Author Topic: The Vista Immersion Experiment (Read 33654 times)

f0dder · « **on:** October 07, 2008, 10:14 AM »

In response to Darwin in another thread, I decided to make this spinoff since the post got too long and off-topic-ish to put there.

So, up until now, my experience with Vista has been relatively limited. I've set up a couple of laptops for the museum, dealt with some minor and major frustrations, and that's basically it. So since I finally got a laptop (mark ye the historical date of October 2nd, 2008!) and needed to put an OS there, I decided to give Vista a proper spin. I've vowed to keep it on the laptop for at least the entire of October. Figured it'd only be fair to finally immerse myself in it, if I want to keep bitching at it.

So, laptop specs: Zepto Orion A15, 2048meg DDR2-800 RAM, 120gig 7200RPM harddrive, Intel GMA X4500HD graphics, 2.0GHz core2 duo P7350 CPU, Sata DVD-RW drive, Intel 5330AN Shirley Peak WiFi. All in all, a pretty sweet machine. Bluetooth makes it easy to sync my phone with MyPhoneExplorer, and it's nice having an SD card reader for grabbing photos from my camera and transferring MP3s to my Sandisk Sansa E280 (finally got an 8gig SD Micro card for it

). I'm already finding myself using the laptop more than my workstation - gogogo reduced power consumption!

The Vista Immersion Experiment

The Vista Immersion Experiment

Yeah, the Zepto logo on the lid is lit. It's very discreet though, you only really notice it in a dark room... not like those obnoxious Mac apple logos

It has frozen a few times though, which I find a bit unsettling. Usually been related to things like using the card reader - I don't know if this is a Vista problem or it's a hardware issue. But there definitely was software Vista issues when the filesystem on the SD card from my camera... I'll eventually have to test with another OS, would suck if the hardware is flaky.

So... f0dder, has your new notebook arrived? What do you think of Vista? Inquiring minds want to know...
-Darwin (October 07, 2008, 07:07 AM)

Yeah, it arrived thursday (talk about waiting a looong time!). Didn't take long grabbing Vista64-business-SP1 from MSDNAA with 20mbit, and heck it almost took as long installing it (yeah, an exaggeration, but I had expected more of the new image-based install system).

I was shocked to see that the base install took up ~12 gigabytes

. So I ran the ISO through vLite, and installed again, this time with a 32gig rather than 16gig system partition. Thankfully, the vLited install was down to 6gig, I can live with that I guess.

So... I've used Vista before, but this is the first time I "immense myself in it". My first impression is that "I can probably live with this", and it's less sluggish than I expected. Even though there's "only" 2 gigs of RAM in it, it's comfortable to use, and stuff in general doesn't feel bad. Visual Studio 2008 and Eclipse run fine. The Intel GMA X4500HD seems pretty capable as well, it can run HL2 in 1280x800 with full details pretty smoothly, Aero runs smoothly... mostly.

I don't understand why things like scrolling contact list in MSN and resizing columns feels so damn sluggish. The column-resize thing might be restricted to things like stuff from the control panel, though, and those are generally extremely sluggish to resize. So perhaps those things are written using WPF, and it's WPF that's a sloppy pig? Just guessing, but anything control-panel seems sluggish beyond belief.

The new explorer doesn't really get my fancy. I would probably be pretty darn frustrated if I had to use it, thankfully xplorer² works fine under Vista. And wtf does a thing like the "Views" in explorer have a vertical slider next to it? O_o - it feels so dumb. Why can't I turn off the bar that has "Organize", "Views" (etc), and the big bar in the bottom that has selection details? At least I can't find any obvious ways to turn those off. So long live x^2!

It also sucks that it's "Aero or nothing" - you can't get a classic look but keep the Aero acceleration. I know there's hacks to use custom themes (WHY can't Microsoft just let third parties do custom themes without the hacky hoops?), and I'll look into that later, but it sucks sucks SUCKS that you're stuck with the pretty much sucky-looking and not very customizable Aero look if you want acceleration (and I do). Why can I no longer "Always show underline for hotkeys" as I could in XP? Why can't you tweak the color of the "selected item bar"? (I already bitched about this). Fortunately, x^2 can be customized, so I can actually see which files I have selected.

