Welcome to PCWizKid’s Tech Talk, many of you have asked me what's new in Windows 7 with security. Has it improved from Windows Vista? There were few nuances relating to the user account control and the way these pop-ups appear when you run a program for example. You know that program is okay to run, why is it coming up with these annoying pop-ups for example.
So you can change the way these pop-ups appeared now in Windows 7 and it has improved, just click on the change when these notifications appear option underneath the yes and the no here and it will take you to the UAC control center where you can adjust the level of notifications that appear. It’s actually much better than before in Windows Vista, things would get dim or you would be notified when you were writing programs and you knew that the program was fine.
So now you can adjust it. For example if you lower that level all the way down to the bottom then obviously it’s not going to notify you. It’s never going to notify you when you run things or when other programs are running and executing. So that one I wouldn’t necessarily recommend unless you’re testing a PC and you're not connected to the internet and stuff like that. So in my case I have that to never notify. So that way I can do my testing and my benchmarks and not worry about things popping up.
You can put it on one level up and that’s one pretty good right there, okay but the default is actually one higher than that. It will prompt to you when you get these pop-ups but the screen won’t dim. It won’t get dark so there you go, see I can double click on it. I didn’t get a pop-up right on this program that I'm then launching. So that’s one thing that’s improve the way these pop-ups are controlled. The other one is the bitlocker, so you can actually encrypt your drive so that no hackers can access your hard drive information from outside right when you're connected to the network or the internet. So you can protect your entire hard drive. It doesn’t protect the section of it. It’s the entire drive. It just encrypts the whole thing so that way only you locally from your PC can have full access to your files and no one else outside of that.
So that’s a safe, safety feature that I would recommend if you have sensitive information. The other thing was the firewall, lots of rules and advanced security other than the defaults, of course. There is the Windows defender. We have that still, that’s nothing new. The firewall options have been improved slightly, so it does take care of all your firewall needs from a software point of view here. But you can actually adjust those rules and go into the advanced settings in the firewall software that comes with Windows 7 and change those inbound or outbound rules.
Right, so for example here is a bunch of rules already setup to allow or deny and some of them are enabled, some of them are disabled by default here. If I just double click on one of this then it would open up and show me the properties of it and then I can modify it, disable it, customized the way that rule works. To allow or deny certain programs from getting through right, our protocols from running, things like that because you might have a game that you're running over the network or a program or something like that and it’s being blocked accidentally maybe by the firewall.
So you can go in here and try to adjust things to allow certain things to go through for example. So these are the security rules that you can adjust in here and that’s pretty nice with Windows 7 and that’s really about it. You still have to get your own anti-virus software for Windows 7 that’s nothing new. Okay, so I hope you enjoyed this video and thank you for watching.
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