Windows7 Evangelist

We put Ubuntu 8.10, Windows Vista and Windows 7 through their paces in both 32-bit and 64-bit tests to see just how well Ubuntu faces the new contender. And, just for luck, we threw in a few tests using Jaunty Jackalope with ext4.

When Windows users say that Windows 7 is easier to install than ever, what do they really mean? When they say it’s faster, is it just in their heads, or is Microsoft really making big strides forward? And, perhaps most importantly, when Linux benchmarkers show us how screamingly fast ext4 is compared to ext3, how well do those figures actually transfer to end users?

These are the questions we wanted to answer, so we asked Dell to provide us with a high-spec machine to give all the operating systems room to perform to their max. Our test machine packed an Intel Core i7 920, which in layman’s terms has four cores running at 2.67GHz with hyperthreading and 8MB of L3 cache. It also had 6GB of RAM, plus two 500GB of hard drives with 16MB of cache.

The tests we wanted to perform for each operating system were:

• How long does each operating system take to install?
• How much disk space was used in the standard install?
• How long does boot up and shutdown take?
• How long does it take to copy files from USB to HD, and from HD to HD?
• How fast can it execute the Richards benchmark?

See the results >>

Source: http://www.tuxradar.com/content/benchmarked-ubuntu-vs-vista-vs-windows-7

Microsoft is facing increasing heat over the security implications of a change designed to make Windows 7 less annoying than its predecessor.

One of the chief complaints with Windows Vista is frustration with all the warnings that pop up to notify users that changes are being made to the operating system. With Windows 7, Microsoft has changed the feature so that users see fewer messages by default and also so they have more control in deciding how often they are notified.

The problem, say some, is that by making the prompts less frequent by default, Microsoft is potentially paving the way for malicious software to makes changes without the user’s consent.

Unlike with Windows Vista, where users were alerted of all major changes to their system, the default setting in Windows 7 provides users with warnings only when it is a piece of software on its own making the changes.

Blogger Long Zheng has detailed several issues he says are created by that change. Last week, he noted that the changes could allow for malicious code that would turn the prompts off entirely without warning the user.

In recent days, Zheng said he notified Microsoft of a second issue in the Windows 7 beta, which he went public with on Wednesday. The latest issue, he says, could allow a program to elevate its rights to administrator level without properly notifying the user.

Microsoft said that latter issue, which still would require malware to make it onto a system, has been fixed in a more recent build of Windows 7 issued internally. That fix is likely to make its way to the public when Microsoft reaches its next public milestone, a so-called “release candidate” build.

As for the broader issue with regards to the User Account Control (UAC) feature, Microsoft says that the criticisms don’t take into account real-world behavior. With Vista, the prompts were seen as so annoying by average users that many were ignoring the warnings or turning them off entirely, said Jon DeVaan, the head of Microsoft’s core operating system development unit.

Read the rest of this entry »

1.) Netbooks will run any flavor of Windows 7. Any flavor, including Ultimate.
Yes, it’s hard to conceive of an Atom-based netbook running Windows 7 Ultimate. The key caveat, however, is that Microsoft says that those Windows 7 netbooks need to run on “sufficient hardware”. Microsoft doesn’t say exactly what that is, unfortunately. However, given that they’ve thrown that out there, look for this feature to be one of the most closely examined of any Windows 7 offers.

2.) Remember Windows Ultimate Extras? They’re gone. Does anyone actually remember why they paid extra for the Windows Vista Ultimate Extras? Was it DreamScene? Windows Sound Schemes? Tinker? Yeah, me either.

“Our new approach to planning and building Windows doesn’t have the capacity to continue to deliver features outside the regular release cycle,” a Microsoft document provided to PCMag and AppScout says. “While our core development team is focused on building the next release, our sustained engineering team is focused on updates to existing features. As a result we don’t plan to create Ultimate Extras.”

Perhaps, although I wonder why Microsoft never thought about creating a Windows 7 (or Vista) apps store?

3.) Windows 7 will run DVDs natively — but is there Blu-ray support? Windows 7 won’t add the a la carte DVD support Vista included. Instead, “for Windows7, we will now offer DVD playback natively in Home Premium, Pro, and Ultimate, and will no longer offer Home Basic and Starter with the ‘with DVD’ option,” Microsoft says.

But wait — will Windows 7 support Blu-ray straight out of the box? We don’t know that as yet, unfortunately.

4.) Downgrade rights are actually mentioned. Downgrading Windows wasn’t even part of the tech lexicon until Vista, when people suddenly backpedaled and realized that Windows XP might actually do the job better than Microsoft’s latest operating system. With Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer claiming that Windows 7 is Vista, but better, I’m surprised that the topic was even mentioned in the document I saw.

“Final decisions are still being made on details like End User downgrade rights outlined in the applicable product License Terms,” Microsoft says. “We will be in touch when we have more to share.”

Incidentally, there will be a Windows XP-to-Windows 7 upgrade available, Microsoft says.

5.) Windows 7 Starter: Netbook users will be confined to three applications, running concurrently. I can’t decide whether this is something to get worked up over, or if constraining simultaneous applications actually makes sense in netbooks running a gigabyte or so of RAM. I suspect that enough users will choose netbooks with an unconstrained Windows Home Premium environment to carve out a distinct tier in the netbook space. But will the market be large enough to support a Linux/Starter/Home Premium segmentation? I doubt it.

Source: http://www.appscout.com/2009/02/windows_7_versions_the_five_mo_1.php

Malware can turn off UAC, claim bloggers; Microsoft says ‘not a vulnerability’

February 2, 2009 (Computerworld) Microsoft Corp. insisted today that what outsiders have called a “security flaw” in Windows 7 is not a bug, but the way the new operating system is meant to work.

Last week, Rafael Rivera, a developer for a Virginia-based company that sells secure messaging software to the U.S. government, and Long Zheng, a well-known blogger who writes “I Started Something,” argued that a change to User Account Control (UAC) in Windows 7 could be exploited by attackers to secretly disable the feature.

UAC, which debuted in Windows Vista, is a security feature that prompts users for their consent before tasks such as program and device driver installation are allowed. The feature has been roundly criticized since Vista’s launch, primarily for too-frequent nagging. Even Microsoft acknowledged UAC’s problems last year, when it named it one of the five factors that contributed to Vista’s slow adoption pace.

In Windows 7, UAC has been modified to pop up alerts less often. It also has been changed so that by default, the feature is set to “Don’t notify me when I make changes to Windows settings,” said Rivera and Long,

“Windows 7 now ships with UAC configured to hide prompts when users change Windows settings,” noted Rivera in a post to his blog on Friday. “While this mode still ensures normal applications can’t overwrite your entire registry, Microsoft made a boo-boo in allowing users to change any Windows setting without any prompts.

“Yes, you can even change UAC settings, allow[ing] applications free reign in elevated mode, after the required restart,” Rivera continued.

The danger, Rivera and Long said, is that attackers can easily disable UAC without involving the user, and — since by default Windows 7 doesn’t warn when such changes are made — without the user’s knowledge.

The pair created a proof-of-concept script that disables UAC — one of Microsoft’s most heavily promoted security features in the past two years — and posted it online.

Source: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9127153