Vista observations and opinions

[swaaye]

I'm not trying to put down your rig, actually. Tho re-reading it probably seems that way. You've done more to get it Vista ready than most folks with that vintage lappie would have done, for sure.

I just made a different choice, and ordered a ThinkPad T61p to replace my lappie of roughly the same age.

Well I actually do have a newer machine. A Dell Inspiron 9300 that's only 2.5 yrs old now. Heh. But I didn't want to put Vista on that machine because it's for work and I don't want Vista as a primary OS yet. The A64 is an old eMachines M6805 that is basically just a web browsing/remote desktop/storage/XBMC file store/etc. The upgrades were ~$120, off ebay. Generic RAM (it works!!) and a used HDD.

I did consider selling it once or twice, but it has basically fallen apart to the point where it's not such a great "notebook" anymore. The screen flickers (common with this line) and the hinges are cracked (again common). I've taken it apart about 30 times to try to fix the flickering, but it's just hopeless. But otherwise it's rock solid. I like to think of it as a super thin tower.

I also frequently giggle over the fact that its 9600 64MB is more capable than most of the laptops in the store even today. And it wasn't exactly a top model when I bought it.

 

[Geo]

My Vista laptop upgrade will be quite a bit faster, but yours was certainly quite a bit cheaper.

 

[Sazar]

Vista Rocks, in my opinion.

So far, on my systems I have Vista on 2 and I have a separate HDD runing XP and ubuntu 7.04. This drive hasn't been used in months.

Vista's absolute coolest feature is the per-application volume control

Set the volume for your IM, your media player, web pages all separately, or together. Your choice

/me hugs volume control

For whomever said that the 3-D flip option only worked on open pages, this is not correct, at least on my system.

I use my MX-1000's document button and it by default opens the flip and I can scroll between all windows I have running.

Also, another really awesome tool is the sleep feature

It is so fast and effortless, I haven't physically turned off my system in almost a month. Simply click the "power" button and it turns "off" instantly. Press your power button when you want to use the system and it instantly "comes on". Very clever indeed

 

[Davros]

so what you you say you need just to run vista then a 4000+ ?
the fasted amd chip is 6000+ that would mean 2 thirds of you cpu power is being tied up just running the o/s that sucks

 

[Albuquerque]

so what you you say you need just to run vista then a 4000+ ?
the fasted amd chip is 6000+ that would mean 2 thirds of you cpu power is being tied up just running the o/s that sucks

Huh? Who are you responding to, and what are you talking about? Last I checked, I could underclock my old Core Duo (not a Core 2 Duo, mind you) to 600mhz and Vista still wouldn't use 1%. In fact, even with a forced clock-stop-throttle to like 150mhz it would hit about 2% on average.

So if 150mhz = 2% usage, I think you're ok with an X2/4000+

 

[nutball]

It is so fast and effortless, I haven't physically turned off my system in almost a month. Simply click the "power" button and it turns "off" instantly. Press your power button when you want to use the system and it instantly "comes on". Very clever indeed

This isn't new to Vista, I've been using to under XP for 3-4 years now (and yeah it is very nice!).

It doesn't work under Linux though on the same hardware, while we're on the subject of ranting about bug-ridden, unfinished operating systems that can't do what the competition has been doing for years. </runs away>...

 

[aaaaa00]

Actually having to type your credentials in makes you pause a bit longer to consider if that's REALLY what you want to do

Actually the reason MS made it not ask for credentials by default was to avoid training users into entering their login credentials all the time.

Look at it this way, if I'm an evil web site, I just put up a popup window asking you for your password, and make it look a lot like the UAC prompt.

Statistically, most unsophisticated users will just go ahead and type their password in and click ok. Now evil web site has your login credentials, and can reconnect back to your machine with them and do whatever it wants.

If instead you DON'T ask for a password, then if they click OK, the worst that happens is the evil web site gets OK back from the fake UAC dialog.

If UAC DOES ask for a password (it will if you are a "Regular User" or if you force it into password mode with local policy), you'll notice that the elevation dialog will have the username and user picture of the admin user in it -- which is hard to fake with a web site, since there should be no way to know what the username and user picture of the admin user will be from within the web browser.

If you want it to ask for a password every time, you can easily set it to do so, it's in the policy editor (gpedit.msc).

This is also the reason by default the UAC dialog will dim and freeze everything else on the screen. It would be pretty hard to do that from a browser window, for example, so it just makes it more obvious that this is really a UAC prompt. (You can turn this off as well.)

 

[aaaaa00]

One rather annoying quirk I found with Vista the other day is that it can't share files with puters running Windows 9x. I can browse files in shares and see their icon images, but when I try to copy it will error out after a long pause. It then says the device is no longer available. After a few hours wasted searching for solutions, I couldn't find any. Apparently Vista drops support for those old operating systems. Not a issue for most I'm sure, but I do mess with some old machines occasionally and not being able to access my glorious share of ancient and archaic updates, DVDROMs, etc, is really very annoying.

