Why Vista? It’s perfect for life on the move

The Windows Vista operating system has many benefits. In the latest of our series of articles on how it can help the health service, Nick Saalfeld and his team explain how it can help your laptop and you to work more efficiently and stop worrying about theft. 

It's no fun being a laptop. Life is just one worry after another. Where are you going to be carted off to today? Are you going to run out of battery power half way through the job?

Have you got everything that’s needed for that important conference presentation? Is that guy in a hoodie about to steal you and all your confidential data? Is that sniffly feeling in your hard drive the onset of a virus?

Fortunately, Microsoft Vista is packed to the rafters with smart technologies that will make your laptop’s life happier. Vista works just fine on desktop PCs; but it has a number of features especially designed to make life easier for mobile and tablet PCs - and for the human beings who support and use them.

Safe and simple in every situation

The Mobility Center in Windows Vista means that mobile PCs can be pre-set to work in the safest and most convenient way wherever they happen to be. It means a laptop can distinguish between being connected to a hospital’s secure local area network, a user's home hub or a public hotspot; or, indeed, whether it is being used standalone. It can then change its behaviour accordingly.

This means it won’t look for the office printer when it's at home or try to file-share from an internet café, for example. This in turn means that users won’t be overburdened with inappropriate options for each situation. Security is also monitored to meet the user’s needs (or perhaps protect them from themselves) accordingly.

Green and full of beans!

Vista has made power-saving much more granular and therefore user-controllable. This means you can get significantly more battery life when you're making sporadic notes on the train, say, while being sure that the screen won't go blank every 30 seconds when you're giving an all-important presentation.

Whenever the PC disconnects from the mains it can automatically apply a different set of power-saving modes; meaning Vista is the greenest version of Windows Microsoft has ever produced.

Super syncing

Anybody with more than one computer will have experienced that annoying feeling of going to open up a document, only to discover that it's on another machine. The Windows Mobile Device Center lets you hook up your desktop, laptop, Tablet, smartphone, etc to one another, and automatically synchronise selected files and folders on all machines.

Lock out thieves for good

A much more sickening feeling occurs when you suddenly remember that you've left your PC on the train or realise that a local scallywag has swiped it. For occasions like these, Vista has Bitlocker, a full-device encryption function.

Bitlocker requires you to enter a PIN before the PC even fires up the operating system, rendering it useless to any unauthorised person. Plus, a hard disk that's protected by Bitlocker can't be removed and used in another machine. The Encrypting File System in Windows Vista and Windows XP can also be used to protect individual files and folders.

Because mobile devices may connect to the organisation's network from a number of locations - directly, from home, a hotspot in a cafe - Windows Vista's built-in firewall has added intelligence that varies the strength of the access controls depending on where, as well as who, the user is.

So file sharing might be enabled when you're on the office WiFi network, but disabled when you're at home or on the road. And because of the risk of picking up malware when your PC is outside the organisation's ring of defences, Vista has built-in spyware alerts through its Defender function.

Windows Defender looks for suspicious characteristics rather than known programs, making it easier to identify new spyware as well as the more established culprits. All of which should help your and your laptop to sleep more soundly at night.