I do like the black taskbar though, and the new start menu layout is also pretty great. Still doesn't beat FARR, though!

When resuming from hibernate/standby/locked session, why doesn't the password editbox have keyboard focus?

Do standard fonts like Courier New look differently in Vista, or is it just me?

Consistent with the other Vista machines I've used, the graphics driver seems to crash fairly often, especially during an UAC screen-dimming thing. Sure, it's nice that the graphics driver now runs usermode and can auto-recover, but I get a feeling that the new graphics system by itself is less stable than XP was. Hopefully this matures with SP2 or Windows 7

I don't find UAC all that annoying, btw. Sure, I disabled it temporarily while setting up the machine, but once that's done, it's not that bad. I probably do mess around with system settings a bit more than the usual Vista user though, so the popups do annoy me a bit every now and then - IMHO it should be possible to elevate yourself for a time period like a couple of minutes, so you could do whatever administrative tasks with only one UAC popup.

More to follow.

f0dder · « **Reply #1 on:** October 07, 2008, 10:20 AM »

Oh, forgot to mention: the laptop is made in a "soft touch" material - reminds me a bit of the rubbery wet-suit stuff. Pretty nice and comfortable to the touch. And the keyboard feels just right, I'm inclined to go hunting for a desktop keyboard with the same button resistance (though I'm afraid that means I'll have to shell out for one of those insanely expensive DiNovos).

MrCrispy · « **Reply #2 on:** October 07, 2008, 01:23 PM »

Ed Bott has a very helpful series of articles on new Vista installs. I like these because they don't contain any of the usual voodoo registry tweaks and make sense.

These are multi-part -

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=466
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=479

nontroppo · « **Reply #3 on:** October 07, 2008, 01:47 PM »

Thanks for the write-up. I'd also done a 1 month Vista SP1 (32bit) immersion on a Dell workstation over the summer, and ended up preferring it to XP overall.

I like the new explorer, and though the view controls are pretty strange from an XP user point-of-view, I got to like them. I refused to install FARR to see how the Start menu could work (as I'd done in Leopard with Quicksilver). FARR was missed throughout, I found the experience pretty poor, but as a launcher it is better than nothing (i.e. XP functionality). Spoilt by Spotlight, I had high expectations for unobtrusive content searching from the start menu, but even after forcibly enabling content indexing, the experience was poor and unreliable. That is really a shame, and something I hope is substantially improved for Win 7. More metadata, robust search and extensibility is my wanted features on this.

Performance was adequate (NVidia 8600GT), though Word 2007+Vista can feel like running in snow sometimes. I would get freezes every so often too, but I never could track it down with process explorer. XP, Ubuntu and Leopard all felt faster on the same machine though in "smoothness". And start times of Vista were slower than the others (shutdown was faster than XP though). Sleeping the machine was much more reliable than under XP. As everyone and their dog has commented, Vista demands good hardware. Having used two different "economy" laptops (1GB RAM) with Vista home of friends, the experience is miserably poor. But the Dell workstation was well specced enough overall.

The lack of attention to detail in Aero is consistent with MS's inconsistency on UI polish. As an example, the window border has a cyan "highlight" on the right+bottom edge, as if incident light is reflected within the "glass". But the cyan colour never changed when the UI colours did (reflected light would be filtered by the glass it passed through in reality), breaking the sense of realistic modeling. Having this bright cyan pixel border of an red-tinted glass is just sloppy. It would be trivial to modify it based on the UI colours. There are several "fit-and-finish" bits like this, but it's hardly a major issue...

I *love* the new fonts, beautifully designed, though limited in unicode extent (hopefully they will grow) and sometimes I saw really poor kerning. I'm not sure if that was Windows poor font handling or specific to the new fonts. Vista's font management is still poor. Nevertheless, the fonts themselves are on all of my machines (as they come with MS Office for PC and Mac), and I use Consolas as my monospaced font of choice for programming everywhere.

In the end though, as one uses Vista one keeps finding the old XP dialogs "under-the-skin", so it really feels like a modified XP over time. I think continuity is good, but some preferences dialogs could desperately do with a clean-sweep design and it feels a bit pick-and-mix design-wise.

UAC *did* intensely annoy me after a couple of weeks. At first I appreciated the security. But over time you do end up just clicking to get rid of it. And working round it in my Matlab programming was annoying as hell. I turned it off after 3 weeks.

