Driver Update Can Cause Vista Deactivation 875
KrispySausage writes "After weeks of grueling troubleshooting, I've finally had it confirmed by Microsoft Australia and USA — something as small as swapping the video card or updating a device driver can trigger a total Vista deactivation.
Put simply, your copy of Windows will stop working with very little notice (three days) and your PC will go into "reduced functionality" mode, where you can't do anything but use the web browser for half an hour."
I've already experienced this... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Fool me once..... (Score:4, Informative)
Cost of Vista's copy protection (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html [auckland.ac.nz]
It's all about the DRM.
Re:I've already experienced this... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Steve Jobs... (Score:3, Informative)
You are right, if you mean by "most" Macs you are talking about the iMac and those aimed at non-professionals, non-IT, etc. But if you want to compare apples to apples then the PC tower form factor Mac has equivalent (if not more) upgradability than it's PC equivalent.
IIRC the Mac towers since the G5 have been designed to more easilly swap out memroy, slot parts, and hard drives as well as provide better air flow than ATX and similar PC equivalent form factors.
http://www.apple.com/macpro/expansion.html [apple.com]
And a quick Google for "mac video card upgrades" yielded much evidence that upgardes exist:
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/accelerators/ATI-Videocards [macsales.com]
http://ati.amd.com/products/Radeon9600/Radeon9600propcmac/index.html [amd.com]
Re:Steve Jobs... (Score:2, Informative)
For those who DO want a choice (Score:3, Informative)
Just try it.
Re:Pirated version? (Score:5, Informative)
"They" really like it if you make that mistake, but there is a big difference between the two.
How could MS not know this? (Score:3, Informative)
The problem with using device drivers as the basis for activation information is that a change in the driver model which has the result of changing the way that the hardware information is reported back to Windows can be enough to register as a physical hardware change.
How could MS not know that would happen? It's like they just got into the computer business last year, but they act like it sometimes.
What a headache for admins. I just can't believe companies take this kind of treatment from a vendor when there are really good alternatives available.
Re:Cost of Vista's copy protection (Score:1, Informative)
No, it has not been "debunked". It has been challenged by interested, and none-too-scrupulous, parties, who were not qualified to comment in the first place and who had nothing of much relevance to say. You can read about that here:
http://www.cypherpunks.to/~peter/zdnet.txt [cypherpunks.to]
Re:Timing (Score:3, Informative)
At least Vista will (temporarily ;) run in a VM (if you have the right version anyway).
Glass houses and stones, my friend.
Re:Fool me once..... (Score:5, Informative)
Programs that were at one time affected: Adobe Reader Install Blackberry Sync LogMeIn.com Client Cisco VPN Client
Those are just the ones I come in contact in my job. I work for a Mortgage company and I can tell you that we may never use Vista. Hopefully we can hold on to XP long enough for Microsoft to pull it's head out of its ass.
Re:Fool me once..... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Fool me once..... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm also a developer who has had to port apps from XP to Vista, and trust me, the GP is right, it's a nightmare. Most of the problems stem from the "improved" security. Vista locks down certain parts of the system pretty hard (e.g. the registry), in theory to block malware, but they wound up taking out (I'm guessing) about 75% of commercial apps along with it. Just for example, under XP, most application operations that require elevated privileges (e.g. writing to Program Files) will simply work if the application is being run by an admin. Under Vista, the OS will block the operation until the admin approves it, even though the admin is already running the app. That might be OK if it were handled transparently, but the application has to be rewritten to handle this case explicitly.
Any substantial commercial XP application that has been around for any significant amount of time will almost certainly run into problems under Vista. Perhaps in theory a 100% perfectly well behaved Windows application that doesn't do one thing even slightly wrong anywhere might have a chance of working immediately under Vista, but how many real world applications are 100% perfect?
And one of those choices (Score:4, Informative)
If MS doesn't like it, they can try not selling their software. They have choices.
Re:Bunk (Score:2, Informative)
Re:biggest mistake ms ever made (Score:4, Informative)
Untrustworthy Computing (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I've already experienced this... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Fool me once..... (Score:5, Informative)
While technically "Documents and Settings" doesn't exist anymore (user profiles are in C:\Users, which is amazingly easy type given typical MS paths), they put a (hidden) link at C:\Documents and Settings that points to C:\Users so that programs of this nature won't break. Whether they should have done that or not is another topic.
In response to the GP, basically anything that is security related could potentially need to be rewritten. A lot of this stems from the fact that, by default in XP all users were Admins (yes, not secure...but that is how it is/was). In Vista, even if you are an Admin you don't have full admin rights without jumping through hoops.
For example, the application that I work on sometimes needs to spawn a child process that requires full admin privileges (the app itself can run as a normal user). In previous versions, we were calling CreateProcess() to start it, and redirecting standard output to retrieve the results of the child process. However, for whatever reason, you can't use CreateProcess() to start a child process with higher rights than the original process - that doesn't trigger the consent (Allow or Deny) dialog. You need to use ShellExecute() for this, which (helpfully) doesn't allow you to redirect standard output.
This is just one example of the many small, annoying "features" we had to work around in order to correctly work on Vista.
