Windows Vista Review-3

3. Security and safety

3.2 User Account Control

Security-wise, Microsoft touts various improvements in Windows Vista. The biggest and most visible of those is User Account Control; this means that whenever anything tries to do something that requires administration privileges, the user must specifically allow this. Any user, even those with admin rights, run in standard user mode all the time now, meaning that a malicious program cannot just install itself anymore to system directories or similar places.

Is UAC annoying? Yes. Is it any more annoying than entering your password each time you need to do something admin-related in, say, Ubuntu? No. At least Windows Vista allows you to edit system files and directories without launching a file manager window as root; Vista will just prompt you to grant admin rights when trying to edit system directories. Of course you can turn UAC off, but that really is a bad thing to do if you ask me.

If you want to know more about security features in Windows Vista, the related Wikipedia article is a good starting point. Many of the measures are technical changes transparent to the user, which is a good thing.

5. Audio

The audio department is where Windows Vista really is far ahead of any other mainstream operating system. The new audio stack allows for a feature I have only ever previously seen in BeOS: per process control of audio volume. Gone are the days where you could get a heart attack from MSN Messenger when someone sent you a message while you were listening to loud music. In Vista, you just set the volume for Messenger lower than for Media Player, and gone is that problem. A major advance, and surely something I would like to see in OS X and Linux.

8. Mobile computing

On my laptop, Vista is a much better fit when it comes to mobile computing than XP ever was. The biggest improvement is that sleep now actually works; when using XP, waking from sleep would regularly fail. It was a known issue on the Dell support forums, but a working fix was never found (although I must say I stopped monitoring the thread after a few weeks). The problem was not hardware related, as sleep/wake in Linux worked just fine (ironically). It's good that this apparent bug in Windows is now fixed.

In the first look article, I mentioned how the various test and beta builds of Vista had a huge bug in the bcm43xx driver; it would randomly disconnect, refusing to work for literally hours on end. This problem now seems fixed, and wireless networking is working perfectly. A bit of a nuisance, though, is that after waking from sleep reconnecting to a wireless network takes fairly long. My Macs reconnected in mere seconds, while in Vista this process can take up to and well over 30 seconds.

One of the really big mysteries in the final Vista build is the apparent lack of syncing with Windows Mobile devices. I have an iPaq Windows Mobile 2003 device, and upon attaching the device, an autoplay dialog pops up asking me what I want to do (browse device, sync media files, import pictures), but there is no option to actually sync the things that matter: contacts mostly, in my case. I tried to use the Sync Center, but my device refuses to show up.

After asking Google for advice, I found out you needed to manually download the third beta of the Windows Mobile Device Center before you can really do anything with your Windows Mobile PDA and Vista. Installing went fine, and everything seems to work; however, it became clear quite quickly that the Mobile Device Center only supports syncing with Outlook, and not Windows Mail or Windows Contacts. Unacceptable, if you ask me, and something that needs to be fixed before Vista goes to consumers.