f13.net

I may as well toss out the other side of the coin after railing on macintosh OS for a bit.  In the interests of full disclosure, my consulting company is a gold certified Microsoft partner, so if you want to believe I'm a MS fanboy, you may do so now.  However, the profit margin on Microsoft's crap is razor-thin, so honestly I have no real stake in people buying their stuff from me, it just looks impressive in the phone book ad to say I'm a gold MS partner.  My money comes from the labor, as I can't make squat off of the hardware or software.

Anyhow, words of advice.

1. Consider Home Basic over Home Premium.  You lose the flashy transparent graphics on the desktop, a DVD movie maker, an automated backup (you can still run manual backups), the Tivo-ish media center program, and some extra games.  Most people don't need any of those things, and it can save you forty bucks.

2. Upgrading is possible, but kind of a rip-off.  Buying Home Premium costs forty bucks more than Home Basic.  However, upgrading from Home Basic to Home Premium costs eighty bucks.  Cheaper than having to buy a new retail box like you did for XP, but more than you might expect.

3. DO NOT RUN AN ADMINISTRATIVE ACCOUNT  This part is important.  If you run an admin account in Vista, it will block you with a verification prompt whenever you do something that could be a security risk.  That's why people keep seeing the 'are you sure?  confirm/deny' window that everyone is complaining about.  Make a non-admin account and use that, instead.  As if by magic, those windows will vanish.  You'll only see the occasional request to enter the admin password when doing something that requires administrative privileges, like installing a new program or mucking around with control panel settings.

4. You don't have to update, spyware scan, or defrag.  All three of those are run automatically by the OS in the background now.  It will ask you for permission to install updates that it finds, and will prompt you if Defender finds spyware and wants to know what you want to do with it.  Other than that, the computer'll take care of itself for those things.  You still need to get and run an anti-virus program, or configure it to auto-scan, whichever you prefer.  AVG works fine on Vista.

5. Get start++. (http://brandontools.com/)  It's an awesome little tool made by one of the Microsoft code monkeys, it lets you run a lot of commands from the search bar at the bottom of the start menu.  'w zork' does a wikipedia search for Zork.  'g coder jobs' runs a Google search for new job for this guy after MS discovers one of their own coders put a google search macro in his program.  'play Johnny Cash' searches your computer's music for Johnny Cash songs, compiles them into a playlist, and runs the playlist into Windows Media.  Very sweet, very useful.

6. Get at least a gig of RAM.  The minimum system specs are filthy lies.  Vista will work on 512 megs, but not very well, with lots of disk churning for pagefile access.  Get a gig.  If you want good gaming experiences, get two.

7. Be patient.  Vista still has plenty of kinks to work out, just like XP did back in the day, and it's going to take a few months to iron them out.  The system will improve, and I'm pretty confident that in time it'll be much better than XP was.

8. DO NOT RUN AN ADMINISTRATIVE ACCOUNT  I really, really mean it.

Always double Microsoft specs, at a minimum, to get a functional machine.

So they made XP where even basic tasks like installing a printer couldn't be done without an admin account and then upgraded it with Vista where you can't do anything with an admin account without getting nagged to death?

/headdesk

Letting you run in non-admin mode but get prompted for admin-only operations (rather than making you log out, log back in, and re-find the thing you were trying to do) is actually an improvement IMO.  I wasn't aware they'd done that.  1 point for Vista.

Of course, distros of Linux have been doing this for a while now. In fact, Ubuntu won't even let you log in as root, you have to use a different account type, even if you elevate that account to admin priv. Every once in a while you have to do stuff that requires elevated privs, and then it prompts you for the admin password. Just like Vista does. Hmm.

So...it's bad that I run XP under the admin account instead of a limited account?

Bah.  I run admin accounts all the time.  No problems here.  I experimented with setting up the Power User account before, that was easy enough.  Not a whole lot there that can't do that you would need an admin account on a regular basis.  But I gimped my IE so badly that it barely runs HTML with no Flash, no Shockwave, no jscript, and no pop-ups (WebWasher plus lots of fun with settings and the hosts file).  This means that there's virtually no web-based virii that can get in (now that I said that, I'll probably get one next week and need to format for the first time in over 2 years).  If I want to view a video or something funny, I just switch over to another computer here and view it that way (I've got 4 machines on one KVM switch).

