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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.
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
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.