Your experience with Vista Beta 2

[the cobbler]

Originally posted by: RobertR1
Anyone figure out how to make the Creative Vista driver work?? I downloaded the Vista Beta Driver for Audigy 2 cards but it fails during the install. Device manager shows it as a bad driver install.

the Stash isn't going to like this method one bit, but here you go :thumbsup:
I put this up a couple days ago (my handle= hawkeyefan on all boards but this one)
you need to disable User Access Control, disable Driver Signing, and use an XP x64 driver...and install twice. plus some goofy bugs to keep it working, but it works nonetheless.

Pardon my attitude there. just too much whining. People over @Creative forums act as if they were robbed blind because their soundcard doesn't have driver support for an OS beta that isn't even RC yet:roll: I mean, I don't remember seeing "supports Vista x64" on the box...

enough rambling:
fully functional Audigy 2/4 in Vista x64

 

[Looney]

Originally posted by: wiin

Originally posted by: angrynerdrock
visually, its beautiful. i will definately get it when the problems are fixed.

otherwise, so far i hate it. its incompatible with about half the drivers i throw at it, half the software doesnt work....im going back to xp. maybe RC1 will fare better...but as of right now im not happy. hell nero wont even install

It is also not compatible with AVG . Vista blocked the AVG installation.

It should be AVG is not compatible with Vista.

 

[CaptnKirk]

So after dowwnloading and trying to install the drivers from HP for my PSC 2200, it tells me that installation was incomplete.
I Go into <Computer><Manage><Device Manager><Printers> & uninstall & perform the restart . . .
and on the restart it 'Has Found New Hardfware' - and proceeds to install BENQ Printer Drivers . . so I let it play.
No worky - no fixie, I'll have to uninstall it again.

It constantly freezes & locks up or crashes to BSOD & auto-restarts - glitchy.
It does not like to do multiple things, only one or two apps running or it locks.

I don't know how much Microsoft plans to charge for this OpSys, but the way it crashes every 10 minutes or so,
I could buy a '72 Ford Maverick & drive it on weekends and have the same experience.

 

[Eug]

AT's review

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: stash

UAS needs to be turned off asap or you'll hate vista.

Please leave it (UAC) on and file bugs. Turning it off defeats the purpose and doesn't do anyone any good.

But it's not a bug - its just the way in which it works which is beyond irritating. It's too overly protective. I really do not need to be asked if I'm SURE I want to change my resolution. 80% of the things it makes sure you want to do are things that are entirely too routine. I can understand if you are a complete and utter noob it might serve a purpose, but for just about everyone on here, its superfluous, irritating, and a waste of time/resources. Leaving it on doesn't do ME any good. At least it can be turned off - if they forced it on, it would be enough of a irritation that I wouldn't buy vista.

They just need to implement one basic change. Allow you to turn it on, but only so that it notices when other programs attempt to change things they shouldnt. If I want to do change my security level, or turn my firewall on or off etc, I have to go to the dialog and do so - windows shouldnt stop me. If a program attempts to do this without my knowledge and without me explicitly opening those dialogs, thats when it should set off the alarms.

Some users need to be protected from themselves, but a lot of us only need to be protected from inadvertant malware doing things we're not aware of.

And Flip3d is still retarded.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: Eug
AT's review

I'd say that review was pretty much dead on.

 

[CaptnKirk]

Originally posted by: BD2003

But it's not a bug - its just the way in which it works which is beyond irritating.
It's too overly protective.

IT"S A BETA - That's how it works now. It collects bugs & makes error reports to solve problems.

Part of it is a used interface compentence test, to see if the user is paying attention to what is beig done.

If a dialog box were to pop up and say:

IF YOU ARE A BLITHERING IDIOT
AND WANT TO DELETE YOUR BRAIN
CLICK HERE NOW TO CONTINUE

nearly 25% would blindly click because they had got used to doing just that.

Lets leave the 'Nag' on and collect the inputs that will resolve problems where the program writers can review & work on them.

Besides that - it prepares young men to accept married life . . when they get their own personal resident nags.

