Half of IT managers who are either testing or installing Microsoft Windows Vista this year said the operating system’s security enhancements are the primary driver fueling the move, according to a new study.

Amplitude Research’s fourth annual Enterprise Security Survey, which was commissioned by VanDyke Software, surveyed 300 IT professionals — 217 of whom are contemplating or moving to Vista. Of those looking to Microsoft’s newest, and highly touted, operating system, 14% said they are eager to use User Account Control (UAC), which is a new security feature designed to limit individual machines’ administrative permissions in order to ward off malware attacks.

Another 22% of respondents said they were upgrading to Windows Vista to take advantage of overall “improved functionality.”

The survey, which was geared to find out what keeps IT administrators up at night with worry, also showed that file transfers are a greatly increasing concern. Secure file transfer showed the greatest growth of all the managers’ concerns, becoming one of their top three security concerns. Thirty-one percent of managers named it a top fear this year, compared with 13% last year.

About two-thirds of the 300 survey respondents reported using a secure method of file transfer when exchanging sensitive data internally between remote offices. That number is up significantly from 52% in 2006. The study also showed that three in four reported using a secure method of file transfer at least sometimes when exchanging sensitive data with customers, vendors, suppliers, and other third parties.

Keeping virus definitions up to date is another major concern, with 45% of managers citing it. Forty percent worry about monitoring intrusions, while 42% are concerned with patching systems and 47% fret about secure remote access.

Actually, securing remote access came in as the No. 1 concern, with 24% giving it their top rating, up from 15% the year before.

“The survey findings correlate to what we see happening in the field,” said Jeff P. Van Dyke, president and founder of VanDyke Software, in a written statement. “Finally, the lines have crossed with steadily increasing adoption of Secure Shell and a significant decline in the use of Telnet to configure network devices.”

Title: Survey: Half Of Windows Vista Adoption Driven By Security
Author: Sharon Gaudin
Date: 22 May 2007
Source: Information Week

Microsoft promises to wow you when you upgrade to Windows Vista, its new operating system. But an upgrade costs at least a hundred dollars.

Commercials for windows vista promise a revolution in the way your pc works. But Consumer Reports says paying for a vista upgrade isn’t the only way to go.

Take vista’s sidebar, where you can put a clock, weather reports, stock quotes, and other handy information. Now take a look at this XP computer. It has a sidebar with the same kind of handy information. It’s a download called Google desktop, available free from Google.

What about vista’s promise of better security? It has a pop-up blocker and a phishing filter, and windows defender to protect against spyware.

But Consumer Reports says at Microsoft’s web site you can get all that absolutely free. Just download windows defender and internet explorer 7.

Another vista promise is a great way to organize your photos, videos, TV shows, and music. Your free option is the media player version eleven download from Microsoft’s web site.

Donna Tapellini, Consumer Reports, says “there you can organize your photographs. You can organize your music and your videos. It’s a somewhat simpler way, but it’s still a nice way to keep everything together.”

Bottom line, while you can’t get all vista’s bells and whistles free, like the cascading windows, you can get a lot of the benefits without spending a dime.

Title: Vista On The Cheap
Author: Christine Park
Date: 24 May 2007
Source: abc 30 Action News

Dutch IT services giant Getronics knows a thing or two about large-scale Windows desktop deployments. With 25,000 employees operating in 20 counties, the company counts 17 of the world’s top financial services firms as customers. Last week, Getronics’ global solutions director Lee Nicholls provided some tips on how to make your Windows Vista deployment as painless as possible.

Getronics started working with Windows Vista a year-and-a-half ago as part of Microsoft ’s Technology Adoption Program (TAP). Nicholls has been involved in many of Getronics’ Vista engagements and has found that large-scale deployments of 10,000 or more Vista seats should be much easier than deploying Windows XP.

Deploying Windows Vista can bring financial benefits, but only if companies do it right, Nicholls says. “Companies have to figure out when Windows Vista is right for them,” he says. “It’s a brilliant product with great benefits. But if you don’t do it at the right time,” you won’t get all the benefits.

