djrobx
join:2000-05-31
Valencia, CA
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| You know what really grinds my gears?
OK, I'll vent my geek angst. Vista's really been grinding my gears this week. Microsoft seems to be going with the "we know better than you" approach to new system features.
Aero
I get the whole concept of profiling my machine and forcibly disabling aero if it falls under a certain threshold. That's fine, but I should be able to override "detection" if I know what's best. There is yet another factor, if DWM uses up more than 25% of system RAM at runtime, you get a warning bubble, and more than 30% and it gets shut down. Why can't I override this? OK, maybe the 30% lmit wouldn't be so bad ... if it actually worked right. On my 5GB x64 machine, it would give me those stupid "windows has detected that your performace is slow" errors and/or shut down when DWM was only at around 70mb (1.4% of my system memory).
I reported the issue to micrososft and they responded with a hotfix that doesn't apply to my situation. Apparently there's some other, issues with the automatic profiling too! Blargh. Took matters into my own hands and disassembled dwm.exe. Found a neat little section of code that contains checks against 25 and 30. Hacked those out. Replaced dwm with my hacked version and my errors are gone. Ahhhh so much better ... now I just hope Microsoft actually fixes the bug for other people who might run into it.
Networking
Another, but similar problem I'm running into that I have not yet solved is yet another casualty of the "we know better than you" attitude. I have VirtualBox installed on another Vista box. VirtualBox includes a virtual network adapter. When my virtual machine boots up, the virtual network adapter gets enabled. Cool. But whoops, Vista doesn't know how to "sense" what network it's connected to, decides it's public and throws up the firewal AGAINST ALL THE OTHER ADAPTERS IN THE SYSTEM. Bam, thanks to Vista's undisableable "detection", I can no longer access my network shares or remote desktop to the PC.
Unsigned 64 bit drivers
Vista x64 has the "security feature" of not allowing unsigned 64 bit drivers unless you press F8 at boot time. OK. I am the one in control, and I want to use my XBox controller with needs XBCD. I *used* to be able to adjust a value in the bcdedit to set what I want permanently. But if I install any of three different windows updates, Vista removes that feature. Excuse me Microsoft but I paid for your software and my machine, how dare you not give me the option to load community-developed drivers if that is my wish.
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Laser eye surgery rocks! I love frickin' laser beams. |
