opinions on vista

[ChrisF]

Switching off Indexing Server might help with the disk thrashing. But also SP1 will fix a lot of these problems, apparently.

[Lyris]

I also had the disk thrashing and it was enough to nearly put me off.

Go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Services, and turn off SuperFetch and Windows Search. That fixed it for me.

Personally, I really like Vista, even if it's just superficially. The main reason I use it is because I'm sure it's faster than XP on my Core 2 Duo (2.4ghz), even if it just "feels faster". You can turn the annoying nannying features off and I've not had any major compatibility problems. It's worth it for the 50 pounds I paid but I wouldn't pay much more than that.

[Hohum]

Superfetch retrieves your most commonly used files at startup and caches them into RAM, hence the hard disk activity for a few minutes after boot. Turning it off obviously prevents the activity, however you lose one of the major speed benefits in doing so.

[SubparMario]

The Aero interface is nasty - mostly unnecessary and tacky dressing for the sake of it.

[Number45]

Control Panel->User Accounts and disable User Account Control! Though the basic idea of ensuring nothing can execute without user authorisation is a good one in theory.

You're a star! It obviously hadn't annoyed me enough for me to work out how to stop it, but I'm happy now that I can break my system with gay abandon.

[Lyris]

What I don't understand about that "Are you sure you want to run this program" thing is: why didn't Microsoft just develop some sort of "handshaking" technology that would authenticate mouse clicks (or keyboard presses) so the operating system could make sure they were coming from the user's mouse/keyboard rather than from some undesirable program?

Sure, it'd only work on new supported hardware, but wouldn't it solve the problem?

[Number45]

It's not to prevent someone from hijacking the machine, it's more to stop the user from doing something that they might regret. Think of it in the same way as the elevated privileges 'sudo' mechanism from Ubuntu. Assuming you know what that is.

[Lyris]

I've not used Ubuntu for too long, so I don't... but wow, that really is dumb! Glad we can turn it off.