You may have seen a report that Jim Allchin, a Microsoft co-president said that the new lock down features in Vista are "so capable and thorough that he was comfortable with his own seven-year-old son using Vista without antivirus software installed."
Of course, the words "Lock down features" are very important. This means that the system is made fairly unusable. The story went on to twist Allchin's comments to make it look like he was saying that you don't need anti-virus with Vista.
Allchin had to set the record straight here and explain that he was referring to a specific situation.
You might notice that Allchin didn't day that he was comfortable running Vista without anti-virus software. Allchin actually goes on to say that "I want to be clear, most users will use some form of antivirus software, and that will be appropriate for their scenarios. In fact, Windows Security Center, a great feature in Windows Vista, specifically encourages the use of antivirus software."
Here is the real test. When I worked at Microsoft I could not log into the network if my computer did not have current anti-virus software installed. Do you really think that Microsoft lets employees running Vista onto the network without anti-virus software? Of course not!
Now, the million dollar question Why wasn't Allchin's son running Microsoft OneCare? OneCare is Microsoft's own anti-virus solution. Was it making the PC run too slowly?
ESET's NOD32 version 2.7 runs on 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows Vista, as well as on other versions of Windows. NOD32 users don't experience the system performance problems that users of other solutions encounter. Try a free 30-day test drive at http://www.eset.com/download/index.php. If you have a current license for NOD32 then the upgrade to version 2.7 is free.
In addition to Vista support, version 2.7 features anti-stealth technology to detect and remove active rootkits.
Randy Abrams
Director of Technical Education
