Gallery

Vista's care in the community

Posted on 24 Apr 2006 at 10:51

Jon Honeyball kicks off his look at Microsoft's next operating system with a renamed beta

So that must be all clear, then? Well no, actually, it isn't. It's a bit of a mess and one can only suppose that the intention is to make things as complex as possible in the vain hope that someone will end up buying something out of confusion and desperation. At this point, I feel obliged to point out that Apple OS X manages to get along just fine with one desktop version - you get everything in the box, it's terribly simple and costs £88 inc VAT, or £139 for a Family Pack, which allows installation onto five machines in the same household.

Under the Hood

I'm not going to treat you to a long ramble through what's new in Vista, since this is far too early for a proper review, and in any case a Real World column doesn't provide umpteen pages to wax lyrical about the complete feature set. It's clear, however, that Microsoft is putting a lot of effort into this release - everywhere you look, it's much better than XP and shows evidence that considerable work has been put into it. This much is only to be expected, of course. I thought that instead I'd focus on a few bits and pieces that have so far either pleased me or driven me to distraction.

Let's start with a Mr Angry issue. XP has turned into a frighteningly insecure mess simply because Microsoft didn't have the guts to lock it down by default and force the mass of migrating 98/ME users to adopt meaningful security policies. It's no good placing the blame for this on Windows 98/ME - they were explicitly written as single-user, single-account operating systems and were never designed with security in mind. Windows 2000, however, was the latest release in the professional NT family, and its successor XP - aka Windows 2003 Home and Professional - took the remarkably stupid decision that security didn't matter in the home environment. This, despite the fact that the OS had a perfectly good set of very high-security facilities built into it, which were being used on a daily basis under the Professional edition in company environments. Giving in to the ISV (independent software vendor) community allowed the viruses, trojans and worms to walk up to an XP Home machine and wreak havoc.

So you can understand that I was very keen to see how things had improved for the home user in the current version of the Home Premium product. Well, I installed it from the DVD image that I downloaded from Microsoft and it set up an account for myself under the username 'Jon'. Then I went to the User Accounts section in Control Panel and discovered that I was logged in as Administrator... No, no, noo, noooo, no, Microsoft, this is wrong. This is bad. This will end in tears.

So let's look at how you create a new account once the machine is set up. Go to Control Panel, User Accounts, Create A New Account, and you see a nice dialog box to fill in with the username. So I entered 'Alexander', the name of my delightful four-year-old nephew. Under this name box is a pair of radio buttons, the first of which is labelled 'Standard User', and this tells me that 'Standard account users can use most software and change system settings that do not affect other users or the security of the computer'. Sounds good to me, and a quite appropriate starting point for a four-year-old child. The second button says 'Administrator', and it tells me 'Administrators have complete access to the computer and can make any desired changes. To help make the computer more secure, administrators are asked to provide their password or confirmation before making changes that affect other users'. Now guess which one is the default? Go on, this isn't a trick question - remember that Microsoft tells us this is the most secure by default version of Windows that has ever been shipped. You got it, the default is Administrator! Yes, it's true, by default and just by clicking buttons, all your home users will be granted Administrator level access to the whole machine, and you will be too.