At work I use mostly Debian Linux, but when I built home computer recently (see the Hardware Guys forum if you're thinking of doing it) I installed Vista. My experience has been mostly positive. Reliability has been good except for occasional Windows Explorer crashes, which are detected and restart the process automatically. Most things just work, and work easier. The Windows Aero interface is an improvement, but with my video RAM on board the mother board, it's slow. For now it's disabled, and will be re enabled when I add a graphics board.

There are a few glaring problems, however, notably in the area of security. Surprised? I certainly was. With all the negative publicity Microsoft has had for poor security, you'd think they wouldn't make simple mistakes. Simply put, some of the security defaults are questionable and they left a few security features out of Vista Home Basic and Premium that are in the business versions, but are equally important to home users:

• By default the power-off icon on the Start Menu puts the computer into sleep mode instead of completely powering off. After powering up the computer it goes directly to the user's last screen, bypassing the login and password prompts. The next user has free access to all your data and files - especially catastrophic if you have Administrator's privileges. This can be fixed using Control Panel->Hardware and Sound->Power Options->System Settings but it's not easy to find, and for me at least, hasn't worked so far.
• Home Basic and Premium are missing the Advanced User Management snapin to the Microsoft Management Console (MMC). It sounds like you wouldn't miss Advanced User Management on a home computer, but think again - by default passwords are set to expire after 42 days. Vista prompts you 10 days before this, but Basic and Premium give you no easy way to reset the maximum password age. There's two ways to access the AUM snapin in the business versions, through the Control Panel or by running the lusrmgr.msc program (the link says the program is available in the Home versions; don't believe it). Home users, however, must use the following steps:
  
  
  1. Click the Start Button
  2. Click All Programs followed by Accessories
  3. From the Accessories menu, right click on the Command Prompt option
  4. From the drop down menu, select the Run As Administrator option
  5. The User Account Control (UAC) will prompt you for permission to open the Local Security Settings. If you are the administrator then press Continue to give your permission. If you are not the administrator, you will require the administrator user name and password before you can continue.
  6. From the Command Prompt window, type net accounts /maxpwage:N where N is the number of days before expiration, and press the Enter key. Use 0 (zero) or the special value unlimited to allow passwords to never expire.
     

The Vista Home password expiration procedure is difficult enough that questions about how to do it are all over the web. Put together, these two problems are security flaws for most home users: 1.) if you're not careful any user can power on your computer and get access to your files; and 2.) it's so difficult to reset the password maximum age that most users will give up and go without passwords. Basically, it's easy to setup your computer with no security, and if you set your browser to remember your usernames and passwords anybody can access your online data.

What was Microsoft thinking? The default for power-off and restart should be to require a password, and there are lots of ways to differentiate Vista Home from Vista Business without making password expiration management so hard. I'm surprised there hasn't been more attention paid to these serious (and easy for Microsoft to fix) security flaws.

¶ 10:26 PM