Wow, update…

I got a Vista Business License and directly installed it. One of the many benefits my job offers.So far it runs very smooth, the Aero surface is fast and visually a long awaited addon.
At first i felt somehow overwhelmed/out of place. Microsoft redesigned / renamed many user folders and improved security greatly. That is, if the user wouldn’t simply ignore those popup windows asking him to verify that a action/program is allowed to make changes to the system and just clicks OK or just deactivates this security feature. If you don’t know what i mean, in Vista an user in the administrator group runs as a simple user without administrative rights. A good idea i think. That is, if it wouldn’t be one popup every time for every program and any system tool. Now, if you want to delete the recycle folder, Vista uses a new folder for that, you have to click 5 times: delete, yes delete, use administrative rights, (popup) yes use administrative rights, yes delete. 5 times for deleting an obsolete folder. Not only that, if you use multiple drives you have to add user rights for all drives, and that takes some time since the rights have to be set for every file and folder on that drive. Strangely enough, Vista does set the rights automatically for every partition on the first drive where Vista has been installed into. At this point, i decided first that i should simply disable this security feature but reenabled it after Vista started annoying me that there are security risks. I should be able to disable this warning but currently i don’t wanna bother with it, there are other problems to solve.
So after setting the rights right, i installed my favorite programs. No real problems occurred, besides Vista asking me after some installations if the setup installed correctly. One of those programs was Winrar, i downloaded the newest version, installed with no problem. But when i first used it Vista started to ask me if i want to run with administrative rights. OK no problem, since i already started ignoring the Vista popups. The real problem was that i wasn’t able to extract via the right click drag and drop method i used for years. It simply did nothing. So i googled for a solution. It was simple enough, i just had to install a previous version which i had to download over rapidshare.
On the hardware side there are more problems. My wireless lan card was not installed, no big problem because i don’t have to use wireless lan for my internet connection anymore. Another problem was my onboard audio, a realtek ac 97 chip. Windows did install a driver, but my most common problem hit me again, the digital output was not working. After searching i found a new driver on the realtek homepage. Tried to install it and directly told me that this drivers is for Vista only. And i thought i was running Vista. Done some things which had nothing to do with this problem, tried installing again and this time it worked. Whatever… So after the restart the next problem hit me and it hit me really hard. No, the digital output was working. Every time i tried opening the control panel the explorer crashed. So this official driver i downloaded from the manufacturers homepage killed a very important part of my system. Somehow i had some luck and it just killed the directory listing of the control panel so i was able to deinstall the sound drivers. I started google again and did some digging. While i found no problems like mine, the driver was just released today, there were some hints that i can install drivers designed for Windows XP. And those drivers do work, with digital output and they even warned me that they are not designed for Vista but simply let me install. I was not able to active AC3 passthrough but even on Windows XP it was a pain, so i should be able to figure it out after some time.

Thats it for now, but i am sure there are more Vista problems i can write about.