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Driver Update Can Cause Vista Deactivation
KrispySausage writes "After weeks of grueling troubleshooting, I've finally had it confirmed by Microsoft Australia and USA — something as small as swapping the video card or updating a device driver can trigger a total Vista deactivation.
Put simply, your copy of Windows will stop working with very little notice (three days) and your PC will go into "reduced functionality" mode, where you can't do anything but use the web browser for half an hour."
I had to reactivate my copy of Windows Vista Ultimate after updating an NVIDIA network controller driver via Windows Update. Not a huge pain, but it simply shouldn't happen. Ever.
That's all very well if you have the choice - like it or not, some people *have* to use Vista. I pity them, but the poor b@$tards don't need any more difficulties like this!
Give a man a fire, and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life. (Terry Pratchett)
For those that haven't yet seen the reason why changing hardware hoses your Vista and are interested in the details, I highly recommend this:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
It's all about the DRM.
Skip Franklin
It's always darkest just before it goes pitch black. -- despair.com
Except it's not stealing, it's copyright infringement.
"They" really like it if you make that mistake, but there is a big difference between the two.
Many programs written for XP will not install on Vista. This is mostly if you try to launch them from the desktop because Vista automatically gives programs launched from there less rights. Vista moved the location of user profiles. If "Documents and Settings" was hardcoded in an application and now doesn't exist that screws the pooch. Next when it comes to actually running programs again user rights come into play. Even users who are Administrators do not have full administratove privilages. You still have to modify shortcuts to apps to have them run as the SYSTEM Admin.
Programs that were at one time affected: Adobe Reader Install Blackberry Sync LogMeIn.com Client Cisco VPN Client
Those are just the ones I come in contact in my job. I work for a Mortgage company and I can tell you that we may never use Vista. Hopefully we can hold on to XP long enough for Microsoft to pull it's head out of its ass.
Are you serious? 2 seconds searching brings up something like this.
Haida Manga
I'm also a developer who has had to port apps from XP to Vista, and trust me, the GP is right, it's a nightmare. Most of the problems stem from the "improved" security. Vista locks down certain parts of the system pretty hard (e.g. the registry), in theory to block malware, but they wound up taking out (I'm guessing) about 75% of commercial apps along with it. Just for example, under XP, most application operations that require elevated privileges (e.g. writing to Program Files) will simply work if the application is being run by an admin. Under Vista, the OS will block the operation until the admin approves it, even though the admin is already running the app. That might be OK if it were handled transparently, but the application has to be rewritten to handle this case explicitly.
Any substantial commercial XP application that has been around for any significant amount of time will almost certainly run into problems under Vista. Perhaps in theory a 100% perfectly well behaved Windows application that doesn't do one thing even slightly wrong anywhere might have a chance of working immediately under Vista, but how many real world applications are 100% perfect?
I read Usenet for the articles.
is to hack the product YOU BOUGHT so that you can use it properly.
If MS doesn't like it, they can try not selling their software. They have choices.
That BIOS hack works quite well and even makes Vista believe it's activated. It bypasses all these activation issues quite nicely. Even if your copy of Vista is legitimate, it's worth using the crack just to ensure that you don't get bothered by activation nonsense.
While technically "Documents and Settings" doesn't exist anymore (user profiles are in C:\Users, which is amazingly easy type given typical MS paths), they put a (hidden) link at C:\Documents and Settings that points to C:\Users so that programs of this nature won't break. Whether they should have done that or not is another topic.
In response to the GP, basically anything that is security related could potentially need to be rewritten. A lot of this stems from the fact that, by default in XP all users were Admins (yes, not secure...but that is how it is/was). In Vista, even if you are an Admin you don't have full admin rights without jumping through hoops.
For example, the application that I work on sometimes needs to spawn a child process that requires full admin privileges (the app itself can run as a normal user). In previous versions, we were calling CreateProcess() to start it, and redirecting standard output to retrieve the results of the child process. However, for whatever reason, you can't use CreateProcess() to start a child process with higher rights than the original process - that doesn't trigger the consent (Allow or Deny) dialog. You need to use ShellExecute() for this, which (helpfully) doesn't allow you to redirect standard output.
This is just one example of the many small, annoying "features" we had to work around in order to correctly work on Vista.
Interesting. I've litterally worked with hundreds of people who have not had issues with Windows machines with a good internet connection, and machines that are up between 8 and 24 hours a day. Probably less than a third have had any serious issues with Windows 2000 or XP.
The trick?
1) Don't download and run random crap - that goes for any OS.
2) Sit behind a decent firewall - that also goes for any OS.
3) Don't have a blank or stupid password - hmm, again, good advice for any OS.
4) Get security updates regularly - again, same for any OS, though it happens more often for windows.
5) Don't use IE unless necessary - I'd say "same for any OS," but it is hard to violate this one on other OSes.
So, 5 is the only serious difference.
Oh, and since the other relpy was a bit of an ass - regarding NT - saying Windows NT is like 98 with better networking, is like saying MacOS X is like MacOS 9 with better networking - in both cases it is a completely different OS, that happens to have quite a number of backwards compatibility features.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
Are you asking for bug fixes in a Linux kernel from 6 years ago? Nope, And Linus wouldn't give release them anyway. But I don't hear anyone yelling at about that.....
Linus won't what?
The latest 2.4 version of the Linux kernel is: 2.4.35.3
The latest prepatch for the 2.4 Linux kernel tree is: 2.4.36-pre1
The latest 2.2 version of the Linux kernel is: 2.2.26
The latest prepatch for the 2.2 Linux kernel tree is: 2.2.27-rc2
Ok so linux 2.2 and 2.4 are still being actively maintained.. how old are those?
Jan 28 1999 linux-2.2.1.tar.gz
Jan 30 2001 linux-2.4.1.tar.gz
So your wrong.. you can get Linux kernel patches from 5 year old versions and older.