Excellent CNET Tip: Unhide Vista’s Administrator Account
I noticed this while beta-testing Windows Vista but never did anything about it: Windows Vista doesn't let you enable the Administrator account from a simple GUI the way Windows XP does.
Enable Vista's hidden administrator, and password-protect its XP equivalent
The trick is to run the CMD command line window as Administrator (right click on the item in the Start menu), then use the net command as the CNET article describes. Every Windows user should have a separate standby account to use in case your main account is messed up somehow.
- Right-click on Command Prompt (or Run) in Start Menu and choose option to Run as Administrator
- Type the following in the Command Prompt text window: net user administrator /active:yes
Slashdot Review: Windows Vista Annoyances
I haven't picked up O'Reilly's Windows Vista Annoyances book yet. But, since I spend a good chunk of my workday on a notebook running Windows Vista Business Edition, I probably should. In the meantime, here's a link to a Slashdot review of the book:
Windows Vista Video Drivers Sure Break a Lot
I run Vista on three different physical boxes (two notebooks and one desktop). They each have different graphic chip/card configurations. And, yet, I often see all kinds of weird display glitches (screen blanks out, switches from aero to basic, etc.) on each of them.
One of the improved features of Vista compared to earlier versions of Windows is the way it recovers from video driver panics. On older Windows boxes, this would result in a non-functional display that would require, at the least, a reboot. Vista detects this and restarts the video subsystem without requiring a reboot. However, the real question is why Vista video drivers crash so much more than XP video drivers. I see the message in the figure above several times a week (if not even more often). This doesn't leave me with a warm and fuzzy feeling. Especially since I NEVER see this kind of problem when I use a computer running Linux (assuming X11 is running at all) or a Mac.
I read earlier this week that the so-called Windows 7 that will replace Vista may emerge as early as 2009. Honestly, this isn't early enough for me. I generally like Vista and miss the program search feature when I use the Start Menu in XP. But, Vista's glitchiness is annoying.
OK to Virtualize Windows Vista Home Basic and Premium Editions Now
According to this ZDNet blog item...
Microsoft (finally) broadens Windows Vista virtualization rules
...Microsoft is going to formally announce that it is ok (license-wise) to install Microsoft Windows Home Basic and Home Premium Editions as Guest OSes on virtual machines. Home Basic and Home Premium cost less than the Business and Ultimate Editions. So, this is good news for those of us who need to run Vista in a virtualized environment for testing and other needs.
The official Microsoft press release on this topic is found at...
Microsoft Announces Vision and Strategy to Accelerate Virtualization Adoption
...and the pertinent paragraph is: Increased licensing flexibility with Windows Vista. For businesses, Windows Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktop provides unique licensing and flexibility to run Windows in virtual machines on servers and access them from either PCs or thin clients. The annual subscription to Windows Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktop is now an estimated retail price of $23 per desktop for rich clients covered by Software Assurance for Windows Client. For consumers, Windows Vista Home Basic and Windows Vista Home Premium are now licensed for use in a virtual machine environment, and the updated end-user license agreement is available at http://www.microsoft.com/about/legal/useterms/default.aspx.
Finding HP Printer Drivers
Reader Linda asks: I have two Hp printers how do i get them to install properly? i have the Windows Vista Home premium Operating System 32 bit i have no clue what that means really? So what drivers do i want/ and where do i get them/ From Dell? HP? or Windows Vista?
Fortunately, HP makes finding printer drivers pretty easy. Of course, Vista printer driver availability (for any brand) is still pretty spotty even though Vista has been out for a year now (more if you count Business Edition's launch in November 2006). Just head over to:
You'll be asked to designate which country you are in and then be whisked off to the appropriate site. Select Software & Driver downloads as the task, then type in your printer model in the text box below. Note that even if a Vista compatible driver is available, it may not fully support your printer's features. For example, my PhotoSmart 7760 prints ok (more or less) but does not report ink supply levels as it does when used with Windows XP.
Humor: Upgrading From Vista to Windows XP
Head over to read this blog entry...
...by a blogger who comments on his experience upgrading from Windows Vista to Windows XP. If it weren't so true, it would be funny. But, hmm, actually it is funny 
Can Vista Windows Update Actually Be More Annoying?
Vista's Windows Update didn't see any updates when I fired it up this morning. So, I clicked on the option to manually check for updates. It saw the Patch Tuesday Vista patches after that action. Why didn't it seem them as soon as it fired up? Then, of course, Vista wanted to be rebooted to actually finish installing the patches. Ugh. Vista takes a look time to shutdown and then reboot. Good thing I have multiple computers to work on.
