* Astronomy

Some of Microsoft's efforts to make Windows Vista its most stable and secure operating system ever could cause instability and new security flaws, according to a Symantec report.

Researchers at Cupertino, California-based Symantec examined the new networking technology in recent test releases of Vista, Microsoft's next major operating system release. They found several security bugs and determined that Vista's networking technology will be less stable, at least in the short run, than Windows XP's.

"Microsoft has removed a large body of tried and tested code and replaced it with freshly written code, complete with new corner cases and defects. This may provide for a more stable networking stack in the long term, but stability will suffer in the short term."

Vista, slated to be broadly available in January, will be the first major new version of Windows for PCs since XP, which was released in 2001. Microsoft has put a stronger emphasis on protecting PCs in the new operating system, as security has grown in importance over those five years. Symantec's report draws attention once again to Microsoft's goal of improved security and the hurdles it faces in getting there.

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Grisoft, the maker of the popular free antivirus software AVG has announced that Microsoft has fixed a bug that was preventing AVG from installing on Vista Beta 2. You need to get an update though.

Peter Cameron of Grisoft's Australian distributor Avalanche Technology said Vista Beta 2 users should obtain the Microsoft patch via Windows Update.

http://free.grisoft.com

Here is a link to the older Vista Transformation Pack (version 3).
If you want to make your XP operating system look like Vista, for free.

(31.66mb download)

Web link:

Update for Windows Vista Beta 2 and Windows Codename Longhorn Server Beta 2 (KB919946)

Install this update to fix an issue where in the presence of Internet Protocol security (IPsec) or Windows Firewall, a race condition can be hit on multi-processor (or hyper-threaded) systems causing memory corruption, leading to a system crash.

Update Patch