 

[stash]

But it's not a bug - its just the way in which it works which is beyond irritating. It's too overly protective

These are bugs. There are things that should not prompt for consent, deleting an item from the desktop being an obvious one. The UAC team is very interested in getting feedback on these issues. Please file bugs.

I really do not need to be asked if I'm SURE I want to change my resolution

There's no UAC prompt for changing the resolution.

Leaving it on doesn't do ME any good. At least it can be turned off - if they forced it on, it would be enough of a irritation that I wouldn't buy vista.

It might not do you any good, until the next Sony rootkit comes along. It will be on by default at RTM.

They just need to implement one basic change. Allow you to turn it on, but only so that it notices when other programs attempt to change things they shouldnt. If I want to do change my security level, or turn my firewall on or off etc, I have to go to the dialog and do so - windows shouldnt stop me. If a program attempts to do this without my knowledge and without me explicitly opening those dialogs, thats when it should set off the alarms.

LOL, this is a basic change?! How do you determine if an action is being taken by a user or by a program? How can you tell if what you think is a user making a change is not malware spoofing this action? That is not a trivial problem to solve at all.

Some users need to be protected from themselves, but a lot of us only need to be protected from inadvertant malware doing things we're not aware of.

Again, how do you make the distinction between malware doing something it shouldn't and a user doing something they shouldn't?

 

[stash]

It constantly freezes & locks up or crashes to BSOD & auto-restarts - glitchy.

File bugs, especially on the bugchecks. These should definitely should not be happening and should be reported.

 

[CaptnKirk]

Originally posted by: stash

It constantly freezes & locks up or crashes to BSOD & auto-restarts - glitchy.

File bugs, especially on the bugchecks. These should definitely should not be happening and should be reported.

I have received feed-back from the Microsoft error report analysis group that a future release
will contain fixes isolated from my inputs to resolve these discrepancies.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: CaptnKirk

Originally posted by: BD2003

But it's not a bug - its just the way in which it works which is beyond irritating.
It's too overly protective.

IT"S A BETA - That's how it works now. It collects bugs & makes error reports to solve problems.

Part of it is a used interface compentence test, to see if the user is paying attention to what is beig done.

If a dialog box were to pop up and say:

IF YOU ARE A BLITHERING IDIOT
AND WANT TO DELETE YOUR BRAIN
CLICK HERE NOW TO CONTINUE

nearly 25% would blindly click because they had got used to doing just that.

Lets leave the 'Nag' on and collect the inputs that will resolve problems where the program writers can review & work on them.

Besides that - it prepares young men to accept married life . . when they get their own personal resident nags.

It's a beta?!? Really? I didn't know that! So they gave it as a preview to the world to see what we thought about it, and how it runs on our systems, but they don't want to know what we think? They just want us to shut up and assume they will know what irritates us? Because if thats the case, I'll make sure to keep my mouth shut about it, that way MS can go on doing stupid things because I don't want to hurt their feelings.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: stash

These are bugs. There are things that should not prompt for consent, deleting an item from the desktop being an obvious one. The UAC team is very interested in getting feedback on these issues. Please file bugs.

A bug is a crash, memory leak, BSOD, unstable, non-working feature etc. It asking me for consent for silly things is a design flaw - both need similar attention, and I have indeed given my feedback to them about it, but I wouldn't call it a bug, just overprotective design.

There's no UAC prompt for changing the resolution.

I'm not on vista right now, just using that as a typical example of the inane things UAC wasn't assurance I REALLY want to do - deleting an item from the desktop is an even better example.

It might not do you any good, until the next Sony rootkit comes along. It will be on by default at RTM.

I've been using PCs for years, and I've never had a SERIOUS problem with malware, because I know what not to do, and no one uses my PC but me. I understand this isn't the case for most people, and I think it's a step in the right direction, but they stepped way too far, I think even for the average non-literate user. They are going to be bombarded by dialogs for silly things, and possibly think theyre doing something wrong. It's a case of crying wolf - it keeps nagging for such little things, when something serious happens, they'll have long learned to ignore the dialog.

