Windows 7
- Thread starter almighty
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ban25, one simple little typo and your .ini file wont parse and worse yet it'll take forever to spot. However, if you have an xml file (and schema), you can check if it's well formed, can easily validate what's wrong, and even perform domain validation on the values.
It's not hard to write a simple parser for key value pair that's robust.
I KNOW THAT!
My point is, however, that when you run a program that changes the registry - for WHATEVER reason - all the UAC does is pop up a window that roughly says "program X wants to perform changes to your computer. allow/deny?"
It doesn't TELL YOU what exactly the changes are, because to roughly 99.9% of all users such information would only be confusing, so you have no genuine way to tell if the program is about to deliberately fuck up your entire registry, or if all it wants to do is save its window size and position.
Then again, I've never ever actually encountered a program that wrecked my registry, by accident or on purpose, and I've been using PCs daily for nearly a decade and a half now, so I have to conclude that if some program writes to the registry the risk is really quite low.
It's still a crappy design though, not just because it's fragile, but also has a tendency to bloat horribly and many programs seem to not quite know where in the registry it put its own stuff - including windows itself. I can't begin to remember the number of times some program simply stops remembering certain settings from one session to the next, you make the changes, save them, and poof... You boot up the PC again and they're gone with the wind. It's like they get saved to one key and loaded from another. Perhaps different teams of devs working on the same project that aren't fully coordinated between themselves.
Typically when you get hit by this level of windows rot the only thing that helps is an OS reinstall.
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Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.
Legend
Yeah, UAC is pretty useless in that respect. It just tells you a program wants to do something to your system, but given that's pretty much what most programs do (especially during install), you have no choice but to accept it. A good virus scanner will catch anything malicious, but it doesn't help with incompatibility problems, or just dumb programmers. I'm sure most people will just click "allow" unless it's something that happens when you are not expecting it (such as a drive by installation off a web page).
That's pretty much off my point of that without a proper clean-up, even uninstallation won't fix problems. I have an example from my XP installation on my old machine where installing Winamp or Divx would install the Sonic Burning engine (was only optional on the Winamp install). This would not play nice with the Nvidia IDE drivers on the motherboard, and all my optical drives would disappear. Even after uninstallation, my drives would not appear, and I would have to hack the entries for the Sonic Burning drivers out of the registry and remove the drivers from the Windows directory.
Most people just wouldn't be capable of doing that safely, yet there's no reason why those drivers and registry entries are not removed at uninstallation except for the crappy system design that allows them to still be there.
I fully agree.
If you install ATI display drivers, then uninstall them and stick in an Nvidia board instead and reboot, you'll still have two ATI entries showing up in the task manager. I'm like, wth? How damn difficult can it be for a multi-billion corporation to write an uninstall script that removes all the crap it put there in the first place? It's unforgivably sloppy.
There actually is a uninstall script that removes _everything_ ATI related as far as I know, you just need to run it from (elevated/admin) command prompt, in the C:\ATI\Support\Catversion\Bin(64)\ folder, atisetup -uninstall all
not sure if I posted this here already.
Aero "slow-mo" mode: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/4046-aero-enable-slow-motion-effect.html
Warning, it slows down all GPU assisted effects, so Aero animations are in slow-mo, but also movies and games, I played Crysis in constant bullet-time with this.
This article mentions a registry key to enable it. My baby girl actually enabled it by walking on my Keyboard.
Aero "slow-mo" mode: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/4046-aero-enable-slow-motion-effect.html
Warning, it slows down all GPU assisted effects, so Aero animations are in slow-mo, but also movies and games, I played Crysis in constant bullet-time with this.
This article mentions a registry key to enable it. My baby girl actually enabled it by walking on my Keyboard.
That is a pain when you need to backup user data though. I guess you would be okay with going through all your programs and copy the configuration files, but when you need to backup peoples data on a daily basis, I'm really glad that we can almost rely on just copying the c:\users\ folder. IMHO %APPDATA% is the right place to store program configuration and luckily most programs I use behave this way by now. I guess the reason why the uninstallers doesn't ask to remove settings is because it doesn't know about all the other users, which could have roaming profiles etc. IMO the situation is not as simple as you make it out to be.
(Design decisions like this is way I always enjoy reading Raymond Chen's blog :smile: )
This is actually relatively simple to solve by using links. Currently there is no consistent way for individual applications to store their data in %APPDATA%. For example, we store configuration data in %APPDATA%/[appname] (replace appname with the real application name), but there is no obvious way to link these two. For example, an application may decided to store their data in a completely different directory name (or even worse, a randomly generated name), and there is no way to know which one need which directories (the same problem applies to registry too).
I agree that this is a difficult problem, but right now there are just too many different ways and everyone seems to be doing differently.
Mize, that's why you should use Emacs in XML mode if you're on a VT100 emulator.
You're absolutely right, but I never learned emacs!
windows 7 Toolkit 1.8 offers a lot of things and optimizations (thumbnails, indexing etc.)
I always use TweekHound. I believe they do a good job in dispelling all the Windows - related would be performance gaining tweaks. Also don't have much confidence in tweak programs, don't know why.
(http://www.tweakhound.com/windows7/index.htm)
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Just took a quick look at that site.
Ugh, didn't know disabling UAC also disables protected mode in IE. Not that I do that, but know some people that use IE and disable UAC.
Regards,
SB
tongue_of_colicab
Veteran
I hate the way win7 handles network files. I got a simple windows xp pc that I use for HTPC and file serving so most files are shared by shared folders. First of all win7 loves to re-scan folders which is really annoing as it can take some time before you finally see all folders. On XP it would just semi hang for a short while and after that i'd be fine. But what I hate most is how win7 seems to lock every file you open. For example if I open a media file, close it and want to delete the folder it's in win7 will always say it's in use. Even on my server it will say it is in use. I can't delete it untill I enter a different folder and open a different media file and than go back to delete the old folder. I think this also happens when you got files locally btw. Why?!
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Hmmm, not sure, that doesn't happen when accessing media files on WHS from Win7, I can delete media files directly after viewing...
The rescanning of folders is a bit annoying though, especially if there's a lot of files/folders nested within. Part of that is that one of the default media attributes it scans is "length" (playtime). So if you have a lot of songs/video's, it scans each and every one of them for the length.
Regards,
SB
The rescanning of folders is a bit annoying though, especially if there's a lot of files/folders nested within. Part of that is that one of the default media attributes it scans is "length" (playtime). So if you have a lot of songs/video's, it scans each and every one of them for the length.
Regards,
SB
I wonder if there is a registry tweak that will disable the re-scanning of said folders.
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