Running Windows Vista

I got an email at work yesterday chastising me for not upgrading any of my work machines to Vista, so I backed up and installed it on my Dell desktop machine. Overall, it's been fine. It's certainly pretty and shiny, which works for me.

It's got this setting on by default (that the Mac ads are making fun of) that prompts you 92 times when you are installing software to make sure you really want to do that. I understand why it's there - so that civilians don't allow various websites to install malware on their machines, which is a huge problem.

Of course, I'm no civilian and I irritate easily at this sort of thing, so I've disabled it, which of course means that I am now more vulnerable to something auto-installing itself via a website. I wonder though -- which is more helpful? Regular users aren't installing software often, so it may not happen that frequently - and when they do get the prompt, theoretically, it will make them think twice. Or, do civilians just get annoyed and confused by Windows talk and just click to make the messages go away?

To me, it wasn't just the prompting. Windows Defender is installed by default, which is handy and I use it to control what loads at startup rather than modifying the registry cause it's neater and easier to undo. But with that setting, I wasn't authorized to modify these settings via Windows Defender - but I had no issues when I modified the registry manually. Now, I happen to generally know what I'm doing around computers, but this seems sorta odd if it's meant to be a security feature - maybe it's not, but then I don't know what they're trying to achieve.

So far, all my software has installed ok. Running Firefox, Media Monkey (great free add-in for playing music - uses much less memory than iTunes or WinMedia), Lotus Notes, FolderShare, Audible, Skype, 1000+ Microsoft apps, etc. It's pretty snappy loading up which is good. Of course, I still want to just press a button and have my computer turn on immediately, but we're definitely not there yet.

I'm not taking my laptop up to Vista yet, although it will upgrade fine (hardware wise). Laptops are way trickier and quite frankly, if I'm traveling and have a weird problem, it's much more difficult to resolve. I'll keep you updated on my adventures in Vista-land.