Perhaps the biggest benefit Vista can bring to administrators’ lives is a new operating system image-management feature. With previous releases of Windows, every time a company wanted to change a setting or apply a patch, it would require rebuilding the entire master image and then shipping it out over the network or via optical disk to the individual desktops, where it would be installed and deployed, Nicholls says.

“But Vista has a modular image, so if you change a piece of it, you don’t have to create an entire new master image,” he says. “Before, it could take four weeks to create a new master image. Now, you can make changes to the image without having to remaster the image.” As a result, Windows Vista images are much smaller–around 1.5 GB–compared to the 4 to 5 GB images required by XP, making Vista images more network-friendly, and speeding the deployment process.

The new modular imaging feature in Vista will also cut down on the number of images an enterprise must maintain for all of its operations. Nicholls once visited a company that had to maintain 96 different images of Windows XP for all the different versions and languages it had to support. Vista modular imaging gives companies more fine-grained control over the images, resulting in fewer images to maintain.

Vista’s more advanced image management translates into savings, Nicholls says. He cited a study that found best practice deployment techniques (which includes using Vista’s new imaging features) would save an average of $52 per seat per year. That’s half a million dollars for a 10,000-seat organization. That savings figure increases to more than $200 per-seat per-year when other best practices are followed, including using BitLocker drive encryption, Vista’s centrally managed firewall, new User Account Control (UAC) settings to restrict users from changing operating system settings, and utilization of Systems Management Server (SMS) to push out updates.

But Vista can bring cost-saving benefits to users, not just administrators, Nicholls says. In particular, he notes Vista’s indexing and search feature, which he says is one of the highlights of the new operating system.

“I’m not even using folders, just one big bin,” Nicholls says. “Vista is so good, as long as I’ve called things sensibly, I’m going to get results instantly when I type in keywords. When [Windows XP] does an index, it can be pretty invasive. Vista just seems to tick away in the background.”

But Nicholls saves his biggest praise for the combination of Office 2007 and Exchange Server 2007. “The level of connectivity and collaboration that Office and Exchange have–we’ve never seen anything like this,” he says. When Office Communication Server 2007 ships later this year, it should get even better. “It’s just going to be amazing,” he says.

Nicholls says the rule of thumb in the past–that enterprises should wait until the first service pack of a new release of Windows desktop before jumping in–is no longer valid. “It’s a lot more stable than previous systems,” he says. “It was the pattern not to deploy until the first service pack, but to be honest, Vista is a complete product. It doesn’t need to wait for the first service pack.”

Nicholls encourages CIOs on the fence about Vista to ask themselves these questions: “Do you think you’re current business is good enough? Do you want to be more agile and make more money? [Vista enables users to be] more collaborative, communicate better, more secure as they roam around. It’s a much richer product, and it’s going to help you get IT off the cost center on the balance sheet. You can’t really do that with XP.”

Title: Getronics Offers Windows Vista Deployment Tips
Author: Alex Woodie
Date: 23 May 2007
Source: IT Jungle

Summer is typically a slow time for hot new video game releases. This year is no different.

Gamers looking forward to big brands like “Halo 3” and “Grand Theft Auto IV” will have to wait until this fall and the Thanksgiving-Christmas holidays. That’s when the games business goes into overdrive and makes up half its revenue, says analyst Anita Frazier at NPD Group.

“Traditionally, the summer months haven’t been super strong game-sales months,” says analyst Ted Pollak of Jon Peddie Research. “Games are an indoor sport and it just lends itself to the holidays.”

Filling the void for the next few months are video game spinoffs of Hollywood blockbusters like “Spider-Man 3.”

Joining Peter Parker in the transition from silver screen to television screen is an avalanche of franchises, including “Shrek the Third,” “Fantastic 4: Rise of Silver Surfer,” “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” and “Transformers.”

The Walt Disney Co. is banking that Jack Sparrow, Elizabeth Swann and Will Turner have enough appeal to keep two upcoming titles afloat.

“Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” will come out later this month for a variety of platforms, while “Pirates of the Caribbean Online” is an upcoming PC game that includes sword fights and naval battles in a persistent, real-time fantasy world.

