Welcome to Brendon Davis

UAC – Even Administrators are now users

Autor brendon | 27.12.2006 | Category TechStuff, VISTA

User-Access Control is one of VISTA’s really useful new features. It may cause problems with a number of badly written applications that are not UAC aware but the advantages definitely outweigh the drawbacks.

With UAC enabled, whenever a user (or program) wishes to change or access something deemed to be “system critical” the screen will dull and a prompt will open above the requesting process asking if the user requested the change. This is a GUI version of the process used in Linux & Unix where to administer something, the user must type SU to elevate their privileges.

BitLocker – Full (SYSTEM) Drive Encryption

Autor brendon | 13.11.2006 | Category TechStuff, VISTA

BitLocker is another of Windows Vista’s new features (in Business Editions only). This supports the ability to encrypt all data on the SYSTEM partition; not to be confused with the ACTIVE – BOOT partition. A separate un-encrypted boot partition of 30MB (1.5GB recommended) is required for the boot files.  The system is very manageable via group policy and for users who do not have a TPM chip, group policy must be used to bypass the TPM check. I like this for two reasons,

ReadyBoost – USB Keys for PageFile in Vista

Autor brendon | 13.11.2006 | Category TechStuff, VISTA

Windows Vista has some great new functions built into it: ReadyBoost, Desktop Search, BitLocker, Domain Fast User Switching. Just to name a few. I have been running the Windows Vista Beta’s since BETA II in production on my laptop and PC at home. I am definitely looking forward to getting my hands on the RTM.

The logic behind ReadyBoost is that modern Flash Drives (USB Thumb Drives) have a faster read/ write throughput than a standard spinning disk. So to reduce load on the disk, the commonly accessed information from the page file or frequently used programs are loaded into the flash drive.