The strength of Windows Vista’s security model is easily the biggest question facing the nascent operating system. While sales will be strong simply on account of the way OEMs have adopted Vista on their midrange and high-end offerings, the place of Vista in the enterprise is not yet clear. Microsoft must demonstrate that its approach to security with Vista is indeed effective; otherwise, IT managers will see little benefit to moving to the new OS anytime soon.

Windows Vista only offers “marginal security advantages over XP” according to tests completed by CRN. “Vista remains riddled with holes, despite its multilayer security architecture and embedded security tools.” The report’s findings are mixed and at times a little unfair, but it does demonstrate the problems that Microsoft has to face—technical and otherwise.

The report faults Vista for “providing no improvement in virus protection vs. XP,” but of course Windows Vista does not ship with antivirus software—something the reviewer fails to mention. Faulting an AV-less Vista for not stopping viruses is a bit like faulting a door without a lock for opening when the handle is twisted. Any business that is deploying Vista (or XP) without an antivirus solution is, of course, out of its mind.

Check this article at ArsTechnica

Vista’s ReadyBoost seems to be lacking in the performance. The technology promises to let you speed up Windows by plugging an inexpensive USB flash drive into your PC. ReadyBoost may speed up Vista a tiny bit, it can also slow it down in some instances.

The premise is this: Although writing data to and reading it from a flash drive is, in most cases, slower than writing and reading to a hard drive, if the data is scattered randomly in small chunks, then flash drives are faster. Vista’s ReadyBoost is supposed to use that one speed advantage to create a faster, flash-drive-based cache of one of Windows’ major bottlenecks — the swap file on your hard drive that most Windows operations use.

So ReadyBoost should theoretically speed up certain frequently performed Windows tasks such as loading programs. The technology seems to works with only the fastest flash drives — those capable of 3.5MB/sec. throughput for 4KB random reads, and 2.5MB/sec. speeds for 512KB random writes.

ReadyBoost does shorten the time it takes to load frequently used programs — but not by much an average of 6% on our notebook and desktop PCs. If launching a program in Vista feels lethargic, one of these drives may help — a bit. But installing more RAM inside your PC would help a lot more.

Read the full article here

Windows Vista and Windows Desktop Search 3.01 recognize many advanced query operators that can make your desktop searches super-pinpointed. This document on Windows Vista Blog provides an exhaustive list of those operators. On Windows Vista you can use these operators to define a search, and then save it as a Search Folder. Once you start using these terms in searches and Search Folders, you’ll wonder how you ever got along without them!

Here is big list of Operators to Help You to Create More Defined Searches in Vista & Windows Desktop Search 3.01