In another movie twist, Midway’s “Stranglehold,” due later this summer for the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360, will serve as a digital sequel to the 1992 Hong Kong action film “Hard-Boiled.” It’s billed as a collaboration between director John Woo and actor Chow Yun-Fat, who reprises his role as the gunslinging Inspector Tequila.

Microsoft Corp. is making several moves this summer to woo gamers to its Xbox 360 and Windows Vista platforms.

The armor-clad star of the popular “Halo” sci-fi shoot-em-up games already debuted on the Xbox 360 this month — sort of.

A “beta” version of “Halo 3” will function until June 6 for consumers who signed up for it ahead of time or purchased a copy of the action game “Crackdown,” which includes a special access code.

Don’t be too jealous: they’ll be testing out a very limited version of Master Chief’s newest adventures to help work out the kinks. The final game won’t be available until Sept. 25, says Shane Kim, corporate vice president of Microsoft Game Studios.

Microsoft is also hoping to get more consumers hooked on its Vista operating system with two first-person shooters.

Available for Microsoft’s game console since 2004, a new “Halo 2” for Vista PCs adds some of the features found in the company’s Xbox Live service.

“Shadowrun,” meanwhile, will be the company’s first game to pit Xbox 360 gamers directly against PC players. Part of a larger strategy to integrate the two platforms, players on the Xbox 360 version will be able to battle Windows Vista users in the same online shootouts.

Fans of Nintendo’s interactive Wii will have “Mario Party 8,” the latest in a long line of over-the-top party games, at the end of this month. In June, the wildly popular “Big Brain Academy” series for the DS debuts on the Wii with “Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree.”

“Pokemon Battle Revolution” arrives a few weeks later, giving Wii gamers a chance to collect and fight their battle critters for the first time.

In June, PC gamers clamoring for the latest from the gurus at id Software will get “Enemy Territory: Quake Wars,” a squad-based war game pitting humans against the Strogg aliens.

For PlayStation 3 owners still playing “Resistance: Fall of Man” until something more compelling comes along, there’s the fighter “Ninja Gaiden Sigma” in June and the gorgeous dragon-riding romp “Lair” due about a month later.

Sony Computer Entertainment America has several other PS3 games in the works as well, including the hack-and-slasher “Heavenly Sword” and the jet fighting game “Warhawk” in late summer. Exact dates haven’t been announced.

Owners of pretty much every platform can look forward to August, when new gridiron cover star Vince Young headlines “Madden NFL 08.”

The football franchise, a perennial top-seller for Electronic Arts Inc., gets some competition this year from 2K Sports, which is releasing its own take on the NFL with “All-Pro Football 2K8” for the PS3 and Xbox 360.

Title: Wave of summer video games
Author: Matt Slagle
Date: 28 May 2007
Source: Daily Herald

Munich- Computer gaming fans should exercise caution when considering purchasing a new notebook for use with the operating system to Windows Vista. The graphics performance of many notebooks sold today with Windows Vista is often considerably worse than when the same notebook runs Windows XP, says Chip Online, the Internet portal of the Munich-based magazine Chip.

Chip Online conducted a range of tests using popular notebooks and found 3D graphics performance lacking. A part of the problem is often that notebook computers found on store shelves aren’t outfitted with the latest graphics driver, which sometimes improves the graphics performance perceptibly.

But even when the latest drivers are employed, a good number of the tested notebooks performed worse under Vista than they did under XP. Bottom line: for gamers, XP may still be the operating system of choice, at least for now.

Title: Chip Online: Notebook graphics often not sufficient for Vista
Author: DPA
Date: 27 May 2007
Source: Earth Times

Nudity in the videogame “Halo 2″ for Windows Vista has pushed back the long-awaited title’s official release to the end of the month, Microsoft said Friday.

Microsoft has already released an optional patch to remove the problematic content.

Originally scheduled to ship on Tuesday, May 22, Halo 2 has been delayed to the 31st so retailers can slap stickers on already-in-hand copies. “It has come to our attention that an unfortunate, obscure content error which includes partial nudity was included in our initial production of Halo 2 for Windows Vista,” a company spokesman said.