I've always felt that keeping a Windows computer alive was quite simple if there were certain things you did and certain things you didn't do.  I used to be in charge of lab computers where virii and reformats were a weekly basis, not so much when the guy I started with and I got done.  Looks like MS has decided to do even more thinking for you and annoy you to death for it.  At least Unix says "st00pid idea" on certain things but lets you do it anyway and deal with the consequences of your own screw ups. 

For security, yes. However, lots of applications just don't work right without administrative rights on XP for a variety of reasons. Most of them lead back to lazy or time-crunched programmers.

Vista has a whole asston of stuff built into it that tries to make these older apps work right while shops transition over to the newer (as of, like.. 3-5 years ago?) model that Microsoft wants programmers to use for storing data and such - filesystem and registry virtualization, mostly. Hence, running Vista in LUA mode is far less painful than 2k/XP.

Was just wondering. I haven't really had a problem with running as the admin in the 4+ years I've had this PC. A good firewall is a plus.

Yes, Vista allows you to elevate to admin privileges as necessary without running an administrative account.  It's a good thing, which Microsoft stole from Apple, who stole it from Linux.

The reason that running in an admin account is a bad thing is that if a naughty program takes over your computer while logged in, it can do anything you can do.  And if you're an admin, you can destroy the OS, format all the drives, install tons of spyware, etc.  But if the same program takes over while you're in a normal user account, it can't do much mischief.

In theory in a perfect security world, XP users should be using non-admin accounts.  However, in practice that sucks balls.  (That's a technical term.)  A non-admin account in XP can barely operate the computer; the OS will disallow things like installing programs, changing settings, certain file operations, running programs that require admin access, it's just a pain.  I tried it for a week, then gave up.  So Vista is trying to make it easier on users to run in a non-admin account.

EXCEPT THE STUPID FUCKERS GIVE THE DEFAULT USER ACCOUNT ON A NEW INSTALL ADMIN PRIVILEGES.  This annoys the hell out of me.  They went to all the trouble of setting things up to run as a normal user account, and then completely fail to implement it.  The user has to know to create a second, non-admin account, or else they're constantly buffeted by those permission warning windows.  Most users have no such clue, and just get frustrated and turn off the security prompts, leaving the system just as wide open to problems as they would be running an admin account in XP.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.  I hope they fix that with the first service pack.

So the answer is to create a non-admin account that then prompts you for an admin password every time you would otherwide, if you were using an admin account, have to click 'allow or deny'? Talk about tripping over yourself to solve a problem.

The picture I'm getting is that you get warning prompts constantly if you run as an admin, even when doing things that you wouldn't have to be an admin to do (perhaps because doing those things as an admin is a potential security risk), but if you run as a non-admin you only get the "admin prompt" when it actually makes sense, like when installing a new program.

Samwise be correct in the understanding of this matter.  Running in non-admin only rarely receives a password prompt, while running in admin gets a popup window every ten minutes or so of normal activity.

I guess my question is then, if you disable the admin-level 'allow deny' feature, does it still warn you when you do tasks that, in a non-admin account, would require an admin password. Because if it doesn't, then you're back at the ole WinXP level of security.

If you disable it, you disable the security as a whole.  Poof, gone.  Back to XP land.  Which is why it's much, much better to run a non-admin account than disable the security if you want to avoid the popup security warnings.  I cringe inside whenever I see a, 'hay guyz, I found out how to fix the pop-up windows!  I just turned off the security!' post.  And it's really Microsoft's fault for just tossing users admin accounts by default like in XP.  All they had to do is have one extra step in the install process, "Please made an administrative account.  You use this password when installing programs, so don't forget it." and then have all other user accounts default to non-admin levels.

For some of the processes that elicit a prompt, is there a way for tell Vista to remember your response to that particular prompt? For instance, whenever I run a new or changed program, my firewall throws up a prompt before giving the program access to whatever it's asking for. I usually only have to do this once after each install/change as I have it remember my response. Does Vista have a similar functionality?