Never heard of Zepto, but it looks a nice laptop. Is the soft touch like on the old thinkpads?

J-Mac · « **Reply #4 on:** October 07, 2008, 04:36 PM »

I was OK with my Vista Ultimate notebook, purchased in late March this year until I lost my event log (event viewer in XP) after about two weeks. Searched around and though I found a lot of others with the same problem - no fix. Also, I could not install SP1 - failed in eight attempts. Grrrr. Contacted the Microsoft Vista SP1 support team, especially formed for problems like this. Two weeks of tests and tweaks with no fix. The tech gave up on it.

Then I found a thread on the Microsoft Support users forum and a guy there diagnosed the issue as changes to the Access Control List caused by two successive MS Auto-Update patches. After a bunch of testing he fixed his and posted the method here. I did the same fix and got it fixed myself.

Great! Got my event log back again and all is exceedingly faster than XP ever was. I'm happy - for a short time.

Then I installed SP1, which now worked thanks to that fix. And now my startup is at least twice as long, as is shutdown. What the hell happened? Worse yet, the Windows SxS folder has suddenly grown to just under 8 GB! Looked around and I find that this is.....NORMAL??? For SP1??? What is normal about that? Can I delete it - got a very emphatic NO from Microsoft. Does it benefit me? No, said they. It just is. Period. Deal with it - after all, I was told, with HDD's so large nowadays what's 8 GB? (Not joking there - that's what I was told.)

So now I am kinda wondering if I should reinstall and go the same route that lost me my Event Log, but left me without SP1. Actually ran much better then.

Jim

wreckedcarzz · « **Reply #5 on:** October 07, 2008, 06:18 PM »

I have 3 Vista PCs and 2 XP PCs in the house. My computers are the only ones that work correctly (when I say "my", I mean the ones that I actually own - 2 desktops and a laptop). The Vista machine (primary, gamer and handles grueling tasks) has had... 2? (not sure) major problems back last year. I reformatted 2x (first reformat I botched the filesystem, my own fault) and after a reinstall, Vista is perfect. All updates, the Error notification actually helped me fix my hard drive issue (it was intermittent but it tracked the source for me, partially both my and the computer's fault caused the error).

My dad's Vista desktop won't install SP1, and the Realtek drivers (there is a problem there, install new sound card is on the to-do list) keep muting the microphone while he is using Speech Recognition??? Other than that, the machine flies, but it still loses to my single core Vista PC. His laptop is a prime example of why people hate Vista - it was not rated as Vista compatible, but I talked him into getting it on there anyways. It takes about a minute to boot, but you have to close and reopen the lid to get the screen to turn back on (Vista sees it as a REMOVABLE DEVICE, and TURNS IT OFF??? WTF??). Once its up and running, it takes a minute to load large applications like Firefox (with addons, not being sarcastic about "large applications"), but it works well. 1GB RAM... might explain it. He does like both machines, and even though he bashes Vista a lot (partially personal (in)experience, partial "believe the media!" syndrome), he can't deny that he likes it more than XP.

My experiences (see my DC profile for my PC info):

AERO runs like a beauty, even in 1080p (actually, ESPECIALLY in 1080p... talk about the "OOO" effect

). Games run at max detail without problems, with DX9 or 10.1 (but FPS drops like a rock on 10.1, but I don't have the best GPU).

Never had a BSoD, just the rare hard automatic reboot because something BAD happened (un/plugging IDE hard drive power at 2AM, hard drive failure (after 6 1/2 years of loyal service as a great slave IDE drive!) - actually, that one didn't cause an auto reboot, just freaked Vista out. Nothing ran (including shutdown.exe), and the BIOS went loony until I disconnected the drive.

I used to use F3D (Flip3D) on a very common basis, but now I have such a fast mouse (default @ 2k DPI) that I use less energy moving the mouse + clicking rather than hitting Win + Tab.

The volume, network, battery and other Tray Notification Icons ability to change dynamically is freaking awesome. I would have LOVED to have this in XP. When using my XP laptop I always glance down at the volume icon and go "crap, gotta click it...".

