The Vista myth buster

Vista has been accused of all manner of insecurities and instabilities, flaky drivers and being the vehicle for Satan's own Digital Rights Management. It also has a reputation as being a memory hog. We searched for the facts on these issues...

Judging whether Vista is more secure than XP is extremely tricky, if only for the fact that most people with something to say about security have a vested interest in pushing a particular product or agenda. CSO's six-month vulnerability report (http://blogs.csoonline.com/windows_vista_6_month_vulnerability_report) was very favourable towards Vista, recording half as many 'high severity vulnerabilities' for it as for Windows XP during the same period - and all of them have been fixed. This report was written by a Microsoft employee, although this is clearly disclosed. One of the main criticisms of Vista's touted increased security is that as it's newer and less widely used than XP, its weaknesses may simply be unexposed. While this is certainly true, it's also the case that by default, Vista ships with better security than XP as it has Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Defender pre-installed.

What about the lack of drivers? From the list available at www.iexbeta.com/wiki/index.php/Windows_Vista_RTM_Hardware_Compatibility_List, this doesn't appear to be much of a problem, with Creative's 16-bit Live! cards being the most notable entry under Incompatible. No TV or capture functions are available for ATI's All-in-Wonder cards with Vista.

On the surface, it would appear that driver support is a separate issue to DRM, but the two are inextricably linked in Vista. It's untrue that Vista will automatically prevent you from breaking a file's DRM; we've experimented with a few popular favourites and all of them worked. However, Vista furnishes content owners with much stronger tools to protect their goods than those provided by XP, thanks to driver signing - the message that pops up when we load new drivers, telling us they aren't signed and asking us if we think we're man enough to continue.

This used to be a mere precaution, but in Vista, its importance has been augmented. The Protected Media Path system can tell your audiovisual applications that there are unsigned drivers loaded. This makes it possible for them not to allow access to content unless all drivers are signed. This is more stringent for the 64-bit version of Windows than its 32-bit sibling. With 64-bit Vista, kernel mode code signing is required to load kernel mode software. This can prevent malware from obtaining deep access to your system, but it also means that digital certification can be used to prevent any unwanted software from running at this level. Only trusted software suppliers will be able to address the kernel, which can be used to prevent you accessing premium media content. With 32-bit Vista, unsigned software can still run in kernel mode, but its presence will be noted and Protected Media Path unleashed if required by premium content providers.

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