Good to hear. Glad MS told me. My Dad got a new PC and, of course, when I set it up I made the default log-in an admin account and then proceeded to turn off all the user protection to stop the "are you sure?" insanity.  Next time I visit, I will change it.

Thanks for sharing it, actually. One of my coworkers is doing evaluation on Vista for our group (we're not rolling over until after the first service pack at the earliest) and he didn't know. It made him a happy camper.

I expect we will roll out Vista in the final hours of XP support.

Ain't that the fucking truth.

By then, though, I hope they have a new OS with some actual business improvements in there.

I haven't experimented as much as I'd like in that particular area, but I think that you can get an individual program to stop bugging you by going into properties>compatibility>run as administrator.

What Vista really needs is 'sudo'. I want to be able to explicitly tell the OS that all operations in a certain context are admin level without either having to approve every fucking little step or completely give the app/command admin control all the time. Personally as an OSX/Linux user I *hate* Vista's approach - seems like the worst of both worlds to me.

Um no. This is not how Vista works. You will get a UAC prompt changing the fucking time in Vista. But you never actually have to supply a password. You just have to click 'Ok'. (Provided you have top level privileges, which everyone will given the default install). And there is no ability to 'sudo' in Vista and avoid the whole issue.

So no. It's not like Ubuntu at all.

EDIT: Clarity on the issue, the default use account is not like Ubuntu at all. And that's the problem.

I think you misread what Kitsune posted. If you create a non-admin account, it prompts you for a password when doing things such as installing, as sudo does. If you use the default admin account in Vista, it doe sthe 'allow/deny' thing, which you rightly state is not like Linux.

There is a sudo (of sorts).  You can work it through the UI by right-clicking on the icon of the desired program (this includes the command window, if you want to pull up a DOS prompt with admin power) and selecting the 'Run As' option.  Alternately, the start++ program I linked to in the top post has a sudo macro.  You just type 'sudo <programname>' in the search box on the start menu and it will search for the program with that name and execute it with admin privileges.

And as Engles mentioned, yes, you only see the flurry of obnoxious, password-less security prompts if you're running as an admin.  If you are non-admin, you will see far less frequent security prompts asking you to enter an admin password.  If you're used to OS X's prompts for an admin password, this is pretty much exactly the behavior you'll see in Vista with a non-admin account.  Which isn't much of a coincidence, as Microsoft pretty blatantly swiped that particular good idea.

I'm running Vista in the default admin account and, without having turned off any of the security features dont find the pop-ups that intrusive at all.  The claim they come every 10 minutes is a gross exaggeration,  I can go days without seeing the pop-up.  I'm not constantly installing new stuff or fiddling with settings all the time but I dont think I am a completely atypical user.

"Run as" is available in XP as well, I share printers all the time using that feature.

We evaluated Vista and despite support for XP running out there will be no reason whatsoever upgrading for our company. I suspect the only reason upgrading will be if somebody is bribed by Microsoft to do so. Or getting it with your computer and not having a company XP license. It eats resources like mad, breaks some of the old programs still in use and doesn't add additional usability to a well groomed corporate XP environment.

Running without support is not an option for larger shops, such as ours.  Desktop support is hard enough around here, apparently, even with actual MS support.

Depends on the outfit. We support over 1200 PCs and in the ten years I worked there we never had any actual MS support for our clients (the server people hogged our free support calls for their emergencies and they never trickled down to our client department). So I wouldn't know the difference.

Taking away administration rights from the users and having automated OS installation and software management admittingly helps there, though. We are quite lenient and helpful in our area, but other regional IT departments give each problem 15 minutes until they nuke the PC and let it reinstall.

Dell has decided to once again offer good old Windows XP on new computers. (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070419/ap_on_hi_te/dell_xp)

I want the latest and greatest! And by that I mean shitty drivers and buggy games.

Consumers generally do want the latest and greatest.  Vista only covers half of that.

When did Linux start competing with Windows?

It's been creeping up.  Still a few years away from real competition in the home market but it has long been a contender in the server world.

All my work, except for documentation, is done on Linux machines.

Aye, the above has been becoming more and more true. The big gap is drivers for the flavor of the month video cards. If we get the ability to run more than one operating system (this is apparently close) it will just be even a step closer. As it is to stay on the hardware edge you gotta compile your own kernel. Thats enough to keep the majority away but the gap is closing and the product is a good one.

