Aero should cost very little in terms of performance. If you graphics card can handle it, it’ll show it and not affect the system as the GPU is doing all the heavy lifting. If your system can’t handle it, it’ll turn itself off by itself.
Sorry took so long to return, been at work all night.
What I said was snarky, I didn’t mean it to cause such offense. I wasn’t trying to say you were inexperienced in computing, just was hoping you’d maybe say you were exaggerating slightly (ie; may have done the work over three days, but not as in missed your holiday because you spent eight hours each day for three days fixing it). That was how your initial statement seemed to sound like to me, exaggeration to prove a point, and why I tried to call it up.
So, yeah, it was a little snarky. I’ll rephrase it once I finish my hindsight machine.
What you said wasn’t, in my opinion, snarky. Just an out of place personal insult. This post is pretty saying the same point I said before, but I’m hoping you’ll see what I’m getting at.
So let me, calmly, describe two such events. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.
Event one:
Receive Vaio in an perma-reboot state. It left my care 6-8 months ago with good virus scanning, firewall, and spyware protection.
After getting it to boot to the recovery CD, I find the knowledge base article that lets me turn off the ‘feature’ of the Bluescreen-insta-reboot. It’s a feature so it doesn’t scare the unwashed.
(Time in at this point: 30 minutes, spent in watching, researching, and digging out an XP CD)
System got in this state during an upgrade direct to SP2 (skipping SP1). Backing out the Service pack didn’t work.
Bring the system up in Safe Mode with Networking, hook it to the network, start slowly copying the data off. (Time in: 90 minutes til the Data is backed up)
Start the image copy process…three CD’s, a HD format, and XP configureation later, the laptop is to factory spec. (e.g. 12 months out of date) Put firewall, spyware, virus protection on. (Time elapsed: 150 minutes)
Download and install SP2…heck, maybe there was something going on that prevented SP2 from installing.
Reboot cycle of death. Reimage laptop (210 minutes). Start over.
Install software, install Service Pack 1, get reboot of death. Start Over.
270 minutes in and I’m baffled. Research continues the next day.
Spend time with Sony making sure I’ve got the latest drivers…Perform Servicepack…reboot of death. (total time: 450 minutes.)
Spend time researching just exactly what that bluescreen is telling me. Something about the memory subsystem is causing the problem.
Pull a DIMM. Reboot of death continues.
Swap DIMM. Reboot of death continues.
Re-image (#4.) Sometime in here, I try my copy of XP pro to disasterous results. There’s not a seperate driver CD shipped with the laptop. SP’ing it returns to the R-of-D.
Determine, 12 hours in, that I can’t do what Microsoft wants to make the system secure. I’ve gotta patch and protect some other way. Reimage and firewall it to within an inch of it’s life.
NOW I can start the data restoration and hope I got everything. (14 hours)
Spend a couple hours in the usual interview process: “What do you use?” “Are you sure that’s everything?”
We’re probably only 16-18 total hours in, so yeah, I may have exaggerated, but it sure wasn’t fun, and it was over three days, and I really woulda preferred to spend my Xmas break with the family…not worrying about WTF is going wrong and did I back everything up?
All this so that the NEXT time the laptop comes to town, the firewall’s been mysteriously disabled and the machine’s a pig.
Meh, one example’s enough. The other one was a 'can’t you just take 10 minutes to get my scanner working and devolved to a multi-day run of data backup, OS installation, and re-installing a ton on geneaology software.
Round about that time, I got OUT of the family PC business. Sure is nice to tell the MIL: “golly, I don’t know, it’s been YEARS since I’ve touched a PC.”
And my Mom doesn’t call anymore, as her Mac Mini doesn’t do this stuff.
The thing I find ironic about these Mac-vs-PC discussions is that, if the Mac side wins, they’ll lose, at least partly. One of the things that’s repeatedly cited as an advantage for the Mac is that there are no serious virus threats. That’s partly due to the superior architecture of the OS, but also due to the fact that there are just not as many Macs out there in the hands of Unintentionally Blank’s mom (and my father-in-law, and my neighbors) – people who install stuff without knowing what they’re doing.
If the Mac side wins, we’ll have a lot more Macs, and consequently a lot more smart, capable but amoral people looking for ways to exploit them.
The problem with Windows is not such much an architectural one as a cultural one. There is a culture of running Windows under administrative accounts (still the default in XP, if memory serves) which makes people far more vulnerable to malware. For example, AIUI in OSX when you run an installer, you are prompted for a root password during the install, so you can perform the install from your everyday non-admin account. This is a sensible arrangement. But on Windows, installers just run under whatever account you’re using. If it’s a non-admin account, the install will usually fail. You can fix this problem this with tools like the indispensable MakeMeAdmin (a sort of sudo for Windows - simple RunAs is not generally suitable for installing programs because it modifies the admin user profile, not yours), but most people don’t know to do that.
OS X is pretty safe by default, but I’ll tell you what can and probably will happen is User Space exploits. Applications that are memory resident, run as the user, and do whatever they want.
Does it ask you for a password when you run Mozilla? iChat? Foo?
What if Foo had a nasty component to it? That’s where you’ll see the compromise.
You’re kidding, right? Apple’s whole ad campaign centers around people saying things like, “I don’t follow instructions well…I can’t turn things on…I can’t find the buttons.”[sup]*[/sup] Their target market is technophobes who want to think that they can “program” a computer by running applications seemlessly and without regular maintenance.
