I recently had a chance to upgrade my laptop (from work) to a new IBM X200 Tablet PC with a multi-touch screen and It came pre-loaded with Windows Vista. I’ve had such bad experience with Windows Vista in terms of stability and performance and I was reluctant to try this operating system again so I decided to upgrade the new and shiny IBM to a Windows 7 Professional edition (crossing my fingers…). I had to do this anyway to check compatibilities of the application we develop at work and I wanted to see what Microsoft came up with and decided to fix on the previous OS version. It took about 30~40mins for the upgrade and it was seamless. I was surprised how all of the components and applications that came with the laptop worked out of the box… I didn’t have to do any special tweak to get any of the drivers or application working. Well… I was actually wasn’t *that* surprised since I knew that Win7 and much of the architected components were Vista like… I call it Windows Vista Version: Fixed.
The dreaded UAC is still there but there are more options now. Not a lot of people may not agree with me, but in my personal and professional opinion UAC is actually a good thing in terms of security (for the masses). Much of my time spent for the past 9 years have been supporting and managing an IT Infrastructure, and being involved with many different users at the early stages of my career, you won’t believe the things I saw what end-users do… and how *applications (good or bad)* could actually do to a desktop. Security is what most end-users asked for… and you got it, through UAC. Yes, it broke some applications, although times have changed and we need to look at security on the desktop with a different set of eyes. For the past couple of years, I’ve been in the position to get our application to work with UAC, and I have to say that I was bitter at first with Microsoft, but the more I understood the security context the more I was accepting and everything just became a challenging and fruitful task our team has accomplished. The application wasn’t just a desktop application, but there is a rich-collaboration (such as, desktop sharing, control, etc), so the implementation of the fix wasn’t trivial since we had to experiment and find out other ways of working with the browser and operating system for low-level hooking, etc.
Remember, Security is NOT a product, but it is a process and user awareness. Here is a preview of the UAC control on Win7:
It has more options now, and it can be tweaked to fit the security notification you can tolerate…rather than just disabling UAC, which is what most users did with Windows Vista. Microsoft took a lot of heat on Vista, but I think with Windows7, Microsoft is headed in a right direction. Good work guys!
