Firmware and Boot Environment
For Plug and Play and power management support under Windows operating systems, the system and its firmware must comply with the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) specification.
Hardware Design for Windows
Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 have introduced breakthroughs in user experience, security, and reliability for end users. Hardware vendors, system manufacturers, and driver developers can use these advances to build next-generation products.
Hardware Management and Security
Windows Server 2008 introduced Windows Hardware Error Architecture (WHEA) as a common infrastructure for handling hardware errors. WHEA uses richer error reporting to reduce mean time to recovery for fatal hardware errors and uses hardware health monitoring to reduce system crashes. These advances supplement support in Windows for solutions that use system management BIOS (SMBIOS), Web Services for Management (WS-Management), and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI).
Performance
We design Windows operating systems to perform well out of the box. However, many factors affect actual performance: firmware design, applications that load at system startup, memory and I/O components, and the built-in capabilities of system components such as graphics, storage, and networking devices. To help system designers and manufacturers, we provide tools and information for the design and tuning of systems for best performance.