“As such, we have updated the initial game packaging at retailers with a label, so customers are aware before purchasing the game. This packaging will only be labeled for the initial run of games; subsequent shipments will not include the content.”

From messages posted on Microsoft’s own Halo 2 support forums, however, copies of the nudity-afflicted game have made it into customers’ hands. “Just drove to circuit city and bought a copy,” a user identified as akakia said Wednesday on the forum. Best Buy, however, has not yet put Halo 2 on shelves, reported several users on the same thread. A quick check of the two chain’s Web sites confirmed that Circuit City has Halo 2 in stock, but that Best Buy reported it as available for pre-order only.

A 2MB update was posted on the Halo 2 site Tuesday. The update, said the Microsoft spokesman, “removes the content error” and thus the nudity. “It’s optional,” he added. Subsequent production runs of the game will have the nudity removed.

“It was added in jest, and not meant to be in the final build,” the spokesman said of the nude code.

The incident is reminiscent of the 2005 brouhaha over Take Two’s “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” videogame and a “mod,” or modification dubbed “Hot Coffee” that unlocked graphic sex scenes buried in the game’s code. That disclosure led to an industry rating board changing the game’s rating from “M” (Mature 17+) to “AO” (Adults Only 18+) and lawmakers, including Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), calling for an investigation.

Halo 2 currently carries an M rating.

Title: Nudity in ‘Halo 2′ escapes Microsoft’s notice
Author: Gregg Keizer
Date: 28 May 2007
Source: Computerworld

Microsoft Games Studios announcement is clear: Halo 2 for Windows Vista will be released on the 8th of the month. The catch is that May is not the month in question.

Initially scheduled to be released on May 8, Halo 2 for Windows Vista was later pushed back until May 22. Now, Microsoft comes with a new statement, setting the release date for June 8. The publisher did not give any reason for the change of heart:

“Microsoft Games Studios today announced the eagerly awaited Halo 2 for Windows Vista, will be available on 8th June. The sequel to Halo: Combat Evolved brings Master Chief to Windows Vista allowing PC gamers to play the critically acclaimed Halo phenomenon against others for the first time.”

In Halo 2, players step in Master Chief’s battle boots and try to defend Earth from an attack of the Covenant, a collection of alien races fighting against the humanity. The game will feature over 14 human and alien weapons (but players will be allowed to carry only two weapons at a time), an expanded range of vehicles and a feature previously seen in Call of Duty 2: there is no health bar visible on the screen. The player will slowly (and automatically) patch up his wounds if he can avoid taking further damage.

Update: Microsoft finally disclosed the reason for the delay. It’s nude content.

Title: Microsoft Delays Halo 2 for Windows Vista Again?
Author: PortalIT
Date: 24 May 2007
Source: PortalIT

German based O&O Software released the new O&O SafeErase 3 for Windows Vista. It is now possible to securely delete personal and sensitive data under Windows Vista – quickly and simply. O&O SafeErase 3 also supports all current Windows versions and integrates itself seamlessly into Windows Explorer. In addition, a new assistant has been developed. This makes secure data deletion easy even for new computer users - and only through secure deletion can data be truly protected from theft.

The new O&O SafeErase Assistant allows the user to select from various deletion procedures, including deletion of files, directories, as well as entire partitions or hard disks. Should the computer or hard disk be sold on or given away, the unique O&O TotalErase can delete an entire computer’s data, with no need for a Start CD or diskette. The system partition is also fully deleted, so that no trace of any data is left on the machine whatsoever.

The most important features at a glance:

- Secure deletion of files, directories, recycle bin and partitions
- New O&O-SafeErase Assistant offers step-by-step guidance
- O&O TotalErase for secure deletion of an entire system
- Secure deletion of free disk space including Cluster-Tips
- Five methods for secure data deletion
- Detailed deletion protocol forms a record of deleted data
- Supports numerous current Windows operating systems, including Windows Vista (32 and 64-Bit)

O&O SafeErase 3 is compatible with all current Windows operating systems

Title: Securely delete personal and sensitive data under Windows Vista
Author: Help Net Security
Date: 24 May 2007
Source: Help Net Security

About Deploying Vista: This is the first of what will be an ongoing series examining the challenges of deploying Windows Vista and the considerations that go into the decision to roll out the new OS. The series will highlight the setbacks and successes of those who are at various stages of deployment.