I was under the impression that Vista turned off the old LM and NTLM authentication methods by default. That might be your problem.

You can reenable them, but be warned, they're insecure.

You also have to do this for some NAS devices with sucky old versions of SAMBA installed in their firmware. Search for "LMCompatibilityLevel".

 

[aaaaa00]

And then there's the whole "ultimate" debacle as well. You pay through the nose for the uberest version and what you get? One ultimate extra isn't even finished yet (the animated desktop thingy: iot's just a buggy beta) and the language packs refuse to install for me. It downloads and installs, and when the install is finished minutes later it says it did not install.

Actually the point of Ultimate is that you get everything in Home Premium (Media Center, Dvd Maker, Movie Maker, etc) and everything in Business (Domain network support, CompletePC Backup, Bitlocker, Previous Versions (snapshots), etc).

The Ultimate Extras are just that, Extras.

Oh and the vault thingy needs motherboard support or it refuses to work.

BitVault needs a TPM to store the keys, but I'm pretty sure you can use it in a USB stick mode where it puts the keys on a USB stick and doesn't use a TPM.

Although, unless this is a company laptop with sensitive data on it, I wouldn't care to use Bitlocker anyway.

 

[KimB]

From my experience with vista, UAC is really, really stupid. It asks for you to click a little box when you want to do almost anything. Though in Linux I actually have to enter my password, the sheer number of times UAC bugs me is absolutely incredible. So yeah, I'd say that Windows Vista handles this sort of thing much, much worse than Linux.

 

[Albuquerque]

Well, it kinda depends on the user.

You and I and a lot of people on this forum likely do a bunch of installs, uninstalls, system settings changes and whatnot on a fairly regular basis. Hence, UAC to you and I is rather irritating, especally on a home computer.

At work, John and Jane Doe shouldn't really be in there doing these sorts of things, or at least not to any great extent. An occasional blip should warn them of pending doom (ph34r!! ) but otherwise it likely stays out of their way.

I turned on UAC again for my home machine for the last week or so, and I only saw it pop up once. But I've been playing the same two games for the entire week, and have yet to make any changes to device manager, video settings, registry entries, install another app, et al. The one time popup was while I was installing an Adobe plug-in from the web, which is generally when it should be asking me if I'm sure...

 

[AlphaWolf]

From my experience with vista, UAC is really, really stupid. It asks for you to click a little box when you want to do almost anything. Though in Linux I actually have to enter my password, the sheer number of times UAC bugs me is absolutely incredible. So yeah, I'd say that Windows Vista handles this sort of thing much, much worse than Linux.

You are coming to a sad realization, cancel or allow?

 

[KimB]

Well, it kinda depends on the user.

You and I and a lot of people on this forum likely do a bunch of installs, uninstalls, system settings changes and whatnot on a fairly regular basis. Hence, UAC to you and I is rather irritating, especally on a home computer.

At work, John and Jane Doe shouldn't really be in there doing these sorts of things, or at least not to any great extent. An occasional blip should warn them of pending doom (ph34r!! ) but otherwise it likely stays out of their way.

I turned on UAC again for my home machine for the last week or so, and I only saw it pop up once. But I've been playing the same two games for the entire week, and have yet to make any changes to device manager, video settings, registry entries, install another app, et al. The one time popup was while I was installing an Adobe plug-in from the web, which is generally when it should be asking me if I'm sure...

Well, sure. But the problem is that when I want to do something, I typically want to do quite a lot at once. In SUSE Linux, for example, I need only enter my root password once to enter superuser mode, or to open up YaST, and then do as much as I want without bothering with more prompts. In Windows, if I want to do a lot at once, I have to deal with the stupid prompt every single time, and sometimes twice for one operation! I haven't turned UAC off yet, because I like the idea of the security it offers. But it is just really, really badly-implemented.

One way that it could have been implemented, for instance, that would have been vastly better would be to have an "administrator mode" or somesuch, where when you first want to do an operation that requires this mode, it pops up with the dialog. Thereafter, a little icon appears somewhere on the screen indicating that you are in this mode, and no more prompts appear except perhaps to warn you that it's not safe to remain in administrator mode all the time. This would dramatically reduce the annoyance of UAC while offering the exact same protection.

 

[Albuquerque]

Oh yeah, I don't disagree with what you're saying. But then you have the exact-opposite problem to contend with: If you allow anyone to set themselves into that mode at any time, what's the point? One popup and Jane User gets fed up and kicks herself into "Admin mode" to shut it up.

Now she (perhaps unwittingly) goes about breaking her system, or being infested with spyware that contribute to the breaking of her system -- and she cries foul to Microsoft for not protecting her.

We both know it's her own damned fault, but that's what MS was trying to avoid nevertheless. I'd still like the option of course; please don't take this to mean that I think your idea isn't 100% in the right direction. But people who use *Nix are simply at a higher computer-literacy place than Jane User in front of her Windoze box. That's fortunate for *nix, but not so fortunate for MS.