And the meme that Mac has a small market share meaning that it’s ignored is another semi-nonsensical argument. Hackers like to one up one another and prove that they can break things that people claim are unbreakable, which again is Apple’s whole marketing blather. Any yet, six years and only a handful of minor expoits. I attribute this largely to the inherently secure FreeBSD-based architecture which isn’t vulnerable to script-kiddie level security gaffs, i.e. the browser doesn’t integrate into low level op system functions or have any special permissions, you don’t have to be the administrator (and thus, grant administrative privlidges) to install non-system level applications, et cetera. Mind you, Unix hasn’t always been this way; in the past, there have been some major exploits based upon set-user-id and running as root, and password hacks that were almost trivial. But the Unix core and developer base has gotten much smarter about security, while Microsoft seems to wander about blindly and blithely.
That being said, what I’ve read of the security model of Vista makes me believe that they are taking security more seriously than in the past, but it remains to be seen if their system will be effective. And it’s still a 600 pound gorilla of an operating system.
Stranger
[sup]*[/sup]Apple Switch Ad Yo Yo Ma.
Just out of curiosity, how come you didn’t Slipstream in SP2 to the XP installation disk? Was the Vaio install disk an image of the inital state of the laptop when you got it? Were there no XP installation disks that came with it?
It was not an official warning. It was directed at you.
If you believe a post is inappropriate, please report it. I will say that this comment, “surely that’s more revealing of your PC skills,” is miles away from this one, “Fuck you and your assessment of my abilities.” The former is not a rules violation, the latter is. Now that (hopefully) you’ve cooled down, do you see the difference?
Only to a degree. If I weren’t up to speed, and didn’t feel competent in an area, I’d mention it. I’ve been the unwitting recipient of these kind of ad hominem attacks, frequently when I show up somewhere and pull a laptop out with a fruit on the cover. It’s uncalled for, and shows an unwillingness to concieve another view might be better, or at least different. It’s gotta be stupid, uninformed, or worse. So instead of a reasoned conversation, I get to back up my statements with lists of reasons, which are usually completely ignored for another jab.
The disks were a multi-part ghost image of a sys-prepped XP install that already had Sony’s drivers (at time of publishing). It was one of the things that made it cheaper. I’d already spent a ton of time on it, I didn’t care to work on it further.
Besides, Slipstreaming? For one Laptop? Which of the serveral hundred items in two service packs was the guilty party that caused it to continually reboot?
The Vista Launch here has been underwhelming, for want of a better word.
I went online to the MS Expert Zone and did the Vista online training modules, and went away with no more idea what the hell Vista was all about than before.
We finally got laptops with Vista pre-installed on on Thursday, and I set them up, as well as installing the Vista Interactive Demo on one of them. It promptly crashed.
To be fair, it automatically shut itself down and rebooted- not in the WinXP “WTF just happened?” reboot, in this case, the system basically said “Warning, Warning Dr. Smith! Now restarting…” and then powered itself down (as it would if you’d switched it off normally), then restarted.
It was slightly… disconcerting, in a [HAL 9000]“I’m Sorry, Dave. I’m Afraid I Can’t Do That.”[/HAL 9000] kind of way.
Otherwise, I’m just not convinced Vista is a huge leap forward over XP. It took quite a number of years for people to upgrade to WinXP- and even now, there are still a reasonable number of Windows users out there running Win98SE, 2000/ME, or NT. It could be a couple of years- I’m going to say at least two or even three- before Vista finally becomes the “DeFacto” operating system for the majority of home PC users and small businesses.
We’ve been advising customers not to upgrade yet, FWIW.
It must be possible to get on the internets with Vista. Why, when I try to connect wirelessly to my own router, it’s listed, along with a few of my neighbors’, in the large apartment house where I live. I can get on their routers!! At least, I get to where I would enter the WEP code if I knew it, and were the type to trespass on someone else’s router. But with my own router I don’t even get to the WEP prompt.
My 6 year old XP computer blew up Sunday morning, so I bit the bullet and bought a new PC with Vista. It has taken a little getting used to and it certainly is slick looking. The built in parental controls are nice for the kids, but Vista seems to think it knows what I really want even when I have told it to do something like download an ActiveX control. It didn’t want to install something from PBSkids.org because the certificate wasn’t signed even after I repeatedly told it to and even signed in with my Admin password. I finally
BTW I picked up a HP Pavilion Slimline from Office Depot. It was a weekly special and was only $609. If my computer hadn’t gone up I wouldn’t have gotten it, but since I needed to buy one anyway this one wasn’t that bad.
Ah, yes. The Microsoft philosophy.
“We know what you really want to do, and we’ll show you how to do it.”
No, not kidding at all. As much as Apple markets to the masses, the simple fact is that Microsoft (and Dell, and HP, and Gateway, and eMachines, and so on) sell to the masses. Since more PCs are sold than Macs (by something like 9 to 1), then unless the vast majority of Mac users are completely clueless, the PC population represents a larger target for compromising.
Note that I pointed out the inherent superiority of the Mac OS with regard to virus/malware resistance. My point, which I think you may have missed, is that while better, it’s not bulletproof. And the “meme” of hackers ignoring Macs due to smaller market share isn’t “semi-nonsensical”, it’s a logical conclusion proceeding from the fact that many virus writers are not motivated by desire to “prove they can break things” but by financial considerations – if you can compromise a computer and get someone’s passwords or financial information, you can make money either using or selling that information.
I’m not talking about the script kiddie portion of the population – I am talking about the people who code malware for business reasons. Yes, it’s harder for them to do it on Macs, but part of the reason that Macs are secure is because they’re a less tempting target. Do you honestly believe that if the market share position were reversed (9-to-1 Mac) that Macs would still be as secure as they are?