Reinstall Vista less often or what - Malware Virus Worm

[Saucy]

I was sitting here think about various clients I've had and how their
machines have been infested with malware often beyond reasonable repair. The
solution was simply the scorched earth one where the drives got wiped and
Windows got re-installed. I often found that was easiest when the malware
count got beyond twenty or thirty thousand ... but then I'm not the best
tech in the world and when the fix got more complicated and screwed things
up more than the malware, I just thought the way to be sure was to re-do.

What will the malware threats be for Vista?

I figure:
-On newer hardware buffer overrun type exploits will drop to near zero ..
-Drive-by exploits will be reduced because Vista and IE7 is better equiped
to reject on-the-fly attacks from visiting websites. And although 3rd party
browser extensions is on, there's no "Install on demand".
-My guess is that "worms" will be greatly reduced as Windows Mail is a
tighter ship. Although opening email attachments might still pose a problem
-And my guess is that Active X pornography viewers will still get a lot of
'em because of the dancing bunnies phenomenon.

But except for the Active X embedded in the pornography content and the
deliberate running of email attachments, Vista seems set to resist most
everything - even those two things.

So it seems that re-installing Vista will be a rarer occurance?

Any ideas? Discussion?

Thanks.

 

[Alexander Suhovey]

So it seems that re-installing Vista will be a rarer occurance?

As things stand now, the weakest link security-wise is (almost) always a
human. So it really depends on the target user audience you are talking
about. Personally , I can't remember when I was reinstalling Windows XP/2003
last time due to security issue on computers I look after.

As for "dancing pigs", nothing can can ever stop them .

 

[Jeff Gaines]

So it seems that re-installing Vista will be a rarer occurance?

I hope so - the Complete PC Backup and restore are brilliant (and they
work). I think my policy of not keeping any data on the OS drive helps
with that as well, any time there is a real problem that's going to take
more than 15 minutes to fix then restore from the image and let it catch
up on its updates.