Unified Diff

After ten months, I’ve had a reasonably pleasant experience with Windows Vista. But I recently had a series of problems that really made me consider switching back to Linux on my desktop.

I came home from work Monday to find that my computer had restarted after seventy-two days uptime. I had been in the middle of a project the night before so I already wasn’t happy when I sat down. I tried to launch the Event Viewer to see what had caused the reboot, but got this error:

“Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file. You may not have appropriate permissions to access the item.”

Now, I’m running as a least-privileged administrator with UAC enabled. I was never prompted to elevate. In fact, forcing it to elevate did nothing. And because the local administrator account is disabled, by default, I was out of luck. (continue reading…)

Like many other developers, I wanted a chance to play with Windows Vista Beta 2. So I downloaded the whopping 3.2 GB DVD image (in twelve minutes). Since I don’t have a spare machine powerful enough to handle it, I decided to install Vista in a VMware virtual machine. This was, to say the least, not a clean and pleasant experience.

I opened my existing “Beta 1″ virtual machine with 256 MB of RAM and 8 GB of hard disk space, set the ISO as the boot media, and started it. Setup started, but then presented me with this:

The file WinSetup.dll could not be loaded or is corrupt. Setup cannot continue.

(continue reading…)