Still, the Administrator ought to at least have access to that kind of thing. It's not like earlier versions of Windows where you're the admin by default when you install the OS.
So i just cleared a few hours to install vista. Backed up all my stuff to another partion, downloaded latest service pack, firefox, video drivers etc. bunged the dvd in the drive and rebooted.
Press any key to boot from CD..
i get the 'windows is loading files' bar fill up, then onto the little scroll bar with the (c) Microsoft Corporation screen, then it opens up into what looks like it'll be the first installation screen. Pretty looking vista wallpaper background and i get the arrow/hourglass mouse pointer for a few seconds. And then.. nothing. I get the regular mouse pointer, and it feels like at this point i should get my first dialog box to start clicking through the instalation process. But literally nothing happens. I left it ten minutes and absolutely nothing happened, just a pretty wallpaper and a mouse pointer.
So i just cleared a few hours to install vista. Backed up all my stuff to another partion, downloaded latest service pack, firefox, video drivers etc. bunged the dvd in the drive and rebooted.
Press any key to boot from CD..
i get the 'windows is loading files' bar fill up, then onto the little scroll bar with the (c) Microsoft Corporation screen, then it opens up into what looks like it'll be the first installation screen. Pretty looking vista wallpaper background and i get the arrow/hourglass mouse pointer for a few seconds. And then.. nothing. I get the regular mouse pointer, and it feels like at this point i should get my first dialog box to start clicking through the instalation process. But literally nothing happens. I left it ten minutes and absolutely nothing happened, just a pretty wallpaper and a mouse pointer.
Leave it more than ten minutes. Some rigs it goes through really quick, others take like twenty minutes to bring up the dialog box(es) sometimes. I've had it happen. Alternatively you might have a dodgy DVD.
FYI, if your Vista disc doesn't have SP1 built in run windows update before installing SP1. There are a few issues that could cause you some major headaches. If it shows SP1 automatically then you can just run your update.
Actually SP1 will show up in Windows Update if it's compatible with your system. If it's not it won't, so there's no reason to get it manually from anywhere.
Poor sentence structure from being tired FTW. Yeah that's a much better way of explaining it. I try to warn people about this do to some of the problems I've run into. I built a PC for my sister with a supposedly "Vista Compatible" Intel mobo that wasn't so compatible. Thanks Intel for an extra 45 minutes of headaches to get it updated properly.
Not even close. There are major under the hood changes. Vista doesn't even use the same kernel or code base as XP. Pre SP1 Vista used the Server 2003 Kernel. Vista SP1 uses the same kernel & code base as Server 2008. Which is also what Windows7 is currently being built with.
EDIT: Those recent security problems that were supposedly going to destory Vista. Yeah not much at all.
Not even close. There are major under the hood changes. Vista doesn't even use the same kernel or code base as XP. Pre SP1 Vista used the Server 2003 Kernel. Vista SP1 uses the same kernel & code base as Server 2008. Which is also what Windows7 is currently being built with.
EDIT: Those recent security problems that were supposedly going to destory Vista. Yeah not much at all.
I am one of the authors of the paper referenced in the post above. First of all, I'd like to apologize for the sensationalism of the press coverage. Most of the articles about our work are completely inaccurate and full of ridiculous statements. Mark and I had nothing to do with these articles and were not contacted by their authors.
...
Our research is focused only on browsers. The protection mechanisms in Vista are still effective at preventing the exploitation of vulnerabilities in server processes, which is why I believe that Vista is still more secure than any previous version of Windows.
It may indeed be a Big Deal, but it shouldn't be the reason to stay with XP instead of moving to Vista.
Is there any exploit code or proof of concept code available yet for the techniques you describe?
Well, we only gave the paper last week, so I doubt that anyone is using any of these techniques right now. What we presented is weaknesses in the protection mechanism. It still requires the attacker to have a vulnerability. Without the presence of a vulnerability these techniques don’t really [accomplish] anything. We used the ANI cursor vulnerability that had been patched. We chose this example because it worked on XP and Vista, but the example we used would not work [in the real world] because this issue was patched already.
Do you have any advice for Windows users today? Should they be alarmed?
As long as they follow standard security practices — use antivirus products and other typical things that are good standard policy — they shouldn’t have anything to worry about. Our research is to some extent academic. The articles that describe Vista security as “broken” or “done for,” with “unfixable vulnerabilities” are completely inaccurate. One of the suggestions I saw in many of the discussions was that people should just use Windows XP. In fact, in XP a lot of those protections we’re bypassing don’t even exist. XP is even less secure than Vista in this respect. What we established is that the security advantage of Vista over XP is not as great as [previously] thought. Vista is still very good at preventing vulnerabilities.
