Augusto Alvarez

It has been nearly 6 months now from the Vista release in late June of this year. And the CSO site published a report about the vulnerabilities of Windows Vista on his first sixth months, compared with other operating systems. You’ll find it interesting:

Even with this report, there’s a rumor that the SP1 for Windows Vista will be released in a few weeks from now (it was planned to be released in October or November). Here’s a snapshot made from a Microsoft conference that I found:

Some of the improvements that you’ll find in this SP1 (including of course all the security updates): WinFS, Windows Live integration, upgrades to Windows Sidebar, a better defragmentation functionality, etc.

Anyhow… with only 6 months living, is it too soon to receive a service pack?

Recently I found that there was a list of all hotfixes of Windows Vista, prior to the SP1 (that it’s going to be release any moment now). I also found out in that site that there’s an Autopatcher that includes many of these security updates for Windows Vista.

If you don’t have implemented in your organization WSUS, you probably know about the sacrifice that could be that in every operating system clean installation what means to download and install all the updates over again.

Also you’ll find in that site the autopatcher versions for Windows 2000 SP4, Windows XP SP2 and Windows 2003.

The Vista Autopatcher it’s compatible with both: 32bit and 64bits versions.

Cheers!

 For those who are not comfortable with the size of Vista icons on your desktop, there's a little trick that I'm sure you'll enjoy.

 On your desktop holding CTRL key and scrolling your mousewheel you can set at your placer the icons size.

 This one also works on the Explorer window when you are navigating any hard drive or folder.

 Enjoy

As you may remember, the code name for Windows Vista (as for Windows Server 2008) was Longhorn. It was a time when no beta were available for the public, but I can remember that you could find in those years that some people shared in P2P programs an XP version adducing that was the Longhorn version, with the only difference with XP was the “starting” logo, changed by “Longhorn 2006”.

Well in the firsts Betas for Windows Vista, Microsoft announced that this new operating system will include many things that are not in this final version, for example: WinFS (the new file system specially for indexing files). Because of this, the Vista final version it turned out very different from what Microsoft said it would be on the first betas.

The Joejoe Group took on of the first Vista betas, the 4074 build, and start to build their own betas from there. These versions are, of course, unofficial and unsupported from Microsoft.

In the group site you can find a downloadable version for the last build. We may assume that wouldn’t be available for long time if any legally issues with Microsoft appear. But don’t say that you are not interested in taking a look to this version!!… Adding the WinFS twist, you also will find with other visual features that were the first versions for Vista’s Aero.

Cheers!

 If you still have a Vista version as Beta 2, RC1 and RC2 you probably been getting expiration warnings since a few weeks. Well, your last day it’s coming: that’s May 31^st.

If you remember when you first installed this versions a Microsoft warning appear before downloading it, that said that in these versions “probably” wouldn’t be upgradable to a final version… in other words, if you get a final version you’ll be needing to make as clean installation. But the good news are that apparently (I have not tested this) these versions are upgradable… so if you have a “Vista upgrade” license, you’ll be able to upgrade from an Beta 2, RC1 and RC2 to a RTM version. The languages must be the same though.

Common'!! Did you actually think that these beta versions would last forever???

Cheers!