Microsoft Windows, commonly referred to as Windows, is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families, all of which are developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. Active Microsoft Windows families include Windows NT and Windows IoT; these may encompass subfamilies,. Defunct Microsoft Windows families include Windows 9x, Windows Mobile and Windows Phone.
Windows 2000 is a business-oriented operating system that was produced by Microsoft and was released as part of the Windows NT family of operating systems. It was succeeded by Windows XP in 2001, releasing to manufacturing on December 15, 1999 and being officially released to retail on February 17, 2000. It is the successor to Windows NT 4.0.
Windows Millennium Edition, or Windows Me, is a graphical operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. It is the successor to Windows 98 Second Edition (SE), and was released to manufacturing on June 19, 2000, with general availability on September 14, 2000.
The Windows Registry is a hierarchical database that stores low-level settings for the Microsoft Windows operating system and for applications that opt to use the registry. The kernel, device drivers, services, Security Accounts Manager, and user interface can all use the registry. The registry also allows access to counters for profiling system performance.
Group Policy is a feature of the Microsoft Windows NT family of operating systems that controls the working environment of user accounts and computer accounts. Group Policy provides centralized management and configuration of operating systems, applications, and users' settings in an Active Directory environment. A set of Group Policy configurations is called a Group Policy Object (GPO). A version of Group Policy called Local Group Policy allows Group Policy Object management without Active Directory on standalone computers.
Administrative Templates are a feature of Group Policy, a Microsoft technology for centralized management of machines and users in an Active Directory environment.
An INI file is a configuration file for computer software that consists of a text-based content with a structure and syntax comprising key-value pairs for properties, and sections that organize the properties. The name of these configuration files comes from the filename extension INI, for initialization, used in the MS-DOS operating system which popularized this method of software configuration. The format has become an informal standard in many contexts of configuration, but many applications on other operating systems use different file name extensions, such as conf and cfg.
AutoRun and the companion feature AutoPlay are components of the Microsoft Windows operating system that dictate what actions the system takes when a drive is mounted.
AutoPlay, a feature introduced in Windows 98, examines newly discovered removable media and devices and, based on content such as pictures, music or video files, launches an appropriate application to play or display the content. It is closely related to the AutoRun operating system feature. AutoPlay was created in order to simplify the use of peripheral devices – MP3 players, memory cards, USB storage devices and others – by automatically starting the software needed to access and view the content on these devices. AutoPlay can be enhanced by AutoPlay-compatible software and hardware. It can be configured by the user to associate favourite applications with AutoPlay events and actions.
The graphical identification and authentication (GINA) is a component of Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 that provides secure authentication and interactive logon services. GINA is a replaceable dynamically linked library that is loaded early in the boot process in the context of Winlogon when the machine is started. It is responsible for handling the secure attention sequence, typically Control-Alt-Delete, and interacting with the user when this sequence is received. GINA is also responsible for starting initial processes for a user when they first log on. GINA is discontinued in Windows Vista.
My Network Places is the network browser feature in Windows Explorer. It was first introduced in Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0 and was renamed My Network Places in Windows 2000 and later.
In computing, SUBST is a command on the DOS, IBM OS/2, Microsoft Windows and ReactOS operating systems used for substituting paths on physical and logical drives as virtual drives.
The Windows NT startup process is the process by which Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 operating systems initialize. In Windows Vista and later, this process has changed significantly; see Windows Vista startup process for information about what has changed.
Microsoft Management Console (MMC) is a component of Windows 2000 and its successors that provides system administrators and advanced users an interface for configuring and monitoring the system.
In the context of the Microsoft Windows NT line of operating systems, a Security Identifier is a unique, immutable identifier of a user, user group, or other security principal. A security principal has a single SID for life, and all properties of the principal, including its name, are associated with the SID. This design allows a principal to be renamed without affecting the security attributes of objects that refer to the principal.
The startup process of Windows NT 6 differ from the startup process part of previous versions of Windows.
A roaming user profile is a file synchronization concept in the Windows NT family of operating systems that allows users with a computer joined to a Windows domain to log on to any computer on the same domain and access their documents and have a consistent desktop experience, such as applications remembering toolbar positions and preferences, or the desktop appearance staying the same, while keeping all related files stored locally, to not continuously depend on a fast and reliable network connection to a file server.
Microsoft Windows profile refers to the user profile that is used by the Microsoft Windows operating system to represent the characteristics of the user.
The Windows 9x series of operating systems refers to the kernel which lies at the heart of Windows 9x. Its architecture is monolithic.
Service Control Manager (SCM) is a special system process under the Windows NT family of operating systems, which starts, stops and interacts with Windows service processes. It is located in the %SystemRoot%\System32\services.exe executable. Service processes interact with SCM through a well-defined API, and the same API is used internally by the interactive Windows service management tools such as the MMC snap-in Services.msc and the command-line Service Control utility sc.exe. Terminating this file is used as a method of causing the Blue Screen of Death.