Not trying to do it in Vista but in a pre-installed XP so I can dual boot without having to wipe a harddrive. Is this possible?
Not with Vista. You'll need to repartiton the hard drive before installing Vista. Either get a copy of Partition Magic or do like LaCabra said and use Acronis Partition Manager, which I believe is free.
Anyway, I can't say I'm a fan of Vista... there are just a lot of little things that shit me... there's one kind of big thing I guess... Aero. Honestly, am I the only one here who thinks it's hideous?
Hah, probably.
For the life of me, I cannot patch my uxtheme.dll in Vista or either of the other two .dll's in system32 that require replacement. The OS simply will not let me, even after I manually enabled the Administrator account and logged into that. "Permission denied." Now, this would bug me, were Aero not so pleasing.
For me, I had to reboot into my Vista disc to replace them because they were in use while the OS was running. If you do have a Vista disc, you should be able to boot into it and go into its recovery options. You can open a Command Prompt from there and replace the files that way. Make sure that you have backups, though. I've screwed up XP and Vista plenty of times doing customisation and I quickly learnt that you need to back up the system files if you're going to bugger about with them.
That said, once buggered around with, they're fine.
Just noticed these posts about having trouble patching these system files... There is actually a very simple, one-click + reboot solution to this: Vistaglazz (scroll down and download the beta if you're using SP1).
As for Aero being ugly, well I tend to agree somewhat. Most elements of the default visual style are nice, but the damned blue/purple menu+toolbar background color really is hideous. I also don't like that so many parts of it are oversized. Whitespace is ok, but only up to a certain point. Thankfully there's a few replacements that fixes both of my complaints
You know you can change the colour of the glass really easily, right? Unless you're actually talking about the default non-transparent toolbar you get in Firefox and stuff.
You know you can change the colour of the glass really easily, right? Unless you're actually talking about the default non-transparent toolbar you get in Firefox and stuff.
Yeah, I'm talking about the non-transparent ones which you can't do anything about outside of replacing/editing the visual style. I don't have any problems with the glass borders (well besides the size they take up).
Not trying to do it in Vista but in a pre-installed XP so I can dual boot without having to wipe a harddrive. Is this possible?
Not with Vista. You'll need to repartiton the hard drive before installing Vista. Either get a copy of Partition Magic or do like LaCabra said and use Acronis Partition Manager, which I believe is free.
Vista has a partition resizer on the DVD. Its not a great one. Its command line driven. But its there and you can boot up the install DVD and run it right before you click "install". There are a shitload of tutorials out there on the net telling different ways to do it, and you can probably come up with a better one if you read a little documentation for 5 minutes.
Posts
Still, the Administrator ought to at least have access to that kind of thing. It's not like earlier versions of Windows where you're the admin by default when you install the OS.
Press any key to boot from CD..
i get the 'windows is loading files' bar fill up, then onto the little scroll bar with the (c) Microsoft Corporation screen, then it opens up into what looks like it'll be the first installation screen. Pretty looking vista wallpaper background and i get the arrow/hourglass mouse pointer for a few seconds. And then.. nothing. I get the regular mouse pointer, and it feels like at this point i should get my first dialog box to start clicking through the instalation process. But literally nothing happens. I left it ten minutes and absolutely nothing happened, just a pretty wallpaper and a mouse pointer.
Thoughts ?
I'd just like to note that Bruce Schneier, the Chuck Norris of security, has seem that article and still seems fairly convinced that this is A Big Deal.
From the comments of your link:
It may indeed be a Big Deal, but it shouldn't be the reason to stay with XP instead of moving to Vista.
edit: more from Sotirov. (from Ed Bott's blog)
I want to dualboot vista and XP on a machine with XP installed and I don't want to lose that data just yet.
Not with Vista. You'll need to repartiton the hard drive before installing Vista. Either get a copy of Partition Magic or do like LaCabra said and use Acronis Partition Manager, which I believe is free.
Just noticed these posts about having trouble patching these system files... There is actually a very simple, one-click + reboot solution to this: Vistaglazz (scroll down and download the beta if you're using SP1).
As for Aero being ugly, well I tend to agree somewhat. Most elements of the default visual style are nice, but the damned blue/purple menu+toolbar background color really is hideous. I also don't like that so many parts of it are oversized. Whitespace is ok, but only up to a certain point. Thankfully there's a few replacements that fixes both of my complaints
Yeah, I'm talking about the non-transparent ones which you can't do anything about outside of replacing/editing the visual style. I don't have any problems with the glass borders (well besides the size they take up).