IgNiTeD SoUL

On a typical PC with two hard drives or partitions, one dedicated to Windows XP, and

one dedicated to Windows Vista, you will typically end up with XP on the C: drive

and Windows Vista on the D: drive when you initiate Windows Vista’s Setup routine

from within Windows XP. But when you reboot the system and boot with the

Windows Vista Setup DVD, something magical occurs. After both operating systems

are installed, Windows XP will be on C: and Windows Vista will be on D: while you’re

using Windows XP. But when you’re using Windows Vista, the system will report that

Windows Vista is on C: and Windows XP is on D:. This is vastly preferable to the former

method, because most people are used to seeing the operating system partition

located on the C: drive. For this very simple reason, we recommend that you always

install Windows Vista in a dual-boot scenario by booting the system with the Vista

Setup DVD and launching Setup from there.

I’ve been referring to Windows Vista’s dual-boot capabilities throughout this chapter,

but the reality is that Windows Vista (and previous NT-based Windows versions

like Windows 2000 and XP) support multi-booting. That’s right: With the right partitioning

scheme, gobs of hard drive space, and plenty of time on your hands, you

can configure your PC to boot between two, three, four, or more operating systems.

Such a setup is conceptually interesting but of little use in the real world, at least for

most people. As the saying goes, people who are dual-booting aren’t getting anything

done.

The Home versions of Vista suffer from some stricter limitations on available main memory

and peer-to-peer networking than the non-Home versions. We’ll summarize these

limits as follows:

_ 32-bit Vista versions will always be limited to 4 GB of RAM, due to limitations of

x86 processors.

_ 64-bit Vista versions have dramatically different limitations in the various editions:

• Home Basic is limited to 8 GB or RAM.

• Home Premium is limited to 16 GB of RAM.

• Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate can access over 128 GB of RAM.

Unfortunately, Vista’s new Solitaire code seems to have broken one way that ne’erdo-

wells have cheated at the game for years. This scandalous behavior was first

revealed in Windows 3 Secrets all the way back in 1991. As that book explained it,

you could click Game➪Undo when playing a Draw Three game, and the last three

cards you turned over from the deck would go back on the pile. If you then held

down the Shift key while clicking the deck, only one card at a time would turn over,

allowing you to pick up a crucial card that wasn’t originally on top of the stack.

Whether by omission or design, that trick no longer works, and you’ll just have to win

at Solitaire the good old-fashioned way. (You can still, however, undo the turnover of

your last three cards if you suddenly see a move on the board that might benefit.)

Screaming headlines in recent years have made the public aware of stolen laptops and

desktop computers that contained the personal records of thousands of millions of individuals.

These thefts might not have exposed anyone’s personal data if the hard drives in

the stolen computers had been encrypted and protected by strong passwords.

Various third-party solutions have long been available to encrypt sensitive data folders

and entire hard drives. With Vista, Microsoft now enters this market with BitLocker Drive

Encryption.

BitLocker has some advantages over competing encryption products because, integrated

as it is into Windows, it can check the integrity of a computer system before the Windows

user interface is ever loaded. BitLocker can tell when a hard drive has been moved to a

different computer—as would be the case if a drive had been stolen—and can defend

against brute-force attacks.

BitLocker also integrates with Microsoft’s Active Directory domain service scheme. The

remote storage of digital keys that can unlock or restore data if a user forgets a password is

a difficult and labor-intensive chore for IT administratrors. BitLocker handles this by using

Active Directory to escrow the keys securely, while still being able to help an authorized

(but forgetful) user access crucial data that’s stored in a password-protected drive.

BitLocker is available only in Vista Ultimate Edition, which can be purchased separately

or upgraded to from the Home and Business Editions, and Vista Enterprise Edition, which

can be purchased separately or upgraded to from the Business Edition.