I hate IE, but IE7+ in Vista does have its advantages for those that use it. Enhanced security and bla bla... I use Firefox anyways

The Start menu layout owns FARR (IMO), and it is probably my most commonly used accessory of the OS. Start, type to search or run, and click to see all my applications, organized both in alphabetical and personal ordering (with the latter taking priority over the former).

I keep UAC, the Security Center (not the service, though) disabled (the notifications), the Firewall is off, Windows Defender is off, and Windows Updates are all green for downloading ASAP. It keeps me up to date without getting in my way, but I don't go around being an idiot and downloading THE_WORLDS_BIGGEST_PROGRAM_IT_DOES_EVERYTHING.EXE from every place

If I had to go either XP or Ubuntu, I would go Ubuntu. I can't take XP's simplicity and lack of visual data on-demand. Vista has it all there, all the time. It just works. (ZOMG! APPLE TRADEMARK!

)

I love Vista, but I never did much like XP (up until 04-05). Professional look (9x) -> "Cartoony" (XP) -> "Homey" (Vista) - XP was the oddball.

-Brandon

Darwin · « **Reply #6 on:** October 10, 2008, 06:50 PM »

XP Pro in classic mode with the Theme service disabled is a fine operating system, IMNHO! I'm finally immersing myself in Vista as well (after owning the notebook for two months!). I'm still loving it! Wonder how f0dder is making out...

Curt · « **Reply #7 on:** October 11, 2008, 02:47 AM »

You guys are making me regretting that I purchased a Vista, even before I have taken it into use!!

Where is that page, "Install this fix, and it will make your Vista behave like a XP SP4...."??

Edited:
- oh, yes, thank you, MrCrispy:

Ed Bott
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=466
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=479
-MrCrispy (October 07, 2008, 01:23 PM)

Curt · « **Reply #8 on:** October 11, 2008, 04:43 AM »

Did anyone try if ClickOff can handle the UAC notifications?

Darwin · « **Reply #9 on:** October 11, 2008, 08:18 AM »

Curt - did you see Josh's post about NortonUAC?

f0dder · « **Reply #10 on:** October 11, 2008, 09:25 AM »

Did anyone try if ClickOff can handle the UAC notifications?
-Curt (October 11, 2008, 04:43 AM)

That would totally defeat the point of UAC, and if it was possible, would be regarded as a security vulnerability and fixed. UAC isn't all that bad, really, and it's a great thing security-wise.

IMHO NortonUAC is a bad idea, but I already wrote about it in the other thread.

Darwin · « **Reply #11 on:** October 11, 2008, 09:30 AM »

IMHO NortonUAC is a bad idea, but I already wrote about it in the other thread.
-f0dder (October 11, 2008, 09:25 AM)

Agreed - I was hoping Curt would read the thread!

Stoic Joker · « **Reply #12 on:** October 11, 2008, 11:26 AM »

Why can't I turn off the bar that has "Organize", "Views" (etc), and the big bar in the bottom that has selection details?
-f0dder (October 07, 2008, 10:14 AM)

Organize Menu->Layout->Deselect anything you don't want. With the new address bar's handy ability to move laterally in the file system I never use the tree view any more.

f0dder · « **Reply #13 on:** October 11, 2008, 11:33 AM »

Why can't I turn off the bar that has "Organize", "Views" (etc), and the big bar in the bottom that has selection details?
-f0dder (October 07, 2008, 10:14 AM)
Organize Menu->Layout->Deselect anything you don't want. With the new address bar's handy ability to move laterally in the file system I never use the tree view any more.
-Stoic Joker (October 11, 2008, 11:26 AM)

That won't let me turn off the organize/views/etc. menu itself, though

- the "big bar in the bottom" turned out to go away when I selected "use windows classic folders". Better than nothing.

Curt · « **Reply #14 on:** October 11, 2008, 12:06 PM »

I was hoping Curt would read the thread!
-Darwin (October 11, 2008, 09:30 AM)

- thanks, Mike, I will take the time and read some more of the Norton thread.
I was just reminded that I have a terrible memory, because I realized that I already have downloaded a copy of 'TweakUAC' and saved it to my external drive; waiting for Vista...