A vast majority of IT shops are moving slowly on Windows Vista , concerned that a company-wide deployment will lead to nightmarish compatibility problems. But for Chris Cahalin, network manager at Papa Gino’s Inc. & D’Angelo Sandwich Shops, Microsoft’s latest operating system is a must-have because of its much-touted security improvements.

Cahalin applied for entry into Microsoft’s Vista Technology Adoption Program (TAP), which allowed participants to pick apart Vista while it was still in beta and have direct access to various engineering groups within Microsoft. His IT department was accepted into the program, pushing the Dedham, Mass.-based restaurant chain well ahead of others in adopting the latest Windows version.

The company has now moved from testing to deployment. Laptops in the organisation are the first to be getting Vista, followed by the remaining Windows devices on the network.

“We already have a district manager with Vista on his laptop, and through TAP we have a direct line to Microsoft in case of trouble,” Cahalin said. “The best way to find the kinks is to use it, and these resources have really made things happen for us.”

Like many early adopters, Cahalin’s IT shop is experiencing the kind of compatibility issues that are typical when a new technology is deployed early. And in Papa Gino’s case, the problems don’t necessarily stem from bugs in Vista itself.

It didn’t take long for Papa Gino’s to find the biggest kink: compatibility problems between Vista and the company’s VPN technology, which Cahalin deems a critical slice of the company’s security program. The company uses a VPN to secure mobile machines in a business where many laptop-wielding employees travel among the company’s 400 locations across New England and often get online using wireless hotspots and hotel rooms outside his IT shop’s control.

Much of Cahalin’s frustration is with Cisco Systems., his VPN vendor, for not being prepared for Vista’s arrival. Since the VPN is so important, he is now considering other vendors.

“As far as I’m concerned, Cisco is moving too slowly on this,” Cahalin said. “Everyone knew Vista was coming, and all the third-party vendors should have started addressing potential compatibility problems before it was released.”

Motivators for early adoption

Cahalin pointed to Papa Gino’s reliance on credit card transactions and its determination not to suffer the kind of data breach experienced by companies like TJX Cos. Inc. , as the main motivator to deploy Vista early rather than wait until the first service pack.

“Any company can suffer brand damage if customer data gets out,” Cahalin said. “Credit cards have been a huge boon to our business and it is our responsibility to protect the data.”

The company is also bound by regulatory requirements and industry standards such as HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley and the Payment Card Industry’s Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), all of which demand that electronically stored data is accurate and secure from online predators.

Cahalin said the security enhancements in Vista are worth the headaches he’s suffered over the VPN issue. With Vista, he said, it’s a lot easier to lock down individual machines and set network policies for end users. He said it’s also easier to secure and connect to legacy applications with Vista. There’s even an upside to one of the security features people tend to like the least: User Account Control, which is the source of those pop-up security warnings a user sees when trying to launch certain applications.

“The pop-up boxes are something users will ignore over time, and they are bound to appear most often when people are trying to use all the legacy applications,” he said. “But we can get around that simply by setting the right policy. Through policy, you can tell Vista which applications are legit and which ones are not.”

Like many Windows administrators, Cahalin has long disliked that Windows would give users local administrative rights, which makes it easier for attackers to take over vulnerable machines. Vista corrects that by blocking local administrative access right out of the box, he said. As for the interface layout, Cahalin admitted it takes some getting used to. Programs and options are not in the same places as they were in earlier versions of Windows. But he said it’s a small price to pay given all the extra control Vista gives IT administrators over those programs.

In the final analysis, he said, Vista offers an “astounding level of security” at no cost.

Of course, not everyone agrees. John Moyer, CEO of Portsmouth, N.H.-based security vendor BeyondTrust Corp., said he’s heard from a number of customers who think Vista leaves too many decisions in the hands of the end user rather than the company security department.

