May 31, 2006, 11:10 AM — When last we met, I was relating to you my experience from Seattle, where, on Monday, May 22, I attended the daylong Microsoft Windows Vista Reviewer's Workshop.
The column recounted the last scheduled item of the day, a simple and remarkably frank Q&A session with Jim Allchin, co-president of the Platforms & Services Division at Microsoft and the brilliant mind behind Windows Vista, Windows XP, and, years before that, the legendary Banyan VINES network operating system.
Within a few hours of my column being published, Allchin responded to my rant.
Two weeks ago, I noted that Windows Vista is much smarter at sniffing out many system health issues proactively. And it contains troubleshooters that are far smarter and more powerful than anything previously included with Windows. Despite this, I said that it's my belief that Windows is still a long way from being a safe, protective, self-healing, impenetrable environment that assures top-level performance at all times. A look at Task Manager on my XP system reveals 83 processes running at the moment. There's no way to tell what they are, where they came from, what they do, or how to get rid of them. Vista, at least, with a right click on a listed process item shows you the folder where that process resides, saving you from the chore of doing a hard-drive search. But you still don't know what it is, how it got there, what impact it is having on performance, or how to get rid of it. And you still can't tell what each instance of svchost.exe is doing (currently six instances running on my system).
Even though Vista is still in beta, Allchin, in his exclusive response, notes that changes will be made before the product is released to manufacturing (probably in October) and into the retail channel in early 2007. That's a news scoop, folks.
Responding to my longstanding complaints about the uselessness of Task Manager, Allchin responds:
"We plan to change task manager in RC1 [Release Candidate 1] to provide the information about the relationship between services and processes. We also have added a Description column for processes (and services). We also have added a 'resource monitor' selection [that] takes you to the essential part of 'perfmon' [the performance monitor utility] from the task manager directly."
In my column, I commented that while Microsoft is great at building operating systems, it's not doing nearly enough to maintain system health and keep your machine from getting inundated; not so much with viruses, but with Active X controls, agents, and other software that is legitimately, but surreptitiously installed on your machine, mostly by applications. These include, agents to automatically check for application updates, time-of-day monitors to ensure your back-up or antivirus scan runs at 2 a.m. every day, and plenty more.
Jim Allchin responds:
"Regarding how to prevent your virgin machine from getting a bunch of stuff on it you don't want, I have a couple of comments. The first comment is that we did something in the system that will prevent having a homogeneous set of Windows machines in the wild. Today, once you know the essential level of the system (e.g., Service Pack level and update level) AND you have an attack that works on it, then it will generally work on all machines at that same level. We did something to change that in Windows Vista. We put this in the Beta. To a large degree we force a heterogeneous population of Windows Vista environments. Thus, making an attack much harder. Secondly, the best solution is prevention in my view. That is why we are spending so much time in defenses (e.g., firewall improvements, UAC, Protected Mode IE, Windows Defender, and on and on). It is still quite possible for a user to INSIST to download a freeware app and get infected with something, but we sure make it a LOT harder."
Allchin will be sorely missed after he retires from Microsoft following the launch of Windows Vista. One of the brilliant minds of our times, Allchin also is as friendly and soft-spoken as anyone in the industry. In a worldwide industry bursting at the seams with arrogant and condescending executives, Jim Allchin will remain a true standout.
