Greetings Citizens of the Realm!

A few days ago the Paladin was tooling around online when his attention came across a rather interesting article that had a few quotes from a Microsoft “bigwig” who was candid enough to speak on the record about how Microsoft had “botched” the release of Windows Vista.

The article appeared on the MaximPC site and is definitely worth your time to read (click here to see the article on Vista).

The article goes into depth about some of the many problems that were encountered when Vista was launched, many of which the Paladin has pointed out as well. From the instability of the operating system (meaning, it crashes a lot), the poor performance (meaning, it is very slow), to the annoying security measures (meaning, having to click on a dialog box to “deny/allow/cancel” for even the most rudimentary of tasks), to the huge hardware footprint (meaning, it requires A LOT of computing power, memory, hard drive space, etc. to run it). And on and on and on…

But the real eye-opener of this article (at least to the Paladin) was the discussion with a high level Product Manager at Microsoft who was willing to speak candidly about Vista and its rather disappointing launch. The Paladin was very glad to read that even inside of Microsoft they understand the depths to which this latest incarnation of an operating system has sunken.

The article goes on to chronicle the strides that Microsoft has made since Vista’s launch to improve the system, including speeding up its performance and reducing the number of system crashes a user is likely to encounter. The Paladin has stayed so far away from Vista (indeed, he uses a TWENTY foot poll instead of the standard ten foot model) that he was not aware that such progress had been made with Vista by its creators.

Even so, the Paladin is still advising his friends and those who ask to avoid Vista if they can. The Paladin feels that Vista may ultimately go the way of Windows ME (for anyone who remembers that failed operating system). Plus, as the article points out, Microsoft’s next operating system (Windows 7) is slated to be released in the not too distant future (of course, given Microsoft’s track record on releasing software, it may be considerably longer than that).

Nowadays it can be rather difficult to get Windows XP preloaded on a new computer. Windows XP is, for the most part, not offered as an operating system choice for new computers at nearly all computer vendors (though there are a few exceptions). Even so, the Paladin feels that it is worth the time of his readers to consider doing the legwork to find such a machine when considering a new purchase.

More on this topic at a later time…

For now, we can all rest in the sure knowledge that the folks at Microsoft are aware Vista’s issues, even if their marketing team is not! (and in all fairness to the MS Marketing team that *is* their job…to put a positive spin on everything and accentuate the positive).

Until our next post!

Greetings Citizens of the Realm!

Tonight the Paladin wishes to discuss a rather basic part of security for your data. He is referring to the venerable beast known as a “password.”

It seems these days that we have more passwords than we know what to do with. We have passwords for our email, passwords for our computer systems at work, passwords for our home computer, passwords for our phone account, internet account, cable account, and on and on and on.

In fact, the Paladin believes with a quick count that he currently has to keep track of approximately 50 passwords at any one time (or more). This is quite a task.

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The Paladin has been following a rather interesting story regarding some security features that were added to Windows Vista. It seems that two very respected security experts are claiming that a lot of the new protection added to Vista can be relatively easily bypassed (see the original story by clicking here).

You see, the engineers at Microsoft incorporated into Vista some advanced techniques of handling memory in order to make it difficult for “hackers” to be able to break Vista’s security by plucking important pieces of information out of memory. Techniques such as randomly relocating blocks of memory, or encrypting (scrambling) parts of memory are just some of the things they employed. However, it appears that after all of their clever work, a couple of computer scientists claim to have figured out a simple way to get around it all.

Now, before proceeding I should mention that the Paladin is NOT a fan of Vista at all! His general feelings about Vista are as follows:

• Vista is way too big (takes up too many resources). You are pretty much forced to have to make a major investment in upgrading your computer in order to run it
• Vista is way too expensive
• Vista is way too buggy! (it has too many problems)
• Vista is far too focused on trying to keep you from pirating vista, downloading music and videos, etc., than it is on doing the job it is supposed to. Namely, running your computer!

Of all of these problems, the Paladin feels that there is a basic software problem that most companies learned back in the 1980’s that Microsoft seems to have missed.

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