Vista ties together several underlying technologies with software that, if it works as billed, could cut down on help-desk support issues. The operating system offers improved automatic recovery, diagnostics, a new recovery environment with a start-up repair tool and monitoring-notification systems that companies can configure to send an SOS to IT help desk operations before a drive fails or whenever a device driver is causing instability. The revised event log and task manager should help IT personnel diagnose problems more readily.

Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR)

This cool techie security feature makes it more difficult for malicious code to locate and exploit system functions. When any system is rebooted, ASLR randomly assigns DLLs, EXEs and other executable images to one of 256 possible memory locations.

Network Access Protection (NAP) service

Network administrators will welcome the Network Access Protection service, which works in concert with Windows Longhorn Server, Vista and XP. It lets IT managers set security standards that all computers must meet before a server allows them to connect to a network, such as having up-to-date virus definitions. If a computer doesn't meet the standards, the network connection is refused.