After the reboot Word 2007 decided it wasn't to open a small DOCX file I had been working on. Now what? After futzing a bit, I checked the net and found that there is an Office 2007 SP1 update. I ran Windows Update again and, again, had it manually check for updates. Now, it sees the Office 2007 SP1 update. Why wasn't this detected earlier. To make matters worse, the Office 2007 SP1 update was 251MB large and took a while to download. And, of course, it too required a reboot after installing itself. Why in the world with an application need a reboot to install itself. The only two things I can think of that requires a Linux box to reboot are kernel or driver updates.
This is a broken and time-wasting scenario.
Vista Windows Experience Index Score Weirdness
The Windows Vista Windwos Experience Index Score never made much sense to me. It grades a PC on 5 factors and then chooses the lowest score as the index. No weighting, no average, just what looks like a poorly thought out implementation of some kind of over simplified Fuzzy Logic. Since the graphics subsystem is generally the weakest component (unless you are a serious gamer), it generally defines the score for the entire system.
I finally got around to upgrading my old Athlon 64-bit 3400+ based PC from 1GB to 2GB RAM. This PC doesn't have a dedicated graphics card, but the integrated chipset is the Nvidia GeForce 6100 which isn't too shabby as built-in graphics goes. It uses shared RAM and Vista decided that it had 831MB of available graphics RAM after the upgrade. This was enough to boost the Graphics index from 2.0 to 3.0 and thus raise the entire index score from 2 to 3 as well.
The interesting thing is that the Dell Latitude D620 notebook PC (running Windows Vista Business Edition) with its Core 2 Duo and a dedicated graphics adapter with dedicated graphics score in reduced performance battery saving mode less than this old single core PC of mine because of Microsoft's scoring quirk. In this case the CPU performance in battery saving mode becomes the weakest component in the score (less than the graphics adapter). The end result is that an aging single core CPU based PC score higher than a Core 2 Duo based one. That just doesn't sit will with me. And, I don't think the actual end-user experience matches the scores either.
If Your XP PC Died, Would You Move to Vista or Stay With XP?
Although I have a slightly newer (Athlon 64-bit) PC running Windows Vista, my main PC is a 3 year old Athlon 32-bit based PC running Windows XP Media Edition. Last week this main PC started acting funny. It started taking longer and longer to boot up. Finally on Thursday evening, it failed to boot.
My first though was that this might be a good excuse to buy a Core 2 Duo PC . But, I surprised myself by thinking I did not want my main PC to run Windows Vista. I preferred XP for this PC because it syncs with my Windows Mobile smartphone (not sure I trust WMDC on Vista) and it is where my family photos reside (UAC makes even copying files to an external USB hard drive for backups an exercise in frustration). So, although I actually like Windows Vista enough to run it on my main PC at work (a Core 2 Duo notebook), I'm not willing to run it on my main home PC. This surprised me quite a bit. Has anyone else been faced with this issue? What did you decide? Stay with XP or move on to Vista?
BTW: Listening carefully, I noted three long beeps. Though I couldn't find any boot sound diagnostic info for this particular PC (an eMachines PC), I guessed that it might indicate a RAM problem. So, I pulled the DIMM from the second socket and, yep, the PC booted with just 512MB in DIMM socket 0. I pulled a 512MB DIMM from my Linux box (rarely used these days since I usually run Linux as virtual machine using either Microsoft Virtual PC or VMware Workstation) and put it in my main PC. I also decided to upgrade my Vista box from 1GB to 2GB and have a pair of DIMMs on order from Crucial. I'm sure Virtual PC and VMware Workstation will be happier with more RAM.
BTW: The photo above is my collection of dead RAM from the last couple of years.
Vista Windows Photo Gallery Shows Video Too
This is probably old news to most people. But, I only noticed this evening that the Vista Windows Photo Gallery displays videos as well as still images. Yeah, doh. I usually work on my family photos on a old Windows XP PC because XP on the old PC seems to run faster than Vista on a newer PC. In fact, even simple things like list files in Windows Explorer seems much faster on XP than Vista.
I have an old Celeron based XP PC with 1GB RAM in my office as well as a relatively new(ish) Core 2 Duo notebook running Vista with 2GB RAM. Vista seems to take forever just bringing up a list of files while XP (on a Celeron) is pretty fast. At home it is an ancient Athlon 32-bit box running XP and a slightly less ancient Athlon 64-bit box running Vista (32-bit).
In any case, if you are running Windows Vista and have a mix of still photos and videos in a folder (I keep all files from my digital camera, still and video by month to ease backups to DVD+R discs), double click on a still image near a video file (AVI in my case) to bring up Windows Photo Gallery. Then, press the forward button to move from file to file. The video should start playing right in Photo Gallery after a few seconds delay.