The only real edge Microsoft has on the desktop anymore is gaming.  If developers actually switched from DirectX to OpenGL, MS would be in real trouble.

Hell, I had my computer-illiterate parents using Ubuntu for a few weeks while I figured out what was wrong with their windows pc.  The only problem/complaint was that Solitaire wasn't as nice.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pysolfc/

What I am finding annoying atm with Vista is games telling me I need to install directx 9.0c when i have directx 10 installed.  I'm sure there is something I am misunderstanding about the whole thing

Sad, but not true.

Torque has always been "OpenGL over a D3D wrapper", until our latest generation of tech (TGE-A). The market (lack thereof to be more specific) combined with way, way too many OS flavors to support has made linux game support almost a thing of the past...and it sucks. We tried like hell to give linux flavors the same treatment as Mac and Windows, but ironically, no one wanted to actually pay for any games--the majority kept bitching "why isn't this free?", and refused to actually buy any linux games that developers made...

Hopefully it will change. Our latest tech abstracts graphics away from the hardware completely, so it's a matter of a couple of months to write an OpenGL device that plugs in to the framework, but until their is a demonstrable market share to be able to support linux game development, it's not gonna happen in my personal opinion.

OK, I can see the server arena, but I don't normally think of that since Linux is shit.  Yeah, we use it here and there, but not much, so I was thinking for home use.

We have a HP-UX soemthing or other (no idea what hardware it's running on) and a Redhat LSF cluster on x86 machines.  Other than login profiles they are identical to the user (me) except that any task run on the Redhat cluster gets done faster.

I don't support the servers in anyway so I have no clue if there are behind the scenes issues with which OS is running.

The issue is likely that clustering HP-UX would require a massive bankroll while clustering Linux just requires a trip to Circuit City, just based on my limited knowledge of purchasing.  I would bet a Franklin that you can only run HP-UX on a HP server; that's how the big boys roll, like IBM (I think you can get Solaris for non-Sparc hardware, though, not sure).  You don't actually pay for AIX, you buy a machine to run it and you get the OS for free.  The big (only) advantage of Linux is that it runs on cheapass hardware, so you can parallelize cheaply for things like login servers or what-have-you.

I don't know if I would care one way or another if my corp laptop was XP or a Linux implementation.

Solaris, at least at one time, had Intel builds available.

It still does. Sun sells Opteron machines are their low end server line.

There you go, fast track to fame and fortune as a Solaris specialist.  I think we have two Solaris boxen.

Ok, so my Vista copy that I bought through Windows Marketplace on 30JAN07 is suddenly telling me that I have 3 days to activate it.

It won't accept my license key, claiming that it is already at use.

I'm about to start breaking things.  I know the flight to Bill Gates' house would be expensive, but I'm willing to bet that geeks all over the world will help with my legal defense fund.

It's only 4-5 miles from my house....

I can only laugh at you. XP is still available for $140. Media Center for $110. (http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=368&name=Operating-Systems)

My dad went out and got a copy of Vista for a new computer he just built. (He also got a stick of bad ram - which made things go real slow while I tried to figure out what was wrong.). So I install it finally and Linksys doesn't have any 64 bit drivers for their wireless cards. So - back to the old HD with XP. Definately not ready for prime-time.

Why did he install the 64 bit version? That's for loonies! Seriously, tho, doesn't the Vista install disk offer the two versions? Or did your dad specifically buy the 64 bit distro?

Neg, they come on different DVDs. Some packs come with both 32- and 64-bit installs on different discs, but that's about it.


Also...is there a reason someone should buy the retail pack over the OEM? Seriously, the price difference is fairly large.

I'm sure he figured - I have a 64 bit processor, I should get the 64 bit version of the OS.

Given that support is crap - It is very pretty.

In theory you can run 3D applications on Linux with OpenGL, but in practice, very few Linux distributions seem to include even a very basic working OpenGL implementation, much less all the wildcat extensions.

Vista :  Things to Know.

1 - Avoid it.
2 - See 1.

Gawrsh, Y'all are so helpful these days.