“Microsoft likes to say Vista is the most secure operating system yet, but the reality is that there are a lot of applications people can’t use without administrative rights, and companies don’t want to deal with help desk calls every time a user gets one of those confusing, disruptive dialogue boxes,” Moyer said. “They also don’t like it when the end user has to make a decision on what to run with administrative privileges. There’s not enough transparency for the user.”

The VPN dilemma

While Microsoft is bound to bear the brunt of any frustrations people have deploying Vista, whether it’s the disruption caused by all the dialogue boxes or compatibility issues, Cahalin isn’t the least bit upset with the software giant over the hurdles he has faced. Instead, he blames it on Cisco’s lack of preparedness on the VPN front.

“The problem is that when you use Cisco you need to live on a Cisco island,” he said. “It’s very proprietary. The VPN connectivity has been very spotty, and it has always been a matter of Cisco properly supporting Vista.”

At the heart of the VPN problem is that Papa Gino’s prefers to use a Secure Sockets Layer-based VPN and Cisco hasn’t finished the work necessary to make its SSL VPN compatible with Vista. As a temporary workaround, Cahalin is switching to Cisco’s IPSec VPN, which was recently made Vista-compatible. But many IT professionals consider SSL VPNs more versatile than those based on IPSec, so the situation is not ideal, Cahalin said.

When told of the problems some Vista adopters have been having with the SSL VPN, a Cisco spokesman confirmed the company had fixed the issues on the IPsec side and is working to make SSL compatible. The networking giant declined to make someone from the VPN team available to offer more detail.

Cahalin is now exploring the possibility of ditching his Cisco 5510 Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) for another VPN product from Juniper or another vendor. And Cisco isn’t the only vendor he’s critical of for not being prepared for Vista’s arrival. Citrix has also been slow coming to the Vista table, he said, noting that the company only recently released version 10 of the Citrix Presentation Server client , which is designed for Vista compatibility.

Any company that moves ahead with a major OS upgrade is destined to run into compatibility challenges, said Pete Lindstrom, a senior analyst with Midvale, Utah-based Burton Group.

There are a number of possible reasons for Cisco’s VPN-Vista issues, Lindstrom said. One of the more likely scenarios is that Cisco is taking its time because so few of its customers are actively deploying Vista at this point.

“Cisco is probably waiting to see what the Vista demand is,” he said. “To the extent that not many companies are on the bleeding edge like Papa Gino’s and adoption is slow in the bigger picture, Cisco may just see this as a situation where they have more time to work out the VPN problems.”

Keeping third-party security

While Cahalin is thrilled with Vista’s security muscle, he believes it’s still necessary to have multiple layers of security from multiple sources. Cahalin notes that every desktop machine Papa Gino’s has purchased since March 2005 is fitted with a trusted platform module (TPM) , a chip installed on the motherboard that’s used for hardware authentication. The TPM authenticates the computer, rather than the user. To do so, the module stores information specific to the host system, such as encryption keys, digital certificates and passwords.

While Microsoft took the big step of building TPM management into Vista, Cahalin said third-party vendors are still needed to implement truly effective security. He uses a Embassy Trust security suite from Wave Systems Corp. for encryption and is considering full drive encryption options from Seagate Technology . The company has also been deploying Dell laptops with fingerprint readers.

“Long, complex passwords started to get in the way of productivity so single sign-on became a must,” Cahalin said.

Between his third-party security vendors and the deployment of Vista, Cahalin said he is much more confident that his company has enough protection in place to avoid a serious data security breach. If Cisco could get its SSL VPN issues figured out, all would be right with the world, he said. Whether Cisco fixes the problem or Papa Gino’s goes to another VPN vendor, he said the problem would be solved sooner rather than later.

Moyer agreed third-party security tools will continue to be necessary for the sake of defense-in-depth.

“There’s a standard approach to security and it’s that it has to be a layered approach,” he said. “If you leave all the security to Microsoft it’s like leaving the fox in charge of the hen house.”

Editor’s note: SearchSecurity.com will provide updates on Papa Gino’s Vista progress in future installments of this series.

Title: When Microsoft Vista and VPNs don’t mix
Author: Bill Brenner
Date: 25 May 2007
Source: Computer Weekly

Windows XP’s update process always seemed a bit oddly shoehorned into the web browser, requiring various ActiveX controls to be installed over time.Vista’s new software update is more neatly integrated into the system as a dedicated application, but does it offer any actual functionality over the XP approach?

