Re: Microsoft Firewall vs ????

goarilla <"kevinpaulus|"@|skynet punt> wrote:
> Sebastian G. wrote:
>> quodnomentibi@remailed.ws wrote:
>>
>>
>>> I just got a new laptop a few days ago, running Vista Home Premium.
>>> I am
>>> in the midst of "customizing" it. Presently, I am running the Microsoft
>>> Firewall. Is this an act of blind faith on my part.
>>
>>
>> Yes. Windows Vista is trivially insecure.


Personally I think a hardware firewall is well worth having. Mine only
allows out the ports I want, and some like lookups to DNS servers and
time servers are only allowed to certain IP addresses.

I don't know how insecure Vista is (Ive personally not been knowingly
hacked), but I do agree it is a poor operating system. I had Vista
Business supplied on my high end laptop, then payed for an upgrade to
Vista Ultimate. I've since repartitioned the disk to Solaris x86, but
I'm going to fit a larger disk (300 GB from 120 GB), and then partition
as XP and Solaris x86.

So despite having Vista Ultimate, on a laptop which costs about $3200
only 13 months ago (dual core 2 GHz, 2 GB RAM), I have come to the
conclusion it requires too much resources from my high-end laptop.

You really should try Solaris x86 and see how snappy a machine feels
compares to one running Vista. I've not managed to get drivers for
either the camera or the fingerprint reader, but those are minor
irritations compared to the slowness of Vista and the fact many programs
have issues when running under Vista.

Re: Microsoft Firewall vs ????

Dave wrote:


> You really should try Solaris x86 and see how snappy a machine feels
> compares to one running Vista. I've not managed to get drivers for
> either the camera or the fingerprint reader, but those are minor
> irritations compared to the slowness of Vista and the fact many programs
> have issues when running under Vista.


This fact is, sadly, well documented. With Windows 2000 Microsoft decided on
a subset of he Win32 API known as NT5 API, which they guaranteed to keep
consistent on all Windows versions till at least 2012, and strongly advised
all newly developed programs to restrict themselves to this subset for the
sake of forward and backward compatibility. Now with Vista they've already
broken this promise, f.e. they've removed the ShellItemIDList stuff and
fully replaced it with Windows Search 4.0 Item Containers (and didn't even
offer a marshaller stub, which would be trivial to implement).