As much as I would love to be able to push the move to Windows Vista, as a consultant I want to make sure I am giving the best advice that I can, from all angles that I can see, whether this be from a technical point of view, or from a security point of view, or simply for ease of connectivity and file/multi-media presentation.
Now with windows XP, I was never a big fan of the Windows Defender anti-spyware program and found that besides slowing down the computers overall performance, it rarely-if ever, found a spyware component other then what spybot search & destroy, ad-aware and avg'santispyware program would find and for that reason, would turn off/disable the defender.
With windows Vista however, I was reluctant to turn it off for the sake of just turning it off and wanted to give this a fair trial, since I had figured the windows team had now integrated it pretty well with the operating system and the various windows updates, to keep its definitions up to date so that it may very well save you from some potential Trojan horse. In any case I have found that besides the annoying and pretty constant pop up message that you receive when launching a program that doesn't have the windows certification, and no, this is not because of the DEP features either, but directly related to the Defender, I also realized by turning this off, the performance boost was quite substantial and this is because the computer only has 512mb of memory. (Before I placed the second stick of 512mb since I would never recommend running Vista without 1gb, and to top that, would highly suggest taking advantage of the very low flash memory card pricing and utilize the memory boost feature with at least a 512mb SD card which should set you back less then $20). It appears that once again Windows should just stick with building a good engine and allow the third party people to accessorize and protect the engine with various antivirus/security and antispyware scanning software. Which ones? Visit the SOFTWARE/SUPPORT page to get the ones I would recommend using.
