Kurt's Thoughts

I’ve read a lot of articles on the web explaining what makes Windows Vista great and a lot of articles explaining why it sucks. None of them really seem to fit my state of mind as I drive at the helm of Windows Vista Aero.

So here’s 5 things that I feel embody my experience using Windows Vista as my production machine’s operating system.

1. No More Operating System Erosion
   No more of that "just reinstall everything to start fresh" mentality.  Windows Vista’s ability to isolate applications, control leakage and memory overruns through hardware data protection, and maintain the system in a state of stability… the value just can’t be measured.
   
2. A Feeling of Protection & Safety
   Besides data protection which completely mitigates the entire class of malware based on buffer overruns, the introduction of ASLR or address space layout randomization in Windows Vista means the virtual elimination of any and all virus attacks by ‘carefully placing virulent data are certain locations in memory’ based on OS components that are usually in the same location in memory on every load.  No virus, trojan, or spyware will ever know where to place itself in memory to ‘latch on’ to the OS, completely eliminating an entire class of malware.  That and having
   
3. Control & Understanding of What’s-going-on
   The introduction of the Resource Monitor in Windows Vista is gold.  I used to use purchased products just to accomplish the same thing.  Basically, the Resource Monitor now provides you with the following at a bare minimum… and if you don’t know the value of this, then, well, never mind:
1. What applications are currently chewing up CPU time
2. What applications are making the hard drive go nuts
3. What applications are pulling data in/out of the Network
4. Just Plain ‘Designed for Laptops’
   Sleep occurs and wakes up in 2 seconds.  Bitlocker secures everything on the hard drive to the PC.  Out of the box, the OS works with most smart cards.  The security functions all recognize the TPM chip.  The EFS security makes selectable encryption easy.  The Power Management is extremely flexible and configurable without any hardware add ons.  I could go on, but this should be enough.
   
5. The Power to Find any Mail or Document
   The existing indexing engine freaks people out because the hard drive light seems to always be flickering…  but that’s a good thing.  It’s the Indexing engine making it possible to search for content on the hard drive during idle cycles, and why not use those idle cycles to make your Information Searching that much easier?  The indexing engine also searches Outlook mail so in a single search you can view either email or documents that exist on the machine.
   
6. Empowerment to run Next-generation Applications
   This is the biggie:  Most next-generation applications will be much smaller in size yet much more powerful.  Why?  Windows Vista contains all of the code necessary to make graphically attractive, workflow empowered, communications enabled applications without any additinal libraries.  Most basic applications are 1MB in size and simply leverage all the incredible libraries that come built into Windows Vista.