XP - Vista is worse than 95 - Vista for apps. (Score:3, Informative)
Registry reflections, file system reflections, DLL reflections/manifests (and other manifestations) are just a tip of the ice-berg. Instead of locking down an administrative account and using a user to run things that then sudo (or whatever) to Admin to install, Windows' admin doesn't have admin rights - you have to jumps hoops though the UAC (or whatever it is called).
If you ever want to run Custom Actions in an MSI installer that was created with Visual Studio 2005, sorry, you are *out of luck*. The new flags to allow admin custom actions are not supported by VS2005 even with Vista update for it. You have to dick around the MSI files with Orca.
And let's not forget the last 3 days of me running around the forums trying to figure out why a MS supplied runtime does not install with their own installer on Vista. Turns out some "security" update or SDK update or whatever, broke the installers...
Oh, but the Windows 95 apps run fine. The designed for XP or 2000, with people running the apps as normal users in mind type of applications, are the ones that are fscked up.
The hellish experience of Vista is even worse for developers (Visual Studio was not even recommended to be run on Vista by Microsoft until earlier this year with SP1 and that SP1 broke the compiler as we see with Qt4).
Re:Fool me once..... (Score:4, Informative)
The trick?
1) Don't download and run random crap - that goes for any OS.
2) Sit behind a decent firewall - that also goes for any OS.
3) Don't have a blank or stupid password - hmm, again, good advice for any OS.
4) Get security updates regularly - again, same for any OS, though it happens more often for windows.
5) Don't use IE unless necessary - I'd say "same for any OS," but it is hard to violate this one on other OSes.
So, 5 is the only serious difference.
Oh, and since the other relpy was a bit of an ass - regarding NT - saying Windows NT is like 98 with better networking, is like saying MacOS X is like MacOS 9 with better networking - in both cases it is a completely different OS, that happens to have quite a number of backwards compatibility features.
Re:Fool me once..... (Score:3, Informative)
Ok, let's just do that.
Windows 98 SE, a patched OS sold as an operating system.
Every OS that matters today is patched up the whazoo. What have we gained by this statement?
Windows ME, Windows 98SE with a new skin and more bugs.
Ok, you got me on that one. A very contemporary observation, I might add. Guess I won't be picking up my shiny ME CD after all.
Windows NT, Windows 98 with better networking abilities.
Equivalent statement: "Ford Explorer, Ford Pinto with better carrying capacity." Let's pretend that NT is, er, New Technology relative to the Windows 9x product line. Ok, then let's pretend the pretend is pretend. Ok, let's take a break now.
Windows XP - While easily the best OS they've released so far...
Wrong again. By most accounts Windows 2000 is the best. XP will do, for most of us, but it is second best. For the reason you point out (activation) and for one you didn't (not enough of an improvement over 2000 to be worth upgrading to activation hell).
And now Vista.
Carry on, I'm with you.
Documents and Settings (Re:Fool me once.....) (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Fool me once..... (Score:3, Informative)
Almost everyone uses XP as adminstrator user because a fair amount of software will fail if you run it as a standard user.
I am a developer myself on linux and windows platforms. I also make installers using installshield.
We knew in advance which of most of our software would or would not work on vista.
If developers know what they are doing security features are not a burden but a delight.
Re:Fool me once..... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:How do I remove vista from a brand new laptop? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Fool me once..... (Score:3, Informative)
Not necessarily. It's trivial to write code that says if (adminUser) DoPrivilegedOperation() else MessageBox("Please log in as Admin before attempting this."). It's not pretty but it is often adequate, and many apps do this. All such apps are automatically broken under Vista since the above logic works fine under XP and fails under Vista.
Just as an example, many applications that support plugins store the plugins under their own directories in Program Files so that they are accessible to all users, not just the user installing the plugin. It may or may not be the 100% approved Microsoft Certified Correct Way Of Doing Things, but the fact remains that many, many Windows apps do this or other similar operations and all such apps are broken by Vista and require patches to fix.
As a home user who tries to always run Windows with non-admin permissions (as, frankly, everybody should be doing)
Why, exactly? I run as Admin all the time. It's my computer, I want to do whatever I want to it, whenever I want to, and I don't want any privilege issues getting in my way. There are definitely scenarios (e.g. corporate users, systems with multiple users, etc.) where people should not run as admins, but why shouldn't I run as admin on my own home PC if I want to?
Re:Fool me once..... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Acrobat (Score:5, Informative)
Are you asking for bug fixes in a Linux kernel from 6 years ago? Nope, And Linus wouldn't give release them anyway. But I don't hear anyone yelling at about that.....
Linus won't what?
The latest 2.4 version of the Linux kernel is: 2.4.35.3
The latest prepatch for the 2.4 Linux kernel tree is: 2.4.36-pre1
The latest 2.2 version of the Linux kernel is: 2.2.26
The latest prepatch for the 2.2 Linux kernel tree is: 2.2.27-rc2
Ok so linux 2.2 and 2.4 are still being actively maintained.. how old are those?
Jan 28 1999 linux-2.2.1.tar.gz
Jan 30 2001 linux-2.4.1.tar.gz
So your wrong.. you can get Linux kernel patches from 5 year old versions and older.