You may know that I dumped Norton Antivirus a few months ago as I was fairly vocal in my rapture that my computer was finally free of its vile shackles. In many ways its protection could be considered absolute — it took so bloody long to perform the simplest tasks that I couldn’t possibly do anything that would actually infect my machine with a virus! The immediate performance boost running sans Norton AV is striking, and as a temporary measure I decided to switch to the free AVG. I had heard good things about the product and was curious as to how the competition managed to charge exorbitant prices for system crippling software when sprightly free alternatives were so widely available. I discovered that the limitation of free antivirus applications lies not their detection of viruses, but in their poor removal ability. And so it was time to start paying for protection once more.

After much research I found NOD32 to be the most praised by the tech crowd, offering strong protection with minimal system drain. One independent test claims it has not missed a single “in the wild” virus for seven years. So why am I not wholeheartedly recommending to everyone and their dog? In short, the interface. ESET are not aiming for the lowest common denominator. While nowhere near as complicated as I had come to expect from others’ comments, the style is such that those who prefer to just install and leave may have trouble.

It is designed in a modular fashion and you’ll need to know what each module does, e.g. IMON for internet, EMON for email, AMON for active monitoring, etc. Once you know this, the control interface is reasonably intuitive, although setting each one up individually can be a bit unwieldy at first. The benefit is that you only need to run the modules your system actually requires (which in my case was all of them). It is certainly easy enough for anyone reasonably computer literate to use, and it runs so smoothly that you’ll often forget it’s there at all. Strangely at some point we seem to have forgot that this ought to be a prerequisite for system utilities running in the background.

I suppose this deals largely with Office 2007 and not Vista directly, but UI change is likely to permeate future Microsoft products so it remains very relevant. Generally the change between iterations of Office requires some openess to new ways of doing things, but with an almost seamless transition in terms of UI. Many felt 2003 was an almost defunct purchase for only prettifying the icons (not quite true, but not far off either). The same can certainly not be said of 2007 which truly tears out the old interface and starts from scratch. The result is something far less intuitive than one might expect from a company that has dominated the office suite market for the past decade — be warned that most offices are going to require some retraining.

This is not to say the new “ribbon” method is bad, merely that the jarring change is surprising given how well and intuitively the old menu bar system worked. Although at first it appears intact, these buttons are no longer drop-down menus at all. Instead they change the set of visible icons in the ribbon below. It certainly looks nicer, and does speed up several tasks. Its greatest benefit is that styles are now much more readily accessible (with a single click instead of selecting from a drop-down list) and its prominent positioning is probably intended to convince users to utilise this useful function more liberally.

The downside is that it took me almost a minute just to work out how to open a document (although the keyboard shortcut remains the same). Without the familiar File menu, I eventually discovered that the big Office logo on the left is actually a button within which are hidden several major functions. Perhaps I was having a slow day, but if it took me that long to do something so basic I suspect many ohers will have trouble. I would suggest that an “open” button next to the conveiently located “save” button up at the top may not go amiss, but undoubtedly many more issues will arise until people settle into the new interface.

The other major plus is a new integrated document reader view for Word, which launches by default when reading things like email attachments. The lack of a reader app was one of my dad’s gripes with the product so I imagine many will find this extremely useful. It makes great use of the screen and as my use electronic texts only increases it should certainly save me from a little eyestrain!

Fonts are something to which most users will pay little attention but the new defaults included in Vista really are pretty special. Arial et al. are definitely a thing of the past now, with Cambria and Calibri providing a wonderfully clear serif and sans serif styles respectively at both large and small sizes. Indeed, all the new fonts scale remarkably well. Consolas provides a far more pleasant monospace experience too. The only real issue is that they all start with C — Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantina, Corbel. I’m sure it sounded like a good idea at the time, but it’s already confusing me! It sounds odd to say but given the going rate for fonts these days, these are genuinely impressive enough to almost justify the cost of operating system alone.

UAC is an acronym you will soon grow to hate. One of Vista’s major flaws for the competent or professional user is that Microsoft’s “we know what’s best for you” attitude evident in XP has grown expansively. It can be illustrated very simply in the image here. You will see the start menu with the instantly recognisable universal icon for “shut down”. Only in Vista it’s not. Instead it stores your session in memory and puts the machine to sleep. Now I know Microsoft are keen to promote the fast booting and low power consumption that its sleep mode offers but, especially with this laptop, often I just want to switch the damn thing off. Forcing me to click on a tiny arrow an select it from a list is not only unhelpful, it actually slows the process down.

The major issue is the soon-to-be-loathed User Account Control system. It is designed to solve a very real problem — that of novice users running as administrators and inadvertantly opening their computer up to all sorts of malware because they don’t know what they are running. I, on the other hand, do. So forcing me to run in standard user mode and to ask me for permission every single time I perform an act like interacting with the Program Files folder is unnecessary. To ask me twice (a first popup warns that permission is required, a second actually asks for the requisite permission as well as a password if you are logged into another account) is unacceptable. Worse still the “secure desktop” proceeds to hijack my entire screen, fading out everything else and locking it, until I select a response. Drawing attention to a new window is fine, halting whatever I happen to be doing is not.

A neater solution to this problem is definitely needed because this intrusive system will likely lead to many users disabling UAC altogether. I should stress that many of these issues can be solved by tweaking the way in which UAC operates while retaining many of its security advantages. Ed Bott discusses these options as well as how Microsoft can save User Account Control as a concept.