http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/topics/msh/cmdlets/index.mspx

From Eurogamer: Unangst said Microsoft would "continue to invest" in Games for Windows, which apart from giving its games an Xbox Live-style service layer with friends lists, Achievements and the like, also insists that games be easy to install, support widescreen displays and include parental controls.

It all sounds promising. The one thing I was most impressed with on Xbox 360 is the whole integration and lack of configuration for games, if they can bring that to Windows Vista then a lot of people will be very happy.

Some ideas:
You can see how they could potentially take the experience index benchmarking framework and develop that into something that can adjust games visual quality, automatic updating and applying of patching without user intervention, matchmaking and the community features could all be very useful and add value to PC gaming. Even some sort of integrated anti piracy tool developed for Microsoft that doesn’t rootkit your machine which would be less painful to consumers would also be an improvement over the current situation.

When a user upgrades from IE7 to IE8, they will be upgrading from IE7 to IE7. When a user upgrades from IE8 to IE9, they will be upgrading from IE7 to IE7. Notice the trend. [...]
Effectively, with this meta tag proposal, Microsoft have either absolutely guaranteed that they will remain the dominant browser on the web, or it has sown the seeds for its ultimate destruction. If it’s dominant IE7 will be the instrument to hold back all standards compliant progress, just like IE6 before it.

Source [isolani.co.uk]

I can only agree. It seems to me the switch will result in better fitting websites, but not by using more standards. But I noticed this at the whole Eolas patent debacle: the IE team doesn’t take enough responsibility regarding standards. Even though the code was fine they wanted developers to implement a javascript workaround for their own workaround solution in all their pages with embedded content. They didn’t want to (or couldn’t) pay Eolas so people now have to click to start embedded media. Even though it’s a browser issue.

And the same happens in this case: if the browser vendor took its responsibility and improved its implementation, the whole issue  wouldn’t exist for webdevelopers’ if their sites written to standards (and valid) don’t display properly. So the whole “the users have to be protected from broken pages” card is a smoke screen in my opinion.

Just be frank then: corporate partners costcutting is more important to Microsoft than the freedom of the web.

• Windows Vista users generally experience 20 percent fewer application “hangs” than those running Windows XP.

Source (Microsoft)

Using SetSAFER, a program created by Microsoft employee Michael Howard we can run just any applications as a regular or limited user, while still using an administrator account. After testing for side effects, which I explain below, I recommend you give this a try. I no longer have to run a realtime spyware scanner, and now just schedule routine scans.

As one of the articles Michael has written on the subject is not available anymore I’ll quote the nonadmin site for an complete explanation of the program:

SetSAFER is a policy-setting tool written by Michael Howard that can force applications to always run with lower privileges. You can download it and read about it in his MSDN article “Browsing the Web and Reading E-mail Safely as an Administrator, Part 2″.

For example, you could mark you favourite  browser to always run as a user, regardless of whether it starts by invoking an URL on the desktop, a link in email, a newly spawned browser and so on.

SetSAFER uses the SetSAFER.xml file to configure the applications that should be run with lower privileges. You can edit this with any text editor such as notepad to add applications and even folders. My configuration can be found below. This way I run my browsers, e-mail software and messengers without worrying about spyware:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<safer>
<app comment="Internet Explorer" path="c:\program files\internet explorer" user="true" />
<app comment="Mozilla Firefox" path="c:\program files\mozilla firefox" user="true" />
<app comment="Opera 9.5 Alpha" path="c:\program files\opera 9.5 alpha\opera.exe" user="true" />
<app comment="Outlook" path="c:\program files\microsoft office\office12\outlook.exe " user="false" />
<app comment="Outlook Express" path="c:\program files\outlook express" user="true" />
<app comment="Windows Messenger" path="c:\program files\messenger" user="true" />
<app comment="Windows Live Messenger" path="c:\program files\windows live\messenger" user="true" />
</safer>

Side Effects

Some applications are not built to run in a mixed privileges environment and seem to cause issues when run like this. However, this is not SetSAFERs fault as it just uses the built-in windows policy settings!

Google Desktop and Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer monitor the browser history for pages that are visited and add them to their database. I assume this is not allowed as a regular user. Whatever the reason, it causes the browser to freeze whenever you go to a webpage. I’ve uninstalled Google Toolbar and Google Desktop until I have found a solution. Any help would be appreciated.

The website for Windows Update and Microsoft Update and certain Java applets will not  function if the user is not an administrator. This can be a pain if you want to manually check for updates. The solution: navigate to the installation folder for Internet Explorer (c:\program files\internet explorer ) and copy the iexplore.exe program to another location. The copy will run with full rights.

Finally, any program started from another application inherits the security settings from the parent program. This means that installations run directly from the browser will run with lower privileges. They’ll let you know you do not have enough rights to install it. This is intended and exactly what we want: a secure browsing environment. However, it might prove a slight annoyance at first. Just browse to the file yourself and run it yourself.

Downloads and Resources

• Download SetSAFER with my configuration. (it requires the .NET Framework 2.0)
• If you prefer you can download SetSAFER directly on the author’s website.