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Windows Vista: The Best Case for Windows XP

Windows Vista continues to piss off even the hardcore XP users. This article is a great case study of an old school XP user upgrading to Vista and breaking all the problems down for us.

The thing that irks me is that everyone that I have tried to turn away from Windows Vista always responds with something along the lines of "but it's what I'm used to." Sad to say, but with Vista's new features you will do much better to either learn a Linux distribution (XGL looks way cooler than Aero anyway) or switch to Mac. As a matter of fact, as the above linked article points out, Vista has a learning curve. Windows XP users, open up Windows Media Player 11 and tell me where your context menus are. They aren't there. Vista designers have decided to kill a 20 year old desktop paradigm. Hmmm.

Something else that I found disturbing is the incorporation of a small chip called a Trusted Platform Module (wikipedia) into some hardware. Apparently this little gem has been shipping quietly on motherboards for a while now. This isn't related to Vista, but as you'll find out later it enables some very bad things. It does the following:

1. Uniquely identifies your hardware (usually the motherboard).

2. Remote attestation - Creates an unforgeable summary of the software on a computer, allowing a third party (such as a digital music store) to verify that the software has not been changed.

3. Sealing - Encrypts data in such a way that it may be decrypted only in the exact same state (that is, it may be decrypted only on the computer it was encrypted running the same software).

4. Binding - encrypts data using the TPM Endorsement Key (a unique RSA key put in the chip during its production) or another 'trusted' key.

The first and second features are arguable threats to privacy, and the third and fourth are poster children for DRM. To make this concrete, imagine that I have a song that I download in iTunes. If sealing and binding were in place then it would be impossible (without cracking the keys on the chip) to transfer that song to any other electronic media that didn't have an identical TPM chip. Since number one states that no two chips are the same, then you are hosed. Vista uses this piece of hardware in it's hell-spawned incarnation of WGA.

Vista is not only the best case to stick with XP. It's also a great reason to switch to Mac or Linux. Below are some links to some really good and usable Linux distributions. I challenge you to go to one of these sites, download a Live CD, and run it. All you have to do is stick it into your computer and boot to the CD drive and you can play around with a fully functional Linux OS.  Try that with Windows. My personal favorite distribution is OpenSuSE, but it really doesn't matter to me what distro you go with. Ubuntu is notoriously easy to use, Fedora is the open source spinoff of the hugely successful Redhat 9, and SuSE is the most versatile without losing its usability. Pick one, try it, and install it on your computer after you convince yourself that it really is better. A word of caution to notebook users: wireless cards are amazingly annoying to get working in Linux. Check to see if yours is compatible (Anything centrino, or non-broadcom core will work without hacks).

OpenSuSE

Fedora

Ubuntu