My thoughts about Vista
by John Lansdale

That was one the best professional talks I’ve heard in a while. Jay Ferron knew what he was talking about. I learned more about Vista in an hour than I would have buying and studying it for a couple of weeks and I really liked many of the features he demonstrated. Some things were especially cool to me:

ReadyBoost. 

Vista could use a flash drive as memory to compliment your regular RAM. Flash drives aren’t as fast as regular RAM but they’re faster than the disk and they can be read randomly so they can boost performance.

Enhanced backup and restore.

In my opinion, a very useful improvement.

Windows Movie Maker.

Included in all versions of Vista. Video editing programs can cost a lot of money so it will be nice to have it included. Maybe now I’ll have to get a video camera!

Service Hardening Features. 

Although I don’t like security “enhancements” in general, this one is good. When older versions are booting up, before anyone logs in, all the services are running in the background with maximum administrator privileges even though ID may not need them. A virus could use this to do bad things. Now, they will run with less authority.

User Account Control. 

I’m not sure whether I like this or not but I’ve got to mention it because it is an important addition to Vista. Jay talked about it for some time. It works like SU in Linux.

Users now have more authority. They can do things like install software, manage file access, etc. so they don’t need to be administrator as often. The administrator has two security tokens. One as a user, one as administrator. Anytime something requiring more than user authority is needed, a warning box pops up.

Applications will no longer be able to store data in program files folders. MS SQL server was one example of such a program. In the old design, Windows gave fairly unrestricted file access authority to the application. The application would then restrict authority in its own way. Access will now be restricted directly at the file level by Windows. The application manages users via Windows. This makes it harder for malware to take over the application and do damage. (The flip side is that if all your security information is handled by Windows, it’s harder to move the application to another system).

Windows Sidebar and Gadgets, Windows Aero, and Live Icons.

All use the new high speed graphics. With the side bar and gadgets you can have little applications running all the time for easy viewing. I can imagine using a stock market, weather or perhaps a web cam type gadget. The thumbnails are a memory helper because when you move the mouse over a document, up pops a miniaturized version of the original. Aero is that 3D rotating  Ferris wheel of applications.

BitLocker Drive Encryption. 

Lets you encrypt sections of your hard drive so well that even if another system is booted up it can’t be read. Caveat. Use with caution, but it’s great for top-secret data.