Microsoft co-president Jim Allchin has suggested that Windows Vista will not need extra security software. The comments were made during a conversation in which Allchin was responding to a question comparing the security of Windows XP and Vista.

Allchin’s comments were summed up as being that Vista’s “new lockdown features are so capable and thorough that he was comfortable with his own seven-year-old son using Vista without antivirus software installed.” according to Scott M. Fulton, III at BetaNews.

One of the features that Allchin touted as a significant improvement that would presumably lead to his comfort, was Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR). ASLR is a feature in Vista that essentially makes the kernel different from one machine to the next. This should lead to the situation where an exploit that works on one machine will not necessarily work on another machine. However, Allchin does admit that this is an ongoing situation. “The hackers are getting smarter, there’s more at stake, and so there’s just no way for us to say that some perfection has been achieved. But I can say, knowing what I know now, I feel very confident.”

Allchin also mentioned Vista’s parental controls, which will allow parents to easily set up restrictions on what their children can do on the computer. The controls include amount of time online or gaming, control of which sites children can go to, and activity reports for parents regarding their children’s computer habits.