Vista Premium set-up question?

Discussion in 'other software & services' started by terminal velocity, Feb 1, 2008.

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  1. terminal velocity

    terminal velocity Registered Member

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    I'm installing Vista premium today for the first time. I've been using XP Pro for the last few years. The two will be co-existing as FD-isr snapshots on the same machine.

    I'm behind a hardware firewall.

    I would appreciate any insights into how Wilder's members have used features of Vista Premium to their advantage re. security. What, if anything, have members found useful to implement, disable, augment etc..?

    Links thought to be generally useful are welcome.

    TIA
     
  2. sukarof

    sukarof Registered Member

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    The limited account is more smooth to use than in XP. Instead of getting a prompt telling you that you dont have the right to install, open or whatever in XP and you have to right click and do a runas. Vista knows when it feels "threatened" and gives you a prompt from the start asking you to enter the password for the admin account.

    I am not sure what the difference in a limited account and User Access Control (UAC) is though, other than you have to enter the password in the limited account instead of a confirming prompt in UAC.
    Even though I have plenty of RAM (2GB) I have disabled Prefetch and indexing. I dont have the need for the fast search and Prefetch didnt boost anything (Vista is fast as XP anyway ime) in my machine so all good they did was grinding my hard drives.
     
  3. terminal velocity

    terminal velocity Registered Member

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    Thanks sukarof.

    It would be useful to hear what approach is recommended around UAC.

    While I accept the additional security of the user account in XP, I prefer to use an admin account for day to day work.

    I've seen a few reports elsewhere of people disabling Vista's UAC component. Also I've seen reports of it running to prevent problems, but made less verbose.

    Is there an approach that is felt generally to be a good balance between security and usability?
     
  4. sukarof

    sukarof Registered Member

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    The only difference between a UAC and a admin account is really that you have to answer a prompt when a software that requires elevated priviledges to run and when you install something.
    Other than that a prompts only appears if something that requiers admin account happens behind your back, like if you managed to get a driveby malware. And that is hard even with IE7 since it has not admin rights anymore. I think you get a prompt from UAC if IE7 tries to download something you haven initiated. I am not sure since I use Firefox.


    But yes, you can disable UAC easily if you wish. Just go to control panel/user accounts and turn it off.
     
  5. Tony

    Tony Registered Member

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    Thanks for this sukarof :)
    Hearing my hard drive constantly clicking away was beginning to annoy me, this seems to have stopped now since disabling indexing which i dont really need anyway as i never use the search function.

    Not too sure about prefetch though, i have had it disabled for over an hour now and have not noticed any difference either way.

    One thing i would like to know is on the power settings, is if i let it put my computer to sleep is this likely to have a detrimental effect on my hard drive and other componments with letting the computer go to sleep between 2 to 4 times a day when not in use and then bringing it out of sleep??
    Thanks
     
  6. terminal velocity

    terminal velocity Registered Member

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    While those tips were useful to receive, I was hoping to keep the focus on this aspect of my OP:-
    What if any, are the key things security wise, I'll need to be aware of to make a well considered transition from XP Pro to Vista Premium ?

    Maybe let me know what type of account you prefer to run from on a day to day basis & what the advantages/disadvantages are for you.
     
  7. midway40

    midway40 Registered Member

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    Next week will be my one year anniversary of switching to Vista. Since that time I have yet to catch any kind of malware. Occasionally I run scans from SAS, PrevxCSI, and online AV scanners in addition to my security suite but they never found anything more than a few cookies. The only thing I had was a couple of false positives (Norton didn't like SiteAdvisor and McAfee didn't like the GRC firewall leak tester). When I was on XP I had several programs that dealt with security--Adaware, Spybot, SpywareBlaster, etc--but from my experience in the last year I feel I don't need anything more than just a standard AV/AS/FW setup (well, with the occasional second opinion scans from other products--just to make sure) .

    When I first got Vista I did set myself up as a limited user. But I noticed the only thing different between it and Administrator is that on UAC prompts you had to supply the Admin password where in the Admin account all you did was click "ok". You get the same prompts in both accounts since Admin is not really a "full" administrator in Vista. Since I am the only one at home using the computers I didn't see any sense in typing the password at every UAC prompt so I set myself up as Admin. Now if you have others that use the computer LUA is the way to go.
     
  8. terminal velocity

    terminal velocity Registered Member

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    Thanks for the input midway40 :thumb:
     
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