 

[Frank]

Well, it kinda depends on the user.

You and I and a lot of people on this forum likely do a bunch of installs, uninstalls, system settings changes and whatnot on a fairly regular basis. Hence, UAC to you and I is rather irritating, especally on a home computer.

At work, John and Jane Doe shouldn't really be in there doing these sorts of things, or at least not to any great extent. An occasional blip should warn them of pending doom (ph34r!! ) but otherwise it likely stays out of their way.

I turned on UAC again for my home machine for the last week or so, and I only saw it pop up once. But I've been playing the same two games for the entire week, and have yet to make any changes to device manager, video settings, registry entries, install another app, et al. The one time popup was while I was installing an Adobe plug-in from the web, which is generally when it should be asking me if I'm sure...

I don't know what you do with your computer, but I saw that extremely irritating popup every few seconds until I turned it off.

And in general, your users dare not complain, because security generally gets (much) worse when you do. Because users aren't supposed to do anything exept use their approved programs. It's easier to tell your boss you cannot do something than call the helpdesk and ask for it, in general. And who cares if you have to click a popup every few minutes and take a slow day or two to call the helpdesk if you really want to change something when it's in the Boss his time?

 

[swaaye]

I was under the impression that Vista turned off the old LM and NTLM authentication methods by default. That might be your problem.

You can reenable them, but be warned, they're insecure.

You also have to do this for some NAS devices with sucky old versions of SAMBA installed in their firmware. Search for "LMCompatibilityLevel".

Nope. Tried it! I found a MS knowledge base entry about that and tried all of the settings in the related dropdown in local security policies.

 

[Frank]

Oh yeah, I don't disagree with what you're saying. But then you have the exact-opposite problem to contend with: If you allow anyone to set themselves into that mode at any time, what's the point? One popup and Jane User gets fed up and kicks herself into "Admin mode" to shut it up.

Now she (perhaps unwittingly) goes about breaking her system, or being infested with spyware that contribute to the breaking of her system -- and she cries foul to Microsoft for not protecting her.

We both know it's her own damned fault, but that's what MS was trying to avoid nevertheless. I'd still like the option of course; please don't take this to mean that I think your idea isn't 100% in the right direction. But people who use *Nix are simply at a higher computer-literacy place than Jane User in front of her Windoze box. That's fortunate for *nix, but not so fortunate for MS.

Well, yes, but in Linux it works. And what is the point of making things as secure as they are when by default the local administrator doesn't have a password? Give me 15 minutes, and I've written a program to take advantage of that.

So, in the end the user is seen as the biggest security risk by far, while professional malware has a free roam. It's all advertising: "See: we really care about your security! Give us more money!"

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Oh yeah, I don't disagree with what you're saying. But then you have the exact-opposite problem to contend with: If you allow anyone to set themselves into that mode at any time, what's the point? One popup and Jane User gets fed up and kicks herself into "Admin mode" to shut it up.

Now she (perhaps unwittingly) goes about breaking her system, or being infested with spyware that contribute to the breaking of her system -- and she cries foul to Microsoft for not protecting her.

We both know it's her own damned fault, but that's what MS was trying to avoid nevertheless. I'd still like the option of course; please don't take this to mean that I think your idea isn't 100% in the right direction. But people who use *Nix are simply at a higher computer-literacy place than Jane User in front of her Windoze box. That's fortunate for *nix, but not so fortunate for MS.

The reason why it works in Unix is because they have a proper security model. Things that need root rights can only be installed by root, but that doesn't stop your hypothetical user from installing whatever she wants in the places she is allowed to (such as her home directory), because Unix doesn't allow what she installs or runs to have free reign over the operating system.

The proper application of the unix user/group/other, the read/write/execute for each set of users, the restricted root access, etc have all worked very well for a long, long time, and I still don't understand why Microsoft have to make such hard work of it all. They still don't have a workable security system where you don't need to be admin to do really basic, obvious stuff all the time, with no way for the user to change that behaviour. Vista was an opportunity to make some changes, instead they just seem to have added a lot of annoying requesters all over the place.

 

[Rainbow Man]

I'm sort of wondering if there are some kinfd of blocks in vista to generating a dialog box identical or similar to UAC's.

If you somehow manage to slip a malware program onto a vista box it hsould be an absolute doddle for a decent programmer to take a snapshot of the screenand darken it down and show it as an always on top-style fullscreen borderless window and throw up an "type in your user account and password" request..

Peace.

 

[Fox5]

They are

We tested with an IBM X41 Tablet that came with both the Intel IGP (a really REALLY old crusty one!) and a 4200RPM drive. So long as you had at least a gig of ram in it, the performance (even with all the tablet goodies) was quite reasonable...

I had the x41t, with 1.5GB of ram too. It had the gma900 btw. Performance was pretty crappy, but became sort of barable with readyboost. Still, way too much harddrive access and my harddrive ended up dieing in the laptop, I'm thinking possibly due to vista's over eager indexing service.