LOL, this is a basic change?! How do you determine if an action is being taken by a user or by a program? How can you tell if what you think is a user making a change is not malware spoofing this action? That is not a trivial problem to solve at all.

How about monitoring mouse/keyboard input, for starters? If a firewall can tell whether or not I requested something, or a popup blocker can figure out whether I asked for that window to pop-up, why is this so hard to do? It doesn't have to be perfect.

Again, how do you make the distinction between malware doing something it shouldn't and a user doing something they shouldn't?

See above.

 

[CaptnKirk]

Originally posted by: BD2003

It's a beta?!? Really? I didn't know that! So they gave it as a preview to the world to see what we thought about it, and how it runs on our systems, but they don't want to know what we think? They just want us to shut up and assume they will know what irritates us? Because if thats the case, I'll make sure to keep my mouth shut about it, that way MS can go on doing stupid things because I don't want to hurt their feelings.

Yes, even arrogant bone-heads get to use the Beta, and the bugs will get fixed
even as some cry about it not being made exclusively for their egos.

Then there's the subject of 'Constructive Critisim', and realizing that the 'average' computer user is not always a techno-geek.

However, as Beta progresses, the little 'bugs' will be worked out, as somwhat over 5 million 'Beta Testors'
are exposing the weaknesses & the strengths of this operating system, each malfunction making progress toward the next level . . .

RC-1 should be much nicer.


I have Windows Defender, Ad-Aware, SpyBot, Avast! & CA eTrust all runing on my system -
and have yet to have any one of these discover it's first 'gottcha'.
(of course every lap around the track ends up slamming into the wall)

 

[stash]

I'm not on vista right now, just using that as a typical example of the inane things UAC wasn't assurance I REALLY want to do - deleting an item from the desktop is an even better example.

An example which has been fixed post beta2.

If a firewall can tell whether or not I requested something, or a popup blocker can figure out whether I asked for that window to pop-up, why is this so hard to do? It doesn't have to be perfect.

A firewall can distinguish between a user requesting something and a program requesting something? Really? Even a layer-7 FW like ISA can't make that distinction.

Since when does a pop-up blocker figure out if you specifically asked for a particular action? It blocks pop-ups based on certain characteristics and settings that you make (exceptions, temporary disabling, etc). But those settings can also be made programatically, by (you guessed it!) malware.

 

[stash]

I have received feed-back from the Microsoft error report analysis group that a future release
will contain fixes isolated from my inputs to resolve these discrepancies.

Cool, thanks.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: CaptnKirk

Originally posted by: BD2003

It's a beta?!? Really? I didn't know that! So they gave it as a preview to the world to see what we thought about it, and how it runs on our systems, but they don't want to know what we think? They just want us to shut up and assume they will know what irritates us? Because if thats the case, I'll make sure to keep my mouth shut about it, that way MS can go on doing stupid things because I don't want to hurt their feelings.

Yes, even arrogant bone-heads get to use the Beta, and the bugs will get fixed
even as some cry about it not being made exclusively for their egos.

Then there's the subject of 'Constructive Critisim', and realizing that the 'average' computer user is not always a techno-geek.

However, as Beta progresses, the little 'bugs' will be worked out, as somwhat over 5 million 'Beta Testors'
are exposing the weaknesses & the strengths of this operating system, each malfunction making progress toward the next level . . .

RC-1 should be much nicer.

I have Windows Defender, Ad-Aware, SpyBot, Avast! & CA eTrust all runing on my system -
and have yet to have any one of these discover it's first 'gottcha'.
(of course every lap around the track ends up slamming into the wall)

And you say all this as if it's something that I'm not completely, entirely, and utterly aware of.

*Bugs* in a beta are assumed to be there. But betas, by defintion, should be feature complete. When UAC asks me whether or not I REALLY want to delete that icon, that had to have been explicity tagged by the programmers as something to keep track of and warn users of. Hence - its a feature, not a bug.