Stoic Joker · « **Reply #15 on:** October 11, 2008, 12:30 PM »

Why can't I turn off the bar that has "Organize", "Views" (etc), and the big bar in the bottom that has selection details?
-f0dder (October 07, 2008, 10:14 AM)
Organize Menu->Layout->Deselect anything you don't want. With the new address bar's handy ability to move laterally in the file system I never use the tree view any more.
-Stoic Joker (October 11, 2008, 11:26 AM)
That won't let me turn off the organize/views/etc. menu itself, though - the "big bar in the bottom" turned out to go away when I selected "use windows classic folders". Better than nothing.
-f0dder (October 11, 2008, 11:33 AM)

Classic Folders? Zoiks! I'd hate to go back that far

The Details pane (pain...) can/is removed via the method I mentioned earlier. While the organize menu/speed bar is a bit anoying it's only so when displaying both it and the classic file menu bar which I haven't used in years (I'm all context menus and hot keys) There are around 300 Windows keyboard short cuts built into Windows and I (collect) use as many of them I I can remember.

Now the default Vista window border size of 4px is revolting and burried in Windows Color and Appearance->Classic Appearance Properties->Advanced->Border Padding I've found 2px to be a tollerable balance for this setting.

J-Mac · « **Reply #16 on:** October 11, 2008, 12:31 PM »

I have UAC turned off completely on my Vista notebook. And before anyone complains how crazy that is, I am the one and only user of this machine, and I have used every Microsoft OS they have ever released without an infection by being careful and using the computer wisely. So, no - I am not "living dangerously". It serves no useful purpose that I can determine other than to make users stop and think before they act. And I believe that I do that myself. If not, well I will pay the price, correct?

As for why some have so much difficulty getting UAC turned off, is it possibly limited to certain editions? I have Ultimate installed on my notebook.

Jim

Stoic Joker · « **Reply #17 on:** October 12, 2008, 09:25 AM »

I have UAC turned off completely on my Vista notebook. And before anyone complains how crazy that is, I am the one and only user of this machine, and I have used every Microsoft OS they have ever released without an infection by being careful and using the computer wisely. So, no - I am not "living dangerously". It serves no useful purpose that I can determine other than to make users stop and think before they act. And I believe that I do that myself. If not, well I will pay the price, correct?

As for why some have so much difficulty getting UAC turned off, is it possibly limited to certain editions? I have Ultimate installed on my notebook.

Jim
-J-Mac (October 11, 2008, 12:31 PM)

Yes you are, and so am I ... Understanding the risk is the first part of mitigating it. It's a little thing called the law of averages. Yes skill counts, but sooner or later you end up being far enough of your game to slip up and get blown outa the water. I not sure at this point if it was Virtual PC issues or Visual Studio hiccups that caused me to disable it...but I'm seriously considering revisiting the situation to see if there is another (UAC enabled) option.

I fell off my game in a street race once, and wrapped a car around a telephone pole ... So I'm not quite as cocky as I used to be about "skill"

All editions of Vista allow you to disable UAC.

Darwin · « **Reply #18 on:** October 12, 2008, 09:50 AM »

I have UAC turned off completely on my Vista notebook.
-J-Mac (October 11, 2008, 12:31 PM)

I'm not sure what I think about this. When I bought my own Vista notebook, I intended to downgrade the XP Pro. Then, when I started playing with Vista in advance of that, I intended to disable UAC but never did. So far, the worst thing about UAC is the constant harping about doing (pretty much) ANYTHING in DOpus 9 (I haven't tried the Administrator switch that's part of DO 9 yet). I'm still dithering, because while I appreciate the function it is intended to serve, I also feel that, having survived the past 14 years with every version of Windows save 95 and ME, I am in the same company as Stoic Joker and J-Mac: more than capable of making these decisions for myself... I guess time will tell. For now, I'm leaving it alone (it stays enabled and I don't run NortonUAC or TweakUAC).

J-Mac · « **Reply #19 on:** October 12, 2008, 01:49 PM »

StoicJoker & Darwin:

For backup of my data AND my system itself I use the following:

System integrity: Acronis True Image 11 for regular full images of my C: Drive
System Integrity: First Defense - Rescue for a complete, separate bootable copy of my C: Drive
Data: Genie Backup Manager Pro for backups of ALL data files to two separate external drives
Data: Super Flexible File Synchronizer for syncing all data folders to an external drive
Data: JungleDisk with their Plus Service (Web Access) for ALL data files backed up to Amazon's S3 online storage
Digital photos: Flickr and Smugmug Pro Accounts. All my digital photos ( >15,000) are uploaded and stored on both services

IF I do have that lapse that Stoic mentioned about when he was racing, I feel that I have enough redundancy built-in so that I can recover from any possible "Oops" moments I may experience. Worst case, I wipe and restore.

