Microsoft announced this week that Vista, the latest version of the company’s popular Windows operating system, dealt with significantly fewer publicly disclosed security problems in its first year on the market than Windows XP and rival open source operating systems. The software maker’s announcement is based on a report written by Jeff Jones, a security strategy director in the company’s Trustworthy Computing group. Through this move Microsoft wants to demonstrate practically that its work on redesigning the security architecture and adding new, tougher security features to its operating system have eventually paid off.

Jeff Jones’ report also showed that the changes that Microsoft made in the way it handles patching resulted in less work for system administrators on Windows Vista compared to Windows XP.

According to Microsoft’s announcement, which may be found on the Windows Vista Security blog, it seems that after one year on the market, the controversial operating system has had only 36 fixed and 30 unfixed security flaws, which is almost half of Windows XP’s (68 fixed and 54 unfixed) security vulnerabilities in its first year. The company also reported that according to its own categorization these flaws were less severe than those Windows XP suffered.

Microsoft credits two particular features for these security improvements in Windows Vista: the IE Protected Mode and the User Access Control. These features are said to protect users’ computers even when malicious code runs.

Microsoft’s recent announcement’s purpose is obvious: the company tries to convince people that Windows Vista, which received heavy criticism over bugs and usability problems, is far safer than Windows XP. But will this report reach its target?