I don't really see this as a big problem.  Most people tech-savy enough to run linux can figure out to type something like 'sudo apt-get install opengl'.  Having out-the-box video driver support has been a much bigger problem. 

Ubuntu's gone a long way to bridging the gap between power-users and normal users for linux.  Newer versions do very well at detecting your hardware, and have built-in support for most nVidia cards.  Even ATI has stated that they're going to support open drivers now.

You should have asked our opinion before purchasing Vista on a whim.  Then we could have helped.

There are Linksys drivers for Vista 64, just not from Linksys.  Seems that their hardware is just rebranded from other manufacturers; while trying to get a friend's wireless card working I discovered that the people who'd actually made the card had Vista 64 drivers on their site.  Downloaded, installed, worked fine.  Linksys, meanwhile, was still listing the drivers as unavailable.  All they had to do was put a link to the drivers on the page, but apparently that was too much work for them.  Fuckers.

As for weird validation problems, Xerapis, I haven't heard of anyone coming across anything like that.  Call Microsoft, they'll help you.  Seriously.  I realize that in this day and age, calling for support is usually such a bad idea as to be laughable, but any time I ran across problems validating XP license codes, the Microsoft folks were actually helpful and sorted it all out.

It happened right after I installed Windows Updates.  Apparently it detected some piece of hardware on my system for the first time.  After the install and reboot, it decided that my hardware had changed drastically enough that I had to re-activate Windows.  So it invalidated my product key code and product ID so HELPFULLY.

9 emails later, I finally got a new product key code, which was all I had asked for from the beginning.  Really pisses me off.

And I'm in South Korea.  Calling Microsoft service here is rather less than useful, as their English skills are mediocre at best.  And I'm not paying the overseas rate for cellphone calls any more than I was going to pay $59 to email Windows Vista tech support directly.

Thanks and sorry. My dad read a description of this problem to me the other day but I refused to believe it until your story.

On the plus side, now that I can actually turn my computer on and off again without worrying about not be able to get back into Windows...

I was able to transfer my computer to my brand new Antec 900 case.

~insert glee here~

Just because I have to share....

(http://i157.photobucket.com/albums/t51/Xerapis/Antec900.jpg)

Are those 120mm fans up front?

Yes.  The entire case is basically built from fans.  Good if you need that much cooling, but my tastes run more towards the P180 series. (http://www.newegg.com/Product/ShowImage.aspx?Image=11-129-026-03.jpg%2c11-129-026-02.jpg%2c11-129-026-04.jpg%2c11-129-026-05.jpg%2c11-129-026-06.jpg%2c11-129-026-07.jpg%2c11-129-026-09.jpg%2c11-129-026-10.jpg%2c11-129-026-11.jpg%2c11-129-026-08.jpg&CurImage=11-129-026-03.jpg&Depa=0&Description=Antec+P182SE+Silver+Mirror-finished+stainless+steel+ATX+Mid+Tower+Computer+Case+-+Retail)  A solid monolithic case, dignified yet menacing.

Don't forget the orgasm-inducing 200mm fan on the top :)

Yeah I doubt I would ever at this point in my life build a computer that needed that much cooling but I do like the idea of a 120mm fan up front for noise purposes. Most ATX cases can only fit an 80mm or 92mm fan up front.

I really haven't run into any issues with Vista yet, and I'm still on fairly old hardware (2Ghz AMD64, ATI X850, 2GB RAM) and running it with all the bells and whistles on.  I like the OS quite a bit once I disabled UAC, which is a pain in the ass if you're knowledgeable enough to avoid the common infection pitfalls.  Gaming takes a wee bit of a hit, but I figure that's to be expected since this thing uses more resources, and besides, I'm not really gaming on the PC very much any more these days.

I tried the latest version of Ubuntu (Feisty, I think?), but Creative still hasn't released drivers for the X-Fi, so I'd be without audio, which is unacceptable.  Although it has to be said that for the first time Linux has apps that I wish were on Windows, namely Beryl and Amarok.  Still, those aren't worth switching over considering the numerous problems I'd have with Linux in the missing application department.

I used the p180 in my last build and took out the middle drive rack to put in a 120mm intake. GPU still gets a bit hot...but it's an overclocked 8800gtx, soo....