Another common criticism of Vista concerns the integration of new forms of DRM into the operating system, and User Account Control (UAC) security technology.
[citation needed] Initial performance tests have demonstrated that Windows XP outperforms Vista in several productivity areas.
This can cause an issue if the storage device is ejected prior to the file being successfully transferred or copied in Windows XP due to the dialogue box's premature prompt.
All of the tests were performed on a computer with a 2.93 GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 processor, 2× 1024 MB DDR2-800 RAM, HIS Radeon X1900XTX IceQ3 graphics card, 150 GB Western Digital WD1500ADFD hard drive and a Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 motherboard.
A large amount of existing software doesn't run well as a standard user, due to developers not implementing the principle of least privilege in their design and testing.
For example, many poorly written applications often assume incorrectly that they will have read and write access to the entire filesystem and system Registry.
Enterprise and Ultimate editions of Windows Vista include BitLocker Drive Encryption, which aims to help protect data in the case of stolen devices.
Vista implements address space layout randomization, that makes it considerably more difficult for malicious code to exploit Return-to-libc attacks than on previous versions of Windows, particularly on 64-bit systems.
[10] 64-bit editions of Windows Vista require all kernel-mode drivers to be digitally signed, initially making it difficult for rootkits to install until Alureon managed to overcome this obstacle in 2010 by subverting the master boot record.