook calculator, entering the sequence 6 *4 +12 /4 -4 *5 gives the answer 25. In scientific mode, order of operations is followed while doing calculations, in programmer mode, inputting a number in decimal has a lower and upper limit, depending on the data type, and must always be an integer. Data type of number in decimal mode is signed n-bit integer when converting from number in hexadecimal, octal, on the right of the main Calculator, one can add a panel with date calculation, unit conversion and worksheets. Worksheets allow one to calculate a result of a field based on the values of other fields. Pre-defined templates include calculating a cars fuel economy, a lease. In pre-beta versions of Windows 7, Calculator also provided a Wages template, while the traditional Calculator is still included with Windows 8.1, a Metro-style Calculator is also present, featuring a full-screen interface as well as normal, scientific, and conversion modes. The Calculator in Windows 10 is a universal Windows app, the traditional Calculator is still included with Windows 10 LTSB, and it was renamed to win32calc. exe. While the original calc. exe file is present for legacy purposes. By default, Calculator runs in standard mode, which resembles a four-function calculator, Calculator supports keyboard shortcuts, all Calculator features have an associated keyboard shortcut. Calculator in hexadecimal mode cannot accept or display a number larger than 16 hex digits. The largest number it can handle is therefore 0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF, any calculations in hex mode which exceed this limit will display a result of zero, even if those calculations would succeed in other modes
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Calendar (Windows)
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Calendar is a personal calendar application made by Microsoft. It offers synchronization of calendars using Microsoft Exchange Server, Outlook. com Apples iCloud calendar service and it supports the popular iCalendar format. Microsoft first included a Calendar app in Windows 1.0, which was included until Windows 3.1, Schedule+ was later moved from Windows to the Microsoft Office suite, and Windows did not include another Calendar application until Windows Calendar in Windows Vista. Calendar had been created by Beta 2 of Windows Vista and this version supports sharing, subscribing, and publishing of calendars on WebDAV-enabled web servers and network shares. It has always supported. ics files, and the feature enables syncing with Google Calendar. Its interface matches Windows Vista Mails, but the two apps are not connected in this operating system, the default calendar can be renamed. A new version of Calendar with a text-heavy was added to Windows 8 as one of many written to run full-screen or snapped as part of Microsofts Metro design language philosophy. It is one of three apps on Windows that originate from Microsoft Outlook, the two being Mail and People apps. Structurally, the three apps are one and are installed and uninstalled as such, but each has its own user interface. Calendar in Windows 8 originally supported Outlook. com, Exchange, Google Calendar, because of API changes, Facebook and Google calendars can no longer be directly synced on Windows 8. Like many Microsoft apps introduced for Windows 8, many of the features are hidden in the charms or a menu at the bottom of the screen that is triggered by right clicking, different calendars can be labeled with different colors. Mail has preset server configurations for Outlook. com, Exchange, Google Calendar, users can set it to use the system theme or choose a custom accent color, background image, and light/dark preference. Windows 10 Calendar has multi-window support for viewing and editing events, different calendars can be labeled with different colors, and events can be rearranged by dragging and dropping. The default interface is Month View, but users can also use Day, Week, the Windows 10 app also uses a flyout settings panel and a mini Ribbon interface in the viewing pane. The day of the year and calendar events show on the live tile, like the Vista version, the important controls are readily visible and use icons to match the systems. Accounts can be grouped and relabeled, but folders cannot be edited from within the app. ics support was added to this version in time for the Windows 10 Anniversary Update. Features new to Windows Vista Features new to Windows 8 Features new to Windows 10 List of applications with iCalendar support SyncML open standard for calendar syncing Set up email and calendar
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Cortana
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Cortana is an intelligent personal assistant created by Microsoft for Windows 10, Windows 10 Mobile, Windows Phone 8.1, Microsoft Band, Xbox One, iOS and Android. Cortana can set reminders, recognize natural voice without the requirement for keyboard input, Cortana is currently available in English, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese language editions, depending on the software platform and region in which it is used. Cortana mainly competes against assistants such as Apples Siri, Googles Google Assistant, Samsungs Bixby, Cortana was demonstrated for the first time at the Microsoft BUILD Developer Conference in San Francisco. It has been launched as a key ingredient of Microsofts planned makeover of the operating systems for Windows Phone. The development of Cortana started in 2009 in the Microsoft Speech products team with general manager Zig Serafin, Heck and Serafin established the vision, mission, and long-range plan for Microsofts digital-personal-assistant and they built a team with the expertise to create the initial prototypes for Cortana. To develop the Cortana digital assistant, the team interviewed human personal assistants and these interviews inspired a number of unique features in Cortana, including the assistants notebook feature. Originally Cortana was only meant to be a codename, but a petition on Windows Phones UserVoice site that proved to be made the codename official. In January 2015, Microsoft announced the availability of Cortana for Windows 10 desktops, on May 26,2015, Microsoft announced that Cortana would also be available on other mobile platforms. An Android release was set for July 2015, but an Android APK file containing Cortana was leaked ahead of its release and it was officially released, along with an iOS version, in December 2015. During E32015, Microsoft announced that Cortana would come to the Xbox One as part of a universally designed Windows 10 update for the console, Microsoft has integrated Cortana into numerous products such as Microsoft Edge, the browser bundled with Windows 10. Microsofts Cortana assistant is deeply integrated into its Edge browser, Cortana can find opening-hours when on restaurant sites, show retail coupons for websites, or show weather information in the address bar. At the Worldwide Partners Conference 2015 Microsoft demonstrated Cortana integration with upcoming products such as GigJam, Microsofts Windows in the car concept includes Cortana. The concept makes it possible for drivers to make restaurant reservations, as of 2016, Cortana can underline certain words and phrases in Skype conversations that relate to contacts and corporations. Cortana can set reminders, recognize natural voice without the requirement for keyboard input, Windows 8. 1s universal Bing SmartSearch features are incorporated into Cortana, which replaces the previous Bing Search app which was activated when a user presses the Search button on their device. Cortana includes a music recognition service, Cortana can simulate rolling dice and flipping a coin. Cortanas Concert Watch monitors Bing searches to determine which bands or musicians the user is interested in and it integrates with the Microsoft Band watch band for Windows Phone devices if connected via Bluetooth, it can make reminders and phone notifications. Since the Lumia Denim mobile phone series, launched in October 2014, active listening was added to Cortana, enabling it to be invoked with the phrase, Hey Cortana, it can then be controlled as usual. Some devices from the United Kingdom by O2 have received the Lumia Denim update without the feature but this was clarified as a bug
