Phil’s Blog

Windows Vista

May 30th, 2006

Today (for some unknown reason) I decided to take a look at Micro$oft’s Vista page and see what all the hoopla is on this perpetual marketing drive known as Windows. It seems that they have copied a lot of the Mac OS X Tiger features. What are known as Widgets in OSX are Gadgets in Vista. The fancy new search feature in Vista is called Spotlight in Tiger, and we’ll see if it works as well.

The part I really liked in the Vista Hype was the security tab. Here are a few quotes…

Microsoft believes the best approach to stopping malware is to layer security features.

This is just a fancy way of saying… “We don’t have time to fix the low level problems with our operating system so we are throwing a bunch of band-aids at them.” Didn’t Microsoft invent most of the ‘features’ that malware writers exploit?

In addition to using these built-in Windows Vista features, you should help keep your computer healthy by using antivirus software such as Windows OneCare or an antivirus solution from one of Microsoft’s partners. Whichever option you choose, remember to update your antivirus software regularly. These updates are generally available through a subscription from your antivirus vendor.

Microsoft’s solution for everything, “buy something else.” It’s often thought that Macs are more expensive than PC’s. Once you buy the spyware scanner, the virus blocker, the disk utility package and all the other little things that seem necessary under Windows, my PowerBook was a pretty good deal.

I really enjoyed the Networking section too.  Other than a few improvements in Wireless networking (most notable being the introduction of WPA2) there was nothing about making computers actually talk to each other.  It was all about drawing pretty pictures of all the problems that your Windows computer is having talking to other Windows computers.  All the while my Mac is talking to all of your Windows computers and printers (plus the Novell, and Linux boxes) that your Vista machine can’t seem to get working, but now you know why, because you can see the picture of the other computers with their little red ‘X’s on them.

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