The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Windows Vista Beta 2 Ash Nallawalla ash@melbpc.org.au |
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Melb PC President Dave Botherway and I were guests of Microsoft as part of the continuing Windows Vista beta test cycle. This time it was in Singapore, not Redmond, on 27-28 May. Our sessions were in a commercial training facility, not Microsoft offices.
We were welcomed by Nick White, who manages the Windows Client Community and by Cally Ko, who is the regional Director of MVPs (Most Valuable Professionals) and Community.
The first presenter was Kenneth Lundin, GM Windows Client, Asia-Pacific. He said that Windows Media Centre Edition (MCE) is growing 400% month-on-month and over 10 million copies have shipped so far. Windows Vista will have Media Centre built into the home versions. People will be integrating such PCs with their home theatres.
Tjeerd Hoek, Director, User Experience Design, presented an updated version of his account of Vista's journey to date from the design perspective. He said that it is friendlier; for example, we will no longer be admonished by error messages when we do something wrong and have to click a modal OK button to proceed. Either there will be no action, or it will be done the right way silently.
Michel Gambier, GM Information Worker, Asia-Pacific presented the latest beta of Office 2007, which is now available for download. It has many great features, but beyond the scope of this article.
Tariq Sharif, Lead Program Manager, showed Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), which has been available in beta for Windows XP and is also supplied with Windows Vista. Much has been said elsewhere about the superiority of other browsers, but Microsoft has taken note of security concerns with older versions of IE.
Tariq gave the example of the novice user who falls prey to phishing and clicks in spite of seeing warnings from IE7. I know some people like that, who blindly click "OK" whether they understand the message or not. Thanks to a new "Protected Mode IE", an integrity control hands over the data to a broker process, which in turn writes to the Registry. A compatibility redirector places suspicious data in the Temporary Internet Files directory and the results are virtualised, so they appear to work without causing real damage.
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Users can now submit URLs of phishing sites to Microsoft through IE7. Phishing
data is sent to Microsoft's URL Reputation Service where live "graders" check
each report in case an innocent site is maligned by its detractors. If phishing
is confirmed, the address bar will appear with a red background when a user goes
to that site. IE7 also uses heuristics to alert users to a new site that
displays phishing-like behaviour. Aaron Coldiron and Nick White next ran a Community Roundtable to get feedback about the day's events and about the Community resources such as blogs and the Hive. The second day started with a presentation on Digital Media, Media Player and Media Centre (MC). Matt Hardman is a Developer Evangelist, so his session was quite technical. He said that MC includes an alphabet soup of applications: |
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- Hosted HTML applications
- Hosted WinFX XAML Browser Applications (XBAP)
- Podcast client
- Sample MCML browser and Software Development Kit (SDK)
Next, we heard a compelling account of Vista's text-to-speech features by Chiwei Che, Development Lead, Microsoft Advanced Technology Centre in Beijing. One needs to use a good quality microphone to issue commands to Windows Vista and you may need to train it to recognise your voice. The results were impressive.
We had a long PowerPoint-reading session by a Microsoft Singapore representative about how easy it will be for corporate IT to deploy Windows Vista. Suffice it to say that each generation of Windows gets better in this area.
The final session featured Security and was presented by Ravi Sankar, IT Professional Evangelist, based in Bangalore.
Highlights for Me
Three major innovations make this release exciting. Known as Windows PC Accelerators, three new performance-enhancing technologies will be featured in the coming months and well after the launch:
- Windows SuperFetch is a memory management innovation that helps
make your PC consistently responsive by tracking what applications are used most
on a given machine and intelligently preloading these applications into memory.
- Windows ReadyBoost makes PCs more responsive by using Flash
memory on a USB drive, SD Card, Compact Flash, or other memory form factor to
boost system performance. I just put in a USB key and followed the instructions
on the screen.
- Windows ReadyDrive enables PCs equipped with a hybrid hard drive to boot up faster, resume from hibernate in less time, and preserve battery power. Hybrid hard drives (HHDs) are a new type of hard disk that uses a NAND Flash buffer instead of the traditional non-volatile RAM. The benefit is that the heads write only when the Flash buffer is full, thus speeding up disk writes. Therefore, I will need to incorporate an HHD in my next PC.
Vista is inherently secure - to the point of driving advanced users like Dave and me crazy. If you have an administrator account, it still asks you to confirm each potentially security-related action.
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Microsoft uses the expression "Service Hardening". It uses layers to separate
services into user mode and kernel mode and also increases the number of layers
to prevent malicious code from damaging the system. Apart from the social engineering protection from phishing, there are safeguards for modern hazards such as support for International Domain Names (IDN) such as Chinese and European accented characters that resemble Latin 1 characters, e.g. microsoft.com versus mïcrosoft.com (the letter "i" is different). Unified URL Parsing will prevent IE7 from parsing a mixture of languages in the URL. A minor feature that will be appreciated by IT managers is being able to disallow a USB Flash drive from being used to copy files while allowing it to be used as extra RAM. |
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Download
Windows Vista Beta 2 is a free download from the Microsoft site below. Be sure
to read the instructions before downloading. Unless you have an ADSL or cable
connection of 512 kbit/s or better, you should order the DVD. The Microsoft
download site has been swamped with downloads so the DVD route is advisable.
The long wait for Windows Vista will be worth it.
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Useful URLs Download Vista Beta 2: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista Text-to-Speech: http://www.microsoft.com/speech Media Centre Blog: http://blog.mediacentersandbox.com |
Reprinted from the July 2006 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
