Vista prevents users from playing high-def content, researcher says

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“Every otherwise unnoticeable minor glitch is suddenly surfaced and turned into a showstopper,” he said.

Separately, all the extra encryption required to meet Vista’s content protection standards means some computer components can never enter power-saving mode, he said. Thus, when you play a movie your CPU keeps running at full steam, he said. The extra power demands make it hard to reduce electricity usage.

“It’s a bit of an extreme claim, but you could say Windows Vista causes global warming, because it’s burning so much power with all this nonsense,” Gutmann said.

The encryption requirements render high-end graphics processing units less effective, he said, because the best of those products emphasize graphics performance over content protection. On Vista, $100-video cards can thus outperform those that cost $1,000.

Gutmann argued that Microsoft placed content protection above all other priorities when building Vista, perhaps to gain favor and money from Hollywood. Microsoft should have instead focused this effort on security features that protect users, Gutmann said, such as encrypted paging to protect user secrets, protected content domains that keep out malware, and anti-debugging techniques to prevent rootkit hooking.

New Zealand’s government, which has argued that digital rights management fails to address the rights of people and government, appears to be the only government worldwide to express public concern about Vista’s content protection standards, Gutmann said.