13th July 2010, 10:44 AM
I was with ya until you said you stuck with ME over XP :D. Backwards compatibility is one thing, and to me a kind of important one, but there's plenty of solutions that don't involve sticking with an OS that no modern browser except Opera supports.
I wasn't "finding it unacceptable", I was defending your choice to stick with Vista rather than spending a mint on what might have ended up an unnecessary upgrade for you. If you really want to upgrade, go for it. For me, 7 is a big upgrade over XP and worth it, but very small over Vista, and mostly an image re branding for MS (which has worked surprisingly well, that Mohave project was right).
http://www.petri.co.il/disable_uac_in_windows_vista.htm
Go here to find out how to shut off UAC in Vista. Running without it is less secure, but still far more secure than XP as I've said. It's got much better "sandboxing" for things like browsers just to name one example (all of these features were inherited by 7, not invented in it). Oh, in 7 they made it less annoying by making it less effective. Still, you can raise the UAC to Vista levels if you want that security (7 does "learn" behavior better and quicker though, so it only stays annoying for a while). Again, OSX actually has been doing the same thing for years now, plus the added requirement to type in a password every single time which Vista/7 doesn't do.
Install AVG or MSE as your antivirus. Don't touch Norton. It has sucked for years now and still does.
Install the latest service pack and any available patches for Vista you can find. Make sure to enable "other products" in the Windows Update program. (It should be enabled by default if you ask me, but I guess it's paranoid antitrust action even if "other products" just means "other Microsoft products".)
Vista should work much better after that. Trust me though, if you're upgrading to 7 to get away from anything other than the UAC annoyances, you may be sorely disappointed. Walk into a store and try out Windows 7 for a bit. It's nice, but you may notice above all else that the experience is basically the same. Then you can decide if you want to upgrade. For myself, I found that 7's weird way of managing taskbar processes was too annoying, so I reverted it back to the old behavior (I just don't like the odd way it combines both the shortcut and the actual running instance of a program into the same "button".)
I wasn't "finding it unacceptable", I was defending your choice to stick with Vista rather than spending a mint on what might have ended up an unnecessary upgrade for you. If you really want to upgrade, go for it. For me, 7 is a big upgrade over XP and worth it, but very small over Vista, and mostly an image re branding for MS (which has worked surprisingly well, that Mohave project was right).
http://www.petri.co.il/disable_uac_in_windows_vista.htm
Go here to find out how to shut off UAC in Vista. Running without it is less secure, but still far more secure than XP as I've said. It's got much better "sandboxing" for things like browsers just to name one example (all of these features were inherited by 7, not invented in it). Oh, in 7 they made it less annoying by making it less effective. Still, you can raise the UAC to Vista levels if you want that security (7 does "learn" behavior better and quicker though, so it only stays annoying for a while). Again, OSX actually has been doing the same thing for years now, plus the added requirement to type in a password every single time which Vista/7 doesn't do.
Install AVG or MSE as your antivirus. Don't touch Norton. It has sucked for years now and still does.
Install the latest service pack and any available patches for Vista you can find. Make sure to enable "other products" in the Windows Update program. (It should be enabled by default if you ask me, but I guess it's paranoid antitrust action even if "other products" just means "other Microsoft products".)
Vista should work much better after that. Trust me though, if you're upgrading to 7 to get away from anything other than the UAC annoyances, you may be sorely disappointed. Walk into a store and try out Windows 7 for a bit. It's nice, but you may notice above all else that the experience is basically the same. Then you can decide if you want to upgrade. For myself, I found that 7's weird way of managing taskbar processes was too annoying, so I reverted it back to the old behavior (I just don't like the odd way it combines both the shortcut and the actual running instance of a program into the same "button".)
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)