Andrew's ramblings

My thoughts on Vista

Tags: Windows Vista

I have made it no secret that the price of vista in Australia is a rip off. And there are things that are really begining to annoy me even more than the price of Vista. Windows Vista is being claimed as the most secure and bug free version ever, now the thing is I am not convinced on either to be honest with you.

Lets first look at the security of Vista first. For Vista to be 100% secure, you still need a virus program, and firewall and anti spam software. Now although the firewall in Windows has been fairly good it is not perfect, and has very little control like a dedicated firewall would.

But the firewall is only part of the security, now Microsoft has come to the party and for a subscription fee of $99.00 (USD) you can make your Windows Vista more secure with OneCare. Except I am not convinced on this product, the reason being is I am running the 90 trial and in the last 7 days it changes my security settings when it feels like it.

What you say, well thats right if you are connected primarly with a wireless connection to a router, expect that every now and the that OneCare will drop you from Restricted Access to full control of you connection. Now there is a fix for this, but why have a setting for it in the first place?

This problem seems to be well documented during the Alpha and beta testing stages, and is still a problem in the release version today. So what does this mean, well it means that if like me you have a private network that also connects to a router this is seen as insecure even though the router is a hardware firewall Windows doesn't care it will turn restrictions on when it feels like it, and within seconds switch it back again.

What the hell is that all about, I have absolutely no idea.

Now looks look at another problem with OneCare, when it updates itself it switches itself off thats right it switches itself off, doesn't tell you it is doing this nor does it switch itself back on either. This is a serious security problem, if you are using the program to protect your computer, because in the end it really doesn't.

Other things that I have noticed with OneCare, that really make me thing what the hell is this all about and why does the user not get notified. For example even the firewall was switched off at one time, and windows defender had even been switched off. Both with no notification that this was happening, nor did they ever switch themselves back on either.

Another feature of OneCare is the TuneUp, you can decide to run this at a scheduled time which is good because it means that it is going to be an optimised system, or is it. The one thing that has annoyed me here, is that I have set this to run once a week, at 2am in the morning and yet the last 2 days I have been wondering why my machine is running so slow.

Further discovery, I found that the defrag of the hard drive which is part of the TuneUp was running. I was not notified that this was happening, and had to discover it for myself. Now comes the bad part, there is no way to stop this as once it is running it will continue to run. That means you can try to kill the background process but it will just go and run itself again.

the same goes with windows Defender, when it is doing a scan of your system, you can't stop this nor is there a notification or even a GUI to see the progress of what is happening.

I have no idea what microsoft where thinking in these examples, but boy these sounds like bugs to me. And the biggest bug, I have a complete fresj install of vista, and booting the computer is 1 out 5 will actually boot. Who knows what is actually happening, but there is no HD activity and the screen with the progress widget / bar or whatever you like to call it is just sitting there, and after 45 mins I had enough an hit the reset button to have it do it again.

So far I am certainly impressed with some of the features, but to claim this is a bug free release is well very game.
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