Constructive criticism is targeted at the people who make it, this forum is for experiences. Which is why I sent my opinions directly to MS, and save the extra whining for here.

Besides, it's not as if I'm just saying this sucks, and that sucks. I think UAC is a good idea, but is overbearing, so I suggested ways to change it. In return, I get told how the people who designed the most complicated OS in history can't figure out a simple way to figure out whether or not a user actually prompted a certain action.

I realize the average user is not a techno-geek. But what MS is doing is making vista easier to use for the "average-user", at the cost of creating nuisance for the power users. UAC's heart is in the right place, but now we get to choose between super-nanny and utter freedom - it needs a middle ground, and given that UAC is the most universally panned feature of the OS, I'd expect (or rather, hope) that it will change for the better by the time RC1 comes out.

 

[BD2003]

An example which has been fixed post beta2.

Bravo - then there is some hope I won't be coddled to death by the OS nanny.

A firewall can distinguish between a user requesting something and a program requesting something? Really? Even a layer-7 FW like ISA can't make that distinction.

No, but it can make the distinction between what your PC requested and what it didnt. Bad example I admit - the pop up blocker is a better example.

Since when does a pop-up blocker figure out if you specifically asked for a particular action? It blocks pop-ups based on certain characteristics and settings that you make (exceptions, temporary disabling, etc). But those settings can also be made programatically, by (you guessed it!) malware.

Since I've ever started using the pop-up blocker in opera (I assume the others work the same way) that gives me the option to let through only pop-ups that I specifically request? I have yet to see a pop-up that wasn't created except by my explicit clicking on a link ever since then. I don't know what kind of magic is in that program, but my guess is it *gasp* only shows pop-ups from links that were clicked on?

Sure, pop-ups can be made programatically, but those are magically blocked. I suppose a good enough malware could fake mouse clicking, etc, but that is no reason to not put that simple protection there in the first place. Similar to how that irritating copy protection prevents casual people from copying games, which is still useful, even though its a piece of cake for the professional pirates to get around it. It doesn't have to be perfect to be useful.

 

[stash]

Sure, pop-ups can be made programatically, but those are magically blocked. I suppose a good enough malware could fake mouse clicking, etc, but that is no reason to not put that simple protection there in the first place.

I was actually thinking about malware programatically adding sites to your pop-up blocker's list of exempted sites.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: stash

Sure, pop-ups can be made programatically, but those are magically blocked. I suppose a good enough malware could fake mouse clicking, etc, but that is no reason to not put that simple protection there in the first place.

I was actually thinking about malware programatically adding sites to your pop-up blocker's list of exempted sites.

Which is a clear case of yet another thing that should be checked for mouse/keyboard input.

 

[stash]

Which is a clear case of yet another thing that should be checked for mouse/keyboard input.

What if you WANT to programatically add these settings, ie, with Group Policy? Or even some script you write yourself. You could probably say that if Group Policy does it, it's trusted, but what if you just write a logon script or something to do this? How does the system distinguish this from malware?

 

[RobertR1]

Anytips of how to fix the bootmanager?

Here's my scenario:
2HDD's
1 with 2 partitions, XP Pro and Vista
2nd just for data
Tried to go into XP pro and it said ntldr is missing (it's not, you can see it in explorer, in vista)
Tried a software called Vista Boot Pro and it totally f'ed everything up
Ran the boot system recovery before the Vista install off the DVD and it hacked it together to make it work so it can boot into vista.

What procedures do I need to reset everything so that I can go into Vista and XP? Also, when I have the 2nd hard drive connected it keeps installing bootmanager onto it and controls off that. I'm enjoying Vista itself a lot but this is a mess right now. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Eug]

Video: MacBook running Windows Vista with Aero Glass (960x540 Quicktime H.264)

(Check my sig if you want a smaller version of the video.)

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: stash

Which is a clear case of yet another thing that should be checked for mouse/keyboard input.

What if you WANT to programatically add these settings, ie, with Group Policy? Or even some script you write yourself. You could probably say that if Group Policy does it, it's trusted, but what if you just write a logon script or something to do this? How does the system distinguish this from malware?

