03-06-2006 9:25 PM Erwyn van der Meer

Why Windows Vista will suck?!

eWeek runs a story with the title "Why Windows Vista will suck".  It links to the full story by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols on DesktopLinux.com. Although I have my fair share of criticism of Windows Vista, this story is very biased and sometimes plain wrong.

For instance, it states
If you didn't buy your PC in 2006, I wouldn't even try to run Vista on it.
Well, my computer is from November 2003 and it runs Windows Vista just fine. I even get the full Aero experience. Granted, in 2003 I did buy a high-end graphics card with my computer: the ATI Radeon 9800PRO with 128 MB VRAM. These days you can buy a similar card for less than 100$/€ 100.

Next it claims
Unfortunately, while Microsoft has worked hard on improving Vista's security, it's still pretty much the same old rickety kernel underneath it. Need proof? In January, Microsoft shipped the first security patch for Vista. It was for the WMF (Windows Metafile) hole.
This proofs the writer has no clue what he is talking about. The WMF hole has nothing to do with the Windows kernel. It was a user-mode vulnerability. Code exploiting this vulnerability gains the rights of the logged in user, but no more.
You see, with SuperFetch you can a USB 2.0-based flash drive as a fetch buffer between your RAM and your hard disk. Let me spell that out for you. Vista will put part of your running application on a device that can be kicked off, knocked out, or that your dog can carry away as a chew toy. Do you see the problem here? Me too!
Microsoft has publicly demonstrated at conferences that you can pull out the flash memory without any problem while Windows Vista is running. This memory is only used for caching items that can be recreated on the fly. You will take a performance hit, but you will not loose any data.
What I do know, is that I really don't see a thing, not one single thing, that will make the still undelivered Vista significantly better than the Linux or the Mac OS X desktops I have in front of me today.
What about an OS that has way more applications written for it than those other OS's and has much better backwards app compatibility than Max OS X ;)
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# re: Why Windows Vista will suck?!

Monday, March 06, 2006 2:19 PM by Ramon Smits

I really admire you for still visiting such websites. I quit that years ago ;)

# re: Why Windows Vista will suck?!

Tuesday, March 07, 2006 2:09 PM by Erwyn van der Meer

eWEEk does run good articles from time to time. Their editor Mary Jo "Microsoft Watch" Foley is pretty well informed and mostly unbiased.

# re: Why Windows Vista will suck?!

Tuesday, March 07, 2006 2:34 PM by doug

You make a valid correction about user vs. kernel mode, but the general point the writer is making is entirely valid; if the wmf vulnerability can still wreak havok with the system, then the fundemental problems still exists. If they did in fact entirely rewrite the OS and the software with security in mind, the fact that the same vulnerability exists in independent code is quite disturbing.

# re: Why Windows Vista will suck?!

Tuesday, March 07, 2006 2:55 PM by Erwyn van der Meer

Doug, there is no way Microsoft will entirely rewrite the Windows OS. This will wreak havoc for backwards compatibility. Do you mean Windows code rewritten by Microsoft with "independent code"? Or do you mean the fact that the WINE library (http://www.winehq.com/) that emulates Windows has the same WMF vulnerability. That is something that is quite disturbing. It means those implementers, like Microsoft, overlooked this vulnerability. The fact that WINE is open source and that thus potentially a lot of people have reviewed the code, didn't prevent this vulnerability from occurring.

On Windows the WMF vulnerability only wreaks havoc when you are logged in with an administrator account. In XP it is not easy to run with a limited user account. In Vista this will be much better. Also the new protected mode for Internet Explorer 7.0 on Windows Vista will severely limit what these kinds of exploits can do, even when running as an administrator.