Windows Security

Morro from Microsoft

One more security suite in the market from a big vendor. As a consultant from small businesses, I have to deal with fire walls and security suite for small networks. Live One Care was Microsoft solution for home PCs and small network security needs.

As a PC user and professional consultant, I am against using any popular security suite that comes bundled with new PCs or are widely used by consumers. From the average user point of view, security suites such as (Norton and McAfee) are difficult to setup and configure; I was always against installing these solutions in my clients’ computers. I still remember how difficult is (for the average user) to setup wireless network access permission in Norton firewall.

I have installed Live One Care few times, but I don’t really have any experience using it. Market data indicating that only 2% of the professional are using Live care as their security solution; Microsoft remedy was to release Morro, which is supposed to be a better solution.

My advice to software vendors, just come up with something that is easy to install and configure, a firewall that doesn’t ask the user to supply too much technical data.

Currently, I am using Zone-Alarm, which as much easier to setup and configure than the other popular security suites in the market.

Will Windows Vista put an end to Microsoft dominance of Operating systems?

If we look back at the early days of windows based operating systems we can see the huge enhancement Microsoft made to the Desk top operating systems, from DOS to windows 3.1 to win95 to win2000 and finally Win XP.

For many users, win XP was (end still) the best operating system Microsoft ever written, with SP1 and SP2, Microsoft fixed major bugs in the system and the users community was content with winXP.

Only when everything seemed to be working great with winXP, Microsoft released windows Vista, I personally, and I am sure as millions of users, was not ready to let go of winXP and start the journey to learn new operating system with its all new features.

Recently, I had to replace my company’s computer systems with new systems, I wanted to get new systems with XP, but the vendor told me they only can provide us systems with windows Visa. I was not very happy to migrate to Vista yet.

The transition from windows XP to windows vista is not as smooth as it should be, for the average user windows XP is more user friendly than windows Vista. One feature of windows Vista that I particularly find hard to understand for the average user is the Network and file sharing properties in windows Vista.
In its attempt to make windows Vista more secure, Microsoft made setting up network and resource sharing in windows Vista a bit hard to configure, there are many security features the user have to configure.

From a historical point of view, I can tell that Microsoft reached its full potential with windows XP, there was no need to release a new operating system at the time when windows XP was performing real well with the users.