(I didn't say that I haven't learned anything in all those years of computer experience!!

)

Jim

Darwin · « **Reply #20 on:** October 12, 2008, 05:02 PM »

Yeah... I use Acronis True Image and Super Flexible File Synchronizer to keep everything backed up, too, and have both AV and AS installed so don't fear messing my system up as I can just go back to a working state.

f0dder · « **Reply #21 on:** October 27, 2008, 05:27 AM »

I'm about 25 days into the experiment now, and so far the verdict is that I'll probably keep Vista running on the laptop. It is pretty fat considering drive-space, but the system feels pretty snappy and responsive. I feel a bit tempted giving XP a spin, to see if it runs even snappier, but can't really be bothered setting it up (I do have multiple partitions so wouldn't have to nuke my Vista install, but there's the issue of MBR/bootloader etc, and hunting down drivers etc takes time).

Regarding fonts - I think my "Do standard fonts like Courier New look differently in Vista, or is it just me?" is just due to having only standard font smoothing enabled on my desktop, but cleartype on the laptop - duh

. The new fonts on Vista are nice-ish, but I still use Dina (and not the praised Consolas) for text-editors and IDEs.

I still don't like the new explorer, so I'm still happy that I use xplorer^2. I guess I could live with the new explorer, and I don't exactly hate it, but I don't particularly like it either.

It still annoys me that there doesn't seem to be a way to always show shortcut underlines, not just when keeping ALT pressed. Why did Microsoft remove this functionality? :-s

The new standard open/save dialog boxes are a step forward from XP, I like the favorites etc... but they could be less cluttered, and they certainly aren't very keyboard-navigation friendly. Could be designed better, but is better than standard XP without extenders.

After updating the intel GMA graphics driver (and perhaps some windows updates?), it seems that I haven't had graphics crashes for a while. I haven't had a lot of UAC prompts either though (which seemed to be the main cause of graphics driver crashes). Never was a problem though, since the graphics driver is usermode and didn't cause BSODs.

I'm undecided about the new Control Panel. I don't see it as much better or worse than the old XP control panel, mainly just... different. Slightly annoying that some configuration options take more clicks to get to, but I don't have to fiddle with that stuff very often, so not much of an issue.

The thing that annoys me the most is that I sometimes get complete lockups - happens when I attach USB devices (mouse, pendrive, whatever) or use the card reader (which seems to be connected as an internal USB device). Haven't been able to pinpoint exactly when it happens, but it seems that it's only if the machine has been in hibernation state. Completely lockup, can't even move mouse cursor, and I have to do a hard poweroff. Dunno if this is a Vista or hardware issue, I'm going to contact Zepto and check whether other people have had similar issues.

Oh, there's a single unknown device listed in my device manager, and I haven't been able to find any useful information about it - it's located on "Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Embedded Controller", and it's Instance Path is ACPI\ACPIHIDMAPPER\5&15D725F4&0 . It's Parent is ACPI\PNP0C09\1 . AFAIK I have all drivers installed, and googling for the ID hasn't brought up anything useful.

The only real issue I've had so far that I'm absolutely sure is Vistas fault, is that the wifi network driver shit itself and died, for some unexplainable reason. p3lb0x was visiting, playing World Of Goo, when the game suddenly started running very slowly, crashed to desktop, and there was some "warning triangle" notify icon... after a reboot, wifi was gone. I had to uninstall + reinstall the driver to get it working again, weird stuff.

Oh, I sometimes have problems connecting to the WiFi at home, but I think that's an issue with my wifi setup rather than with Vista. Works fine at school and other places.

I still like the new taskbar (including the battery, volume and network connection icons - like wreckedcarzz mentions, they're really nice, rocks having visual status indicators right in the tray. And they look pretty.)

The new start menu is also lovely, and quite a step forward from XP. Since I'm a FARR fan, I don't use it supermuch, though. But without FARR, it's definitely a step forward, and if I used the indexed search stuff, I would probably appreciate it even more.

