If that happens you should look for a new BIOS that enumerates your drives properly. Your bios is likely buggy or you are doing something wrong..

But once again your go ahead and decide that something is not working because your systems haven't been working. For me, it works like it should and I have 4 drives in my machine and 2 external CF cards, plus 2 USB bootable drives, so in total 8 drives windows can play with, works fine. I have 2 different windows version running on the first and second harddrive.

But dual booting is not what it used to be any longer, VMs is more or less commodity and much easier to manage.

Well apparently you don't understand how the BIOS boots your machine then.

If you want that, then make sure the drive you are installing on is your boot drive. It is intuitive that windows will install itself so that it will boot up on the machine you are installing it on. Unless you believe that figuring out how to swap boot orders in the BIOS (and before that you had to swap cables) is more intuitive.

I believe you are missing the point.

Windows will install the boot loader on the drive that the BIOS will boot first, which is fairly obvious, unless you have a boot loader on another drive then it will plug into that one, which is also fairly expected behavior. You don't have to rip your drives out you change the order in the BIOS.

If you are dual booting you should know how those things work before embarking on that journey or let someone that does know help you.

If you know the complexities of booting a system the choices made in the installer makes sense and takes no user discovery.

No, your point seems to be that the way your want it is somehow the way a user wants it. A normal user definitely doesn't worry about it. So that point is moot.

Apparently you fail to see why this partition is there in the first place, but it is for the very common scenario of using bitlocker on a laptop. By doing it this way it enables a "not knowing user as yourself" to enable bitlocker without repartitioning the drive in the future.

Design is choosing, what is right for one person is wrong for the other. This choice was apparently wrong for you, but I am pretty sure it is right for a lot of people.

I leave it up to you to explain why this is necessary on a bit locker system.

And apparently in your setup your MBR/active partition was on another drive. If you wanted them to be separate than you tell windows installer to do so. I believe most users just wants it to work and plug into the current boot menu they have.

Anyway, windows normally creates the system partition on the same drive if there are no other bootable drives. If you have more than one boot loader on your system you apparently an advanced user and know how to handle this, if you are not your likely glad to get it booting. Note that Windows only supports dual booting other windowses, this is what the installation process is geared towards.

They did, and it is by design.

I just don't understand why you can't post correct factual posts, is that so hard??

On my machine, with 12GB of memory it uses up 10GB, I still have over 1GB of free memory (10%), the computer is not sluggish and working fine.

If you get an BSOD from this, you should know that it most likely comes from a driver that has not been verfied under low memory scenarios, which is a prerequisit for being WHQL certfied. It is also part of the Driver Verfier supplied by MS.

To me this seems like a good design, if you have surface scanning the HD (like once in a life time) it is very likely that you don't want to do much else with the computer any way.

I will run this on a low end hardware too, as it is a good way to test that your drivers are in order, but it is very likely not at all connected to chkdsk.

Maybe those that experience BSOD, experience them when they play games too? I guess that's the OS fault too.

I guess yesterday when I ran "gmake -j" on a single core SuSe Linux machine, and it entirely stopped responding, I lost med SSH connections and could barely navigate it through the console is a much better option =)

You have obviously not installed many OS yourself, and if you really believe what you are writing you should probably stop installing those you already are installing. You can control exactly where and how you want any partitions to be, so even with windows 7. It has a certain default, which is to install a 100MB, let's call it, rescue partition.

Just pre partition the disk the way you want it and you won't have that extra partition. So perhaps the bad move is on your for not knowing what you are doing and still posting as if you did.

Truth to be told though, you will need a reboot in between, still scary and very silly.

I just wrote a vbscript to replicate the steps and it works out of the box. Very scary, I really hope they will close this.

If they don't, I really don't understand what they are thinking.

It is pretty simple really, if you the working of a computer. This security flaw is on Intel. They allowed from the start programs to execute on the stack. disable execution makes sure you have to mark sections as executable, this makes buffer overrun's more or less impossible, not entirely, but alot harder.

The problem again, like with UAC, is that applications out there use this functionality, such as JITs (Java, .Net), not really on the stack, but on the heap, so the attacks just have to move there instead.

However with UAC in place, and your app running as a non privilieged (or even low priv) it cannot make compromising changes to your computer. It can still steal stuff though.

I would trust that you are clever enough to not run unverified software, without digital certificates or web trusts?

Properly configured UAC will prompt you. However as all installers normally prompts for elevation you really _always_ need to trust your source.

For all code, and _all_ systems unix/windows/macos alike.

apt-get can have been compromised, apple store can have been compromised and microsoft download can have been compromised.

Thus you need digitally signed software on _all_ OSes.

Anything else is just up to chance.

1. Incorrect, they cannot, there are many levels of integrity. Have a look at the model for IE protected mode for instance. Normally you need the DEBUG privliege to read anywhere, this can only be granted by an elevated account.

2. Any installer will usually be prompted to elevate, through the mentioned heuristic. However you don't have to agree to this and instead install the APP into _non_ system directory. Very much like unix works, actually exactly the same way.

3. No it cannot, a non admin process (started by a non elevated admin, the normal with UAC enabled admin account) cannot send messages to an elevated process.

4. Nope it doesn't, it uses heuristics to figure out if the program has compatiblity issues and thus would need elevation to work. Vast difference, it will never elevate without letting you know and agree to it.

Windows 7 can be set to full prompt like in Vista, I would recommend this (which would close the mentioned attack, if the attack is possible in the first place, haven't tried yet). If you are hit by UAC prompts daily you are doing something wrong or something out of the ordinary. There are however exceptions as many games today still required admin to run, completely screwed up. They even have checks to make sure you elevate, some even go so far to recommand turning UAC off. These are the kinds of evils that should be fought, not good intentions like UAC in a difficult situation.

However you can easily setup shortcuts to start app's that need elevation so that it will not prompt you. However this setup _must_ be done when elevated. This will reduce the daily prompts, but it will still leave you more vulernable as the program/game you are running can now be attacked with much success.

Most people get UAC technically completely wrong. It is not like a sudo system, it is more clever than that and it needs to be, because MS built themselves into a corner by not getting it right from the start.

In an admin UAC enabled account your account is associated with 2 security tokens, one elevated and one "normal". All application you run and all activities you do is handled by the normal token. However whenever the UAC elevates you (through your consent) the higher priviliege token is used.

UAC can be changed to work exactly like a sudo system, however a sudo system cannot be set to work like UAC.

A sudo system is way more annoying than the UAC system, if MS would have configured this by default it would crippled even more users. Just like it would cripple people on a unix system (app-get requires root just like installers on windows gets elevated). MS should have been much stricter from the beginning so they wouldn't have ISV etc implementing apps completely in the wrong manner.

Any sys-admin worth his salt will not allow "normal" users to run under an admin account, not even in a XP environment. However with UAC and Vista they will at least gain the benefit of being able to easily elevate and install apps for the users, either physically or through AD push. Physically is useful when a user needs special software that the masses don't.

UAC can be set to ask for a password even for an admin, I wish this was default, but nothing prevents you from changing it. Or for admins to enforce it.

UAC can be set to auto elevate for the built in admin account (like logging in as root) but default it "secure".

UAC can be set to not use the secure desktop, thus allow script attacks. This is normally not the default mode, however in Windows 7 it can be default if the hardware you run on is listed as being too "annoying" when switching desktop. Due to inherently bad graphic card's in some low end laptops.

This is likely due to a USB device that wakes the computer up even if it shouldn't.

try checking the USB status with

powercfg -DEVICEQUERY wake_from_any

That might have changed in windows 7, they have added more stuff to powercfg so you can troubleshoot wakeups better