Daily Cup of Tech

I have been working with Vista now for a couple of weeks and I an starting to get a feel for some of the odd quirks that are occurring to me. Many of these are because of how I have done things in the past and I will probably have to make some changes in how I do things in the future.

But, I thought that I would start documenting some of these odd things, what caused them, and how I have worked around them. Please keep in mind that I am writing this after only working with the system for a couple of weeks. I am no where even close to being an expert with this OS and I would greatly appreciate any (gentle) correction and addition that you can supply.

Too Far On the Secure Side

One of the things that I have discovered over time is that there is a sliding scale between a secure system and an easy to use system.

The further you go toward one, the farther you get from the other. I think that Vista may have sacrificed some of the ease of use while attempting to make it more secure.

I have found that if you are having difficulty with an application working properly, most of the problems can be resolved by right clicking on the application or the shortcut and clicking on Run as administrator. This goes for installing applications as well. Of course, if you are not a member of the local administrator’s group, this will be of little help to you.

Can I Get Some Services Please…

The vast majority of the old services that worked under Windows 2003 and Windows XP simple do not work. This is understandable because of how the entire services engine has been rebuilt in Vista. I’m sure that it is just a matter of time before someone comes up with a Windows XP service on Vista wrapper but I have not found anything like this yet.

…And a Side of Resource Kits?

I miss my resource kit tools. There is a whole pile of resource kits available for pretty much every Microsoft product out there but I have yet to see one for Vista. I’m sure it is on the way but it can’t arrive too soon for me.

No, That’s Not a Network Drive

For some reason, Vista sometimes mistakes my TrueCrypt mounted volume, which is on X:, to be a network drive. What’s more, it seems to not like working with some of the files and mistakes them for read-only at times. I know that this is not necessarily a Vista issue since TrueCrypt is just newly release for Vista but it is still a Vista related annoyance.

What Makes One Application Good and Others Evil?

I am having a hard time figuring out how Vista determines whether or not to block or allow an application to perform a specific action. I’ve had signed application get stopped in their tracks and yet potentially destructive batch files run without pause. This definitely needs further scrutiny.

More DCoT Research Needed

As I stated earlier on, I am still very new to this and a lot of the answers to these issues may become obvious in due course. I think with more time and experience, I will come to enjoy working with Vista. Until then, it will have to be Google to the rescue!

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