Anyone jumped on the Vista bandwagon yet?

[2uk]

I am reasearching this , but this looks like some hack that depends on having admin rights , which if an attacker already has.... the rest doesn't really matter.

You reckon? - http://www.alex-ionescu.com/?p=34

Less than 2 months after release and Vista's so-called protected processes have been cracked. In other words, new malware could effectively masquerade as being digitally signed by Microsoft. Nice...

[Sysman]

Here's a little light reading:

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut00...ista_cost.html

[Kyajae]

Here's a little light reading:

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut00...ista_cost.html

Quite a useful article. Many thanks.

[interested]

Here's my experience:

A mate bought a Toshiba laptop with Vista Home Premium on it, and found his 1.5 year old HP colour laserjet wouldn't work - and never will because HP are too fecking lazy to write new drivers/want you to buy a new printer. Also the UAC thing is unbelievably annoying and you end up turning it off after a while, thus drastically reducing your security. Thirdly - Windows Explorer is now much more complex, and I found it to be pretty useless because it never seems to remember your default views, or the ones you change to. The search function is still crap compared to Google Desktop or Spotlight on the Mac. Windows Explorer and IE7 also seem to crash a lot, far more so than on XP. Fourthly there is a problem with Windows Live Messenger conflicting somehow, I never got to the bottom of it as it wasn't a high priority. Fifth - finding drivers for other hardware (Skype phones) etc was a time consuming process, I wasted about half a day doing it. Sixth - the bells and whistles really aren't worth it - in my opinion someone at MS has just said 'make it look like OSX' and did a very bad job of copying the look/features. Seventh - it actually seems slower compared to XP, and the laptop had 1GB of RAM and a Core 2 Duo processor - certainly 'Vista Ready'. Eight - for some reason the wireless connection kept dropping after waking up from sleep/hibernate mode.

I then thought about running XP in a VM so he could use the printer, but you can't run the more basic versions of Vista in a Virtual PC VM, you have to have Vista Ultimate I think.

In the end I booted off a XP CD, installed that, and got rid of Vista completely - and then spent another half a day twatting about installing XP drivers from the Toshiba website (from other laptop models, as Toshiba don't provide XP drivers for laptops they sell with Vista pre-installed)

So - a complete waste of my time for an OS that made my friend's computing experience a whole lot worse than XP. I'm also aware that in the corporate world there is no compelling business case to upgrade to Vista. The head of Intel said as much recently; and I don't know of many Vista roll-outs going on at the moment.

I'd also advise looking at www.windowsvista.co.uk - in fact I've just had a look and what's interesting is there used to be a forum which was full of comments about how crap Vista is and people having all sorts of problems. Looks like Microsoft have removed or hiddden the forum!

Also - have a butchers at the reviews on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk

[Joe Black]

In response to interested's post here's my experience, having upgraded my laptop a few weeks back.

1) Almost everything I've plugged in has PnP'd and worked perfectly. Only problem so far has been with graphics drivers. nVidia certainly don't seem to have been up to speed on these. The current one installed, and even the Vista supplied one, though haven't shown any problems.
2) Yep, the UAC can be bloody annoying. Turned it off for the most part while getting everything [re]installed. Not such a big problem now though as I don't install/change things that often. A plus side for me though is the group policies for hardware.
3) Find Explorer easier to use, more useful, have had no problems with settings, crashes, anything. Same with IE7.
4) Don't use Messenger so can't comment there.
5) Can't comment on Skype phones, but otherwise no hardware/driver problems.
6) For some people, depending on their hardware, budgets, upgrade plans etc paying perhaps £200 for Vista might not be worth it. For me though I've found it much more productive, and easier to use than XP.
7) Hard to compare to my previous laptop since it was on it's last legs anyway. Still, on a set of performance tests against a colleague at work with a similar spec'd XP machine I equalled or beat him on most of the tests except graphics. Only difference between us is he has 256MB graphics, me 128MB, but I have 2GB RAM against his 1GB for all the other stuff.
8) No prob's with wireless LAN, Bluetooth or otherwise.

Wouldn't at all suggest it though for a corporate rollout at this point (obviously), but for my personal use I'm so far more than happy, certainly with the Ultimate version. Not sure if I'd recommend the other ones though...

[cojak]

for my personal use I'm so far more than happy, certainly with the Ultimate version. Not sure if I'd recommend the other ones though...

And here we come to the nub of the Vista debate.

If you want Vista, get yeself the Ultimate version only - nothing else will work properly...

[darmstadt]

I'm currently testing a new software product for a large software company and although most customer will be running in on 2003 and XP, corporate policy is to also allow it to run on Vista. I got a copy of Business 32 bit (also have a 64 bit) to install. I first installed it on a T60p (2gb memory and core duo) and had no problems with it whatsoever. The only problem I have is with ooRexx and this is due to how Vista works:

The RexxAPIManager and the RexxAPIService run in two separate processes and communicate through memory mapped files. Vista implements Windows Integrity Control (WIC) which says in essence that in order for an object to act on another object it must have an integrity level greater or equal to that object.

In Vista most if not all services run with an integrity level of System, which is the highest. All users run at an integrity level lower than that, even Administrators.

3 of the memory mapped files that RxAPI uses were created unnamed. Access was being gained to them by doing an OpenProcess and DuplicateHandle. Since the process being opened was running at System integrity level, even the full blown Administrator account was denied access on the OpenProcess call. (Administrator runs at High integrity level.) Therefore, RxAPI was never started, which in turn prevented any external functions from being registered.

The fix is to create all memory mapped files as named memory mapped files. This allows access to them through OpenFileMapping and is the procedure that Microsoft recommends for inter-process communication involving services in Vista.

The actual product, for me at least, works perfectly fine although my collegue is having some serious problems.

I have also installed it on a T40 but under VMWare with only 768mb and its fine but you don't get the Aero interface and its a bit slow. I have now just finished installing it under VMWare on Linux with 768mb and thats fine as well.

[Ardesco]

Running it on my laptop and no real problems. Takes a hefty memory charge (never below 50% and I have 1Gb ram in this little beasty) but I've had no problems yet. It installed with no issues and updated with no issues and hasn't crashed on me once yet.

As for the wireless issue (wireless unavailable after going into sleep) i used to get that on XP too.
If you go into Device Manager -> Nework Adaptors -> <wireless network adaptor> -> Properties -> Power Management you can uncheck the check box that allows windows to turn off your wireless nick to save power. I have done that but not gone into sleep and out again to see if it works yet.

[xoggoth]

Got it. Early days but seems ok, plug and play all very easy, not had to use a CD to install any h/w yet. Not had any s/w not able to work yet but have had to download some service packs/upgrades.

Installed Visual studio 2005, bleedin' ell, have to download 480Mb service pack followed by 50mb service pack upgrade to work with Vista! Thank de lawd for broadband.