Alexander’s Blog

Microsoft has worked hard on securing Windows Vista because it has been criticized in the past for not properly securing its previous operating systems. Jeff Jones has published a Windows Vista 90 day vulnerability report that compares Windows Vista’s record with Windows XP, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Novell and Apple. Here are the numbers in a chart.

Because almost 90% of the personal computers in the world run Microsoft’s Windows, it is encouraging to see that Windows Vista has much tighter security compared to its predecessors.

There will always be critics who will blame Microsoft regardless of how secure their operating is. Windows Vista is not going to be an exception. I have already seen some technical experts encouraging people to turn off the User Account Control (UAC) feature, which is not a wise idea.

Jeff’s report is available in PDF format here.

Seattle author Brian Livingston of WindowsSecrets.com recently revealed how “Microsoft allows bypass of Vista activation” on his Web site. Microsoft allows a registry hack called SkipRearm so customers can rearm a computer to restore the Windows system to the original licensing state. Rearming causes all licensing and registry data related to activation to be either removed or reset. It also resets the grace period timers. Essentially SkipRearm specifies whether to execute the Windows Software Licensing Rearm program which removes licensing values set during system installation and testing. This will restore your computer to its original state prior to the user logging on for the first time.

For step-by-step instruction on how the registry key can be modified, check out Brain Livingston’s article here.

Microsoft has released Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Windows Server 2003. Service packs are cumulative so the problems that are fixed in a service pack are also fixed in later service packs. You can download SP 2 here.

For a list of updates in Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2, click here.

Windows Vista’s new Aero user interface allows you to take advantage of the Vista’s fancy 3-D platform. This feature off-loads the GUI from your PC to the graphics card resulting in better performance for multimedia applications, screen switching, video playback, and lets you take advantage of Macintosh-like opaque windows.

In order for you to take advantage of Aero user interface, your computer hardware must support this feature. Most nVidia and ATi cards support Aero. To enable or disable the Aero feature, use the following procedure.