The same way you do it with your firewall, or when your palm tries to sync with outlook - you specifically allow the program to make those changes for a period of time or indefinitely.

Which is not likely to crop up very often, and considering that, it wouldn't be much of a nag. But after direct user input on an administrator account, it shouldn't coddle you like that.

Windows:"Are you SURE you want to allow this seemingly innocuous but possibly dangerous if you have no idea what youre doing action?"
Me: I'm an administrator, and I clicked it didn't I?

It should be as simple as that.

Don't get me wrong, I know where youre coming from. One can come up with a million situations where so and so program will do this, but if the solution is to irritate me *just in case*, I'd rather not be irritated at all. I could appreciate a windows defender-like popup that lets me know something funny just happened, and giving me the option to undo it or ignore it, but to be constantly asked otherwise simple things, is just way too much. If I have to choose between absolute idiot-proof security that is annoying as hell, or a complete free for all that leaves me alone, Ill take my chances.

 

[stash]

Which is not likely to crop up very often, and considering that, it wouldn't be much of a nag. But after direct user input on an administrator account, it shouldn't coddle you like that.

Windows:"Are you SURE you want to allow this seemingly innocuous but possibly dangerous if you have no idea what youre doing action?"
Me: I'm an administrator, and I clicked it didn't I?

It should be as simple as that.

Ah, but not all users are savvy enough to make those sorts of decisions on their own. However, most of those users will still continue to be in the admins group by default.

UAC is the beginning of a shift from the way things have always been in Windows with regards to access. The goal is to move everyone away from running as administrators. With such an enormous user base and overall 'ecosystem,' this is not something Microsoft can just flip on. The transition will probably be bumpy, but over the years, I think everyone will benefit.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: stash

Which is not likely to crop up very often, and considering that, it wouldn't be much of a nag. But after direct user input on an administrator account, it shouldn't coddle you like that.

Windows:"Are you SURE you want to allow this seemingly innocuous but possibly dangerous if you have no idea what youre doing action?"
Me: I'm an administrator, and I clicked it didn't I?

It should be as simple as that.

Ah, but not all users are savvy enough to make those sorts of decisions on their own. However, most of those users will still continue to be in the admins group by default.

UAC is the beginning of a shift from the way things have always been in Windows with regards to access. The goal is to move everyone away from running as administrators. With such an enormous user base and overall 'ecosystem,' this is not something Microsoft can just flip on. The transition will probably be bumpy, but over the years, I think everyone will benefit.

I really don't think that the average user is as naive as microsoft is assuming. Maybe 30% of people have NO IDEA wtf theyre doing, 50% have some idea, and the other 10% don't need to be coddled. People can be duly warned upon install/startup, in the same way that windows xp warns me not to open up c:\windows\ the first time I try.

Besides, we've all been using windows XP for years - its not as if many people are going to have vista be their very first computing experience. The AT Review hit it on the head:

Ultimately, UAC is a huge part of the new security systems within Vista, and even if it isn't perfectly streamlined by release, it will be much better for virtually all users to have it enabled and slightly bothered by it, rather than being in the open. If too many users end up turning off UAC, it can create a chicken/egg situation where application developers will not bother to make their programs work without administrative powers (just like today), and where Vista is left with much of the same security mess that XP has today.

Right now, its WELL past the point of acceptability. I agree that this is a shift that is in general a good thing, and a long time coming - we'll know by RC1.

Other than that essentially non-issue for most of us here (I'm running in admin 24/7 with it off unless they REALLY clean UAC up), I'm getting slowly more used to it, but I'm still not a very big fan of the new explorer interface. I'm hoping MS puts out some decent powertoys to make up for some of the weirdness. Most annoying to me is the move away from customizability - I don't care if they change up explorer or any other program as long as they let me change it back, but right now its the new MS way or the highway.

I'm sure for every useless feature (Flip3d), there will be a similar program not very long behind that can do it right where MS does it wrong.