Windows Pre Environment, or Windows PE, is an execution environment designed to assist in installing and troubleshooting operating system installations. Rather than the old blue-background, text-based installation screen with previous versions of NT, Windows PE comes in graphical format and contains a full complement of tools to assist with getting Windows Vista installed on a drive.

The big win with Windows PE is that standard Windows network drivers work with it out of the box -- no hunting for special NDIS drivers only for network deployment use. Additionally, it has a built-in firewall to protect the operating system in its most vulnerable state, being partially installed, and the ability to insert drivers from any sort of removable media into the session.

You might recall the frustration of only being able to add a driver by hitting F6 at the right moment of Setup and then having the driver only on a floppy disk. Windows PE eliminates this annoyance.

Windows Deployment Services

Windows Deployment Services (WDS) is the next generation of Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003's RIS. It will release with Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 and is the only supported method of deploying Windows Vista over the network, so if you want to stream Vista images to desktops and notebooks over the net, you'll need to upgrade your RIS servers to that service pack level. WDS supports both x86 and x64 images as well.