HP’s Connection Manager software allows you to chose the connection speed: 2G or 3G or Auto for either.

All this is fine.

The trouble is when the coverage is dodgy: the HSPA connection automatically switches to UMTS but Windows doesn’t like this so your ability to use the connection is in effect removed. You have to then disconnect and reconnect.

Very annoying, especially when it happens multiple times each day!

Changing the Connection Manager to only 3G doesn’t help as it classifies both UMTS and HSPA as 3G.

Grr!

Except by giving it all the bells and whistles, they’ve given it a huge potential security problem. How so? Well they’ve gone to town with speech recognition (the hyperlinks on the Windows Vista sections of the Microsoft website are changing very frequently, so bear with me).

So all you need is a microphone and you’re away, being able to dictate commands as well as by clicking or typing them. And don’t forget that many PCs have speakers too.

Ah.

So in theory, your speakers could say something and your PC could act on the commands? No, of course not. Er … well, yes, actually.

You might visit a web page, leave it on screen whilst you go and make a coffee or nip to the toilet and whilst you’re away, the page might refresh to another one which has an embedded sound file set to autoload and autorun. And that embedded sound file might tell your PC to open the file explorer, select your documents folder and delete the contents. Then it might tell the PC to delete all the files in the recycle bin too for good measure.

Microsoft wouldn’t let that happen, would they?

Well … yes they did. And here’s more on that.

Oh dear…