Microsoft has brought a new entrant into the operating system wars and it’s name is Windows 7.
After Windows Vista has pretty much turned out to be a dud, even though the security in the system proved to be much improved over previous version of Windows, Microsoft seems to have found a winner in Windows 7 and especially in their expanded security front.
The tools are now easier to use and the capabilities of the security that are built in has been expanded as well.
I will go over with you, the built in tools that you should be utilizing to keep Windows 7 a fun experience.
User Account Control (UAC)
The first thing that the people over at Microsoft have done to make the dealing with security of Windows a better experience is to make the UAC (User Account Control) a more pleasurable item to work with.
The UAC now allows less software events to make it create a pop up.
This will cause more users to not want to turn it off so they will have a sane computing experience!
The main problem in Windows Vista was the fact that this pop up would go off an insane amount of times, causing many of the complaints that Vista received.
The new UAC also has four levels of security warnings, ranging from “always notify” to “never notify”.
“Never notify” is a better option than to turn it off completely.
Even though you do not see the pop up warnings, UAC is still working in the background, allowing you to still be protected.
BitLocker Encryption
An innovation that Microsoft introduced in Vista was the BitLocker feature.
This allowed you to encrypt and protect your hard drive.
This feature was limited in Vista to protecting your main partition and other drives surrounding it.
Now you are able to encrypt and protect portable media as well.
This is a big improvement and will allow you to feel safe if you ever lose your thumb drive while walking around your city or neighborhood.
Also Microsoft has allowed BitLocker to be used without the TPM chip being built onto the computer motherboard.
This allows everyone to have the option of having their drives protected.
It is not the default choice and you will have to activate the ability to use Bitlocker without the chip.
Additional Security Features
Microsoft has many more new and improved security features that have been built into Windows 7.
This list includes the new Direct Access, which allows workers to seamlessly connect to their work network automatically and securely, as well as Applocker, which prevents unauthorized scripts and programs from running on the machine.
These are mostly security features that will interest IT administrators so I will not go into detail about them here.
Overall Microsoft has done well in improving their security features in Windows 7.
Being built upon a decent security scheme, such as Vista, and making it more user friendly as well has created a better overall experience.
It has really brought them into the world of having a grade A security system.
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