AERO... I'm still annoyed with it's looks. Better than the XP fisherprice theme, but I'd prefer a classic 2k/XP style look but still with acceleration as well as the new taskbard+startmenu look. If Microsoft would at least support custom themes without having to use dirty hacks, *sigh*. The acceleration is pretty cool though, I love having app previews on hovering mouse over the taskbar, and on alt+tab. I know it's possible to achieve something like this on XP, but it's done via dirty hacks rather than proper system support. Flip3D is a cute gimmick, but I don't find it very useful.

Oh, I'm still running "full UAC" - no tweaks, haven't diabled the "protected desktop", etc. I don't really find it annoying once the initial new-setup-install-spree is done (and you can disable it temporarily while doing that, anyway).

I find myself using the laptop more and more, and my workstation less and less. Should make a difference wrt. my power bill - there's been too much partying-till-6AM lately though, which has sorta evened out the gains

Carol Haynes · « **Reply #22 on:** October 27, 2008, 05:41 AM »

Oh, there's a single unknown device listed in my device manager, and I haven't been able to find any useful information about it - it's located on "Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Embedded Controller", and it's Instance Path is ACPI\ACPIHIDMAPPER\5&15D725F4&0 . It's Parent is ACPI\PNP0C09\1 . AFAIK I have all drivers installed, and googling for the ID hasn't brought up anything useful.
-f0dder (October 27, 2008, 05:27 AM)

Isn't this normally either part of the motherboard drivers or installed by Windows during setup when the motherboard/BIOS type is detected?

justice · « **Reply #23 on:** October 27, 2008, 05:50 AM »

Oh, I'm still running "full UAC" - no tweaks, haven't diabled the "protected desktop", etc. I don't really find it annoying once the initial new-setup-install-spree is done (and you can disable it temporarily while doing that, anyway).
-f0dder (October 27, 2008, 05:27 AM)

Just a note, if you want tot disable UAC and enable it later on. I've had experience with this, program settings and licence status might change. This is not Vista's fault AFAICS but lazy programming (storing settings / licence files in the program's installation folder should be avoided, that's why with UAC on programs don't have permission to update their own folder) but it did happen with Direct Access the one time I tried it.

However it's quite easy to remedy, moving the files to where the program expects them to be would solve the situation.

f0dder · « **Reply #24 on:** October 27, 2008, 06:22 AM »

Oh, there's a single unknown device listed in my device manager, and I haven't been able to find any useful information about it - it's located on "Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Embedded Controller", and it's Instance Path is ACPI\ACPIHIDMAPPER\5&15D725F4&0 . It's Parent is ACPI\PNP0C09\1 . AFAIK I have all drivers installed, and googling for the ID hasn't brought up anything useful.
-f0dder (October 27, 2008, 05:27 AM)

Isn't this normally either part of the motherboard drivers or installed by Windows during setup when the motherboard/BIOS type is detected?
-Carol Haynes (October 27, 2008, 05:41 AM)

I really have no idea, since it doesn't say what kind of device this is >_<

I would expect it to perhaps be chipset-specific, which means the intel chipset drivers should have handled it... but they don't. On the other hand, the Instance Path contains "ACPIHIDMAPPER" - I don't know if HID in this context means Human Interface Device, in which case it could be touchpad-related... but the touchpad works fine, and even installing the extra (and superfluous?) synaptics/whatever driver software still didn't fix this. Would be interesting knowing what the heck this device is :-s

Oh, I'm still running "full UAC" - no tweaks, haven't diabled the "protected desktop", etc. I don't really find it annoying once the initial new-setup-install-spree is done (and you can disable it temporarily while doing that, anyway).
-f0dder (October 27, 2008, 05:27 AM)
Just a note, if you want tot disable UAC and enable it later on. I've had experience with this, program settings and licence status might change. This is not Vista's fault AFAICS but lazy programming (storing settings / licence files in the program's installation folder should be avoided, that's why with UAC on programs don't have permission to update their own folder) but it did happen with Direct Access the one time I tried it.

However it's quite easy to remedy, moving the files to where the program expects them to be would solve the situation.
-justice (October 27, 2008, 05:50 AM)

Yeah, that'd be a 3rd-party software problem. And that software would have to be pretty shoddily coded