The answer is yes — if you know where to look.

A default Vista installation automatically downloads and installs updates — great for mums and dads who’d never get round to doing it themselves, but it can be annoying for people who do know what they’re doing.

When Vista applies an update, it often requires a reboot, which means if you walk away from your machine for an hour and come back, it will start pestering you to reboot incessantly.

Take control of when updates install

If you’re doing a clean install, when asked to configure Automatic Updates select “ask me later” – you’ll get more control over setting up how and when updates are applied.

When the desktop loads, either click on the Automatic Update icon in the system tray or go Start, Programs, Windows Update. When the Windows Update screen pops up, select “Let me choose”.

Windows Update - Choosing

On the Change Settings screen there are a number of update options.

I find the most effective option for day-to-day computing is the third option – “Check for updates but let me choose whether to download and install them”.

This setting minimises both bandwidth usage and drive space, and gives you the best control over what’s available versus what you actually want.

It’s also worth ticking the checkbox to have Vista check for recommended updates as well.

Hit OK and the changes are saved.

Windows Update - Update Settings

Vista will check for updates straightaway and will notify you of any (which there almost certainly will be).

Other useful options

On the left hand side there are links for:

• refreshing the available update list,
• changing the update settings,
• viewing the update history (very useful for administrators),
• restoring hidden updates (more on that further down), and
• a link to the incredibly thorough Vista Help app.

If you’re running Vista Ultimate, there will also be an option “Learn about Windows Ultimate Extras”.

Windows Update - Main Window

Under “Install Updates”, you can click on “View available updates” which gives you the full list of updates, broken down by application and type.

By default, Vista will auto-tick all the Important and Recommended updates and leave the Optional ones alone.

Find out what Microsoft is doing to your PC

Windows Update - Available Updates

Highlight and right-click any update and you’ve got three options: View Details, Copy Details and Hide Update.

Viewing details gives you a rundown on the Hotfix details and links to the Microsoft Support page for that particular update — worth reading if you’re interested in knowing about the defects you might encounter in unpatched Vista systems, and also what Microsoft is doing to your PC (not all updates are for the benefit of the user — some upgrade DRM protections and so on.)

Windows Update - Update Options

Windows Update - Update Details

Avoid unnecessary, bandwidth-wasting updates

If you’ve got an update that you’re never going to install (for example, a Vista Ultimate Language Pack), then Hide Update is very useful as it gets it out of the list (once you hit F5 to refresh, anyway).

You can restore hidden updates using the link in the left-hand panel of the main Updates window.

Get updates for your apps as well as Windows

If you’ve got other Microsoft products like Office or Windows Defender installed, then you can configure Windows Update to download updates for these applications too.

On the main window click on “Get updates for more products”. This opens Internet Explorer and directs you to Windows Update online. Tick the checkbox “I accept the Terms of Use” and click Install.

Windows Update - Microsoft Update

Windows Update - Microsoft Update 2

This adds extra updating functionality to the Update application – the main window now states that you’re receiving updates “For Windows and other products from Microsoft Update”.

When ready, click “Install Updates” and Windows Update will head off and download then install the chosen updates.

Windows Update - Downloading

Failed updates: tracking down the culprit

If System Restore is still enabled (that’s the default when you install Windows, so it will be enabled unless you’ve specifically disabled it) Vista will create a Restore Point before the updates are installed and depending on what updates are installed, Windows may need a reboot.

Once that’s done, go back into Windows Update and click on “View Update History”. Here you get a list of what updates were attempted, whether they were successful and what date they were installed.

This is useful just in case things go wrong after an update and you need information to help in tracking down the culprit.

Windows Update - Update History

The more I use Vista the more it seems that the main benefit of the new OS is using features which are present in Windows XP, but have been given a thorough going-over and are far more streamlined, informative and user-friendly, and Windows Update is a great example of this.

Title: Windows Vista Update: tell Bill who’s boss
Author: James Bannan
Date: 25 May 2007
Source: APC