Vista Security Report 1 Year Out

[Caldor]

http://blogs.technet.com/security/archive/...ity-report.aspx

 

Vista continues to be more secure than XP, RHEL, Ubuntu and MacOSX. A combination of factors such as MS's secure development lifecycle (which Vista was the first OS to use), UAC and IE7 protected mode by default provide this.

 

The Linux or Mac zealots claim that Vista hasnt been a malware target. Thats strange given over 100 million users on Vista and what really has been the focus of much attention from white hats and black hats alike. Thats in contrast to RHEL and Ubuntu having more security problems, when geeks see it as being largely uncool to hack Linux for exploits.

[JDPower]

Not exactly an independent report though is it, the bloke works for Microsoft.

[Caldor]

He's a well known security expert well before he joined MS. Besides, his methodology in his research is fully stated and is open for anyone to critically explore. I encourage readers to explore it rationally. Illogical arguments using fallacious reasoning isnt rational.

[CTskifreak]

I think I know why it has less exploits...because the hackers realize everyone is staying away from Vista, so they are trying to find all the weaknesses left in XP. There can't be many more left, considering SP3 will be out soon.

 

AJ

[Caldor]

Actually, there is more unpatched security flaws in XP than Vista if you research the data.

 

I wouldnt call 100 million users a sign that everyone is staying away from Vista. Its many more desktop users than MacOSX, BSD, Linux etcetc all combined.

 

It's a common theme amongst some MS users - I heard the same with people sticking with 2K instead of XP, with 95 instead of 98 and so on. Actually I remember windows for workgroups 3.11 being the same said about it.

[Tunerz]

Vista, for me, is still very young to hit the big market. The OS is very promising. It gives us the idea on how the computer world may evolve through years of innovation. Yes, as of now, Vista is more secure, but does it support most of the programs users enjoy in XP? You can secure XP if you have the knowledge. No matter how the OS is built, if the user is just more or less an average joe, then it will be susceptible to the horrors that plague Windows OS over the years.

[Caldor]

For me, Vista is the only OS that supports the programs I want to use. Vista runs all the usual stuff like openoffice, paint.net, ffdshow and so on just as they run on XP. Since I enjoy gaming, Vista offers me DirectX 10 and support for multi gpu configurations of three and four gpus. It is unlikely XP will ever support these new crossfire/sli setups.

[CTskifreak]

Caldor...that's where you're wrong. Yes, XP does not support DX10, but it does support the new tri-SLI and Crossfire-X configurations. That's hardware, not software - the motherboards and the games have to support it, not just the OS.

 

AJ

[Caldor]

Mate Id be happy to be wrong but I do believe that quad crossfire and tri sli wont be available in XP drivers because advanced frame rendering modes in XP is limited over Vista. i.e. My understanding is the architecture of the middleware with directx9 doesnt support it. For it to happen I believe MS would have to heavily patch DX9 which I dont think they would do.