or dare i say it... get a Mac. :}

Microsoft has admitted that speech recognition features in Vista could be hijacked so that a PC tells itself to delete files or folders.

Vista can respond to vocal commands and concern has been raised about malicious audio on websites or sent via e-mail.

In one scenario outlined by users a MP3 file of voice instructions was used to tell the PC to delete documents.

Brilliant! It reminds me of an early speech rec demo at a computer show. The punter said "format c enter"... unfortunately it worked perfectly :)

M$ are complete plonkers if an mp3 can be used to activate the speech rec feature. They have spent the last few years (I am on the critical update email distribution list) fixing unchecked buffers allowing code exec of the attacker's choice.

A Mac is not a solution. Historically, Macs were used in the graphic design trade where one is running a small range of applications, and is running it on a very narrow range of hardware platform specifications. Today, they account for about 4% of "PC" sales so no attacker is going to bother with them. Just as no attacker will bother to attack an email program other than Outlook, or at a stretch Eudora. If you run only a few applications, any PC will be just fine - but you don't need vista for that since anything currently out will run on win2000 and a few things need XP.

I am about to purchase a laptop for the daughters school work, possibly a Dell and am wondering if there is a list of programmes that will run with vista. The graphics programme I am concerned about is Adobe FreeHand MX, not sure which version possibly 11.0.:confused: