This week I spent some time installing my essential software applications under Windows Vista (RTM build). The results were not great. Out of about 35 applications that I depend on, 8 of them either would not install or run properly, with little prospect for them working any time soon (if ever in some cases):

Microsoft has long (at least since Windows 2000, which was released 7 years ago) recommended that users not run as administrators. But most users still do, partly because most computers are configured out-of-the-box with the user as an administrator, and partly because software vendors have not done a very good job of following Microsoft’s guidelines to allow their programs to run well for non-administrators. The primary offenses are writing to locations like Program Files and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE in the registry, both of which are read-only for regular users. Case in point: I just bought a game for my kids last week that won’t start if run from a regular user account on XP.

To address this issue, in Windows Vista by default (with UAC, or User Account Control, enabled), even administrators don’t actually run as administrators most of the time. For Vista-aware applications (and programs that Vista recognizes as application installers), when an operation that does require administrative privileges needs to be performed, an elevation prompt is displayed, which the user must confirm before continuing (of course you have to wonder if users will quickly tire of these prompts and mindlessly click Continue or disable them altogether, but it’s probably about the best Microsoft can do since users and developers refuse to change their habits).

Microsoft also built an entire virtualization layer into Vista to minimize problems with legacy apps (file and registry access to restricted areas is transparently redirected to user-specific locations). So even though Vista is more secure, it will actually be more compatible with poorly-behaved programs than Windows XP is. I haven’t tried yet, but with the game I mentioned earlier, a non-administrator will probably be able to run it in Vista. However, virtualization doesn’t solve every problem in legacy applications, so it’s still best to for developers to properly support running with least privilege (not the least of which is to work better on Windows 2000, XP and 2003).

Vista has released to manufacturing, and it will be in the hands of users soon (starting with MSDN subscribers within days, then businesses by the end of November, and consumers and new computers by January). For you slacker developers out there, it’s time to pay the piper and get your applications ready for Vista. A couple related blogs may also be of use.

My initial reaction to IE7 was positive, but it quickly soured. Then I happened upon a way to make IE7 look like IE6 by running %WINDIR%\IE7\iexplore.exe rather that %ProgramFiles%\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe.

Now that the final version of IE7 has been released, I decided to install it again to try out this technique, and sure enough, it does work. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a simple way to make the IE6 look the default one (for file, protocol, and shell associations). I tried both copying the files from %WINDIR%\IE7 to %ProgramFiles%\Internet Explorer and munging the relevant registry settings to point to %WINDIR%\IE7 instead, but neither of these worked properly.

I also discovered another annoyance with IE7: After closing all IE7 windows, the iexplore.exe process remains in memory and never goes away, and starting another IE7 instance results in another iexplore.exe process. This can quickly eat up a lot of memory, with the only way to resolve being to manually kill the extraneous processes.

So I uninstalled it again. Unfortunately, IE6 would no longer start (iexplore.exe was gone). I tried running the IE6 install and encountered the error “A previous installation has pending work requiring a reboot. You need to restart your computer to complete that installation before running Internet Explorer Setup. Setup will now close.” Rebooting (again) didn’t help. A search led me to a KB article to work around this problem. But after that, running the install resulted in “Setup has detected a newer version of Internet Explorer already installed on this system.” A fix described in another seemingly relevant KB article did not resolve the problem.

Fortunately, I still had IE6 installed another computer, and copying the files over from its Internet Explorer folder fixed the problem. I was also lucky to not run into other problems after uninstalling IE7.

I also played around with running IE7 standalone to test pages in IE7 without replacing IE6, but it wasn’t very stable.

I recently installed Windows Vista RC2 (Build 5744) on a secondary partition of my main computer. The installation was very smooth (whereas installing RC1 on my AMD Athlon 64 X2 with NVIDIA nForce RAID array was painful and LAN access was atrociously slow). Out of the box, it recognized all my hardware except the SoundBlaster X-Fi sound card, and their Beta drivers worked with RC2.

Boot time is about the same as Windows XP and performance feels similar as well. However, shutdown and restart don’t really work — Windows mostly shuts down but the PC remains powered on with a black screen (I have to hold the power button for several seconds to force the PC to turn off). My machine is less than one year old, so I would expect that to work.

Vista uses a new boot manager (Boot Configuration Database), which can be easily removed (if you know the magic incantation) via Bootsect.exe (available in the Boot folder on the Vista DVD) if you wish to completely uninstall Vista:

bootsect –NT52 All

Vista makes itself the default boot partition, but I’m not ready for that, and this is easily rectified via BCDEdit (accessible from a Command Prompt [running as administrator] in Vista):

bcdedit /default {ntldr}
bcdedit /set {ntldr} Description "Windows XP"

You can also edit the default partition and boot delay (but not the description) in Vista at Start - Computer - System properties - Advanced system settings - Startup and recovery - Settings.

Of course, the first thing you’ll notice about Vista is the completely revamped user interface, which has been discussed ad nauseum elsewhere. For the most part, I do like the new Aero Glass interface, although I’m suprised they don’t provide an option to retain the Windows XP Theme (just the Classic theme). And while pretty, it is a step back in at least one area: In Windows XP it’s easy to instantly tell which application is the active application (the entire caption and window border background is faded for non-active applications):

But on Vista with Aero Glass, the difference between the active window and others is much more subtle, making it very difficult to quickly identify the active window (the only obvious difference is the color of the close button):

The lack of a conspicuous focus/active window indicator really hampers productivity when switching between applications, especially on a multiple monitor system.

I tried to get IntelliType and IntelliPoint software running to utilize my mouse and keyboard to the fullest (I have Microsoft hardware — an IntelliMouse Optical USB and Natural Ergonomic 4000 keyboard — and both have only basic functionality in RC2). No luck — these are still in private beta, and the workaround I found did not work for me.

The next thing I’ll try is installing my essential software to see how it fares on Vista. While Vista is a significant update to Windows, the problems and shortcomings I’ve encountered so far have tempered my enthusiasm about its ability to replace XP for me any time soon. I’ll talk more about useability and new features in later posts.