February 2007 Archives

Remember that post I made earlier with that perfect 10.0 system stability score?  Well, it's since taken a bit of a slide...

Kind of depressing, isn't it?  Well, the reason for the decline in the stability score is not Vista itself -- it's a couple of particularly misbehaved applications.  One of them is PowerDVD, which I'm using a very old version of (and which I mean to get updated as soon as humanly possible).  It locks up every now and then, and did this under XP as well -- so it's nothing Vista-specific.  The rest of the system is as stable as it's been since the beginning of this particular install.

Ed Bott recently pounced on a problem with Vista's WGA -- something we all hate to some degree, but which appears to be particularly problematic when one of a small pool of applications is installed that changes system settings.  Among the offenders were PC Tools Spyware Doctor [fixed], Trend Micro Internet Security / PC-Cillin Anti-Virus [fixed], and nProtect GameGuard, an anti-cheating package that apparently touches off a whole mess of problems with many systems.  Install that program (which is often bundled with many games) and suddenly your system starts a 72-hour countdown to being delicensed until you remove it.

Okay, now for the good news.  MS owned up to the issue and released a patch via Windows Update for it, so it's at least something they are (painfully) aware of and doing their best to minimize.  If you don't know if you have it or not, open Windows Update, click on View Update History, sort the resulting view by Name, and look for Update for Windows Vista (KB931573).

The larger questions of whether copy protection really does more harm than good remains perpetually unanswered, of course.

Welcome to another ongoing feature of the Windows Vista section of Windows Insight, where I talk about those many features in XP that have vanished or been "transformed" in Windows Vista.

For starters, I thought I'd talk about something that many people have asked me about: Why, in the Users section of Control Panel, is there no longer any mention of Fast User Switching?

Both ATI and NVIDIA have published newly-signed WHQL drivers for their respective lines of graphics cards; my own ATI (a Radeon 9550) got new drivers just this morning courtesy of Microsoft Update.  I'm not sure about this -- it may simply be some observational bias on my part -- but some parts of the system seem to be running a little bit faster with the new driver.

However, the big thing for me is and will probably always be stability.  Microsoft moved the video drivers out of kernel space to sacrifice that much more speed for that much more stability -- i.e., they moved back to the old NT 4.0 way of doing things -- and from what I can tell the tradeoff hasn't been anything that's really hurt me.  (The FPS hounds, though, may tell a different story with Vista -- but I'm admittedly not a gamer, so this whole area of discussion is really outside my realm of expertise.)

Mark Russinovich has posted Part 2 of the Inside the Windows Vista Kernel series at TechNet Magazine.  Among the topics covered this time around:

• Vista's dynamic kernel space addressing scheme
• Memory prioritization
• SuperFetch (a topic many people don't understand completely, I think)
• ReadyBoost (ditto)
• ReadyBoot (boot-time optimization)
• ReadyDrive (hybrid hard drive optimization)
• The infamous Boot Configuration Database or BCD, the binary replacement for BOOT.INI that has been driving people nuts for a long time.  Interesting fact: it's actually stored as a Registry hive on disk.
• And much more.

In my post about Part 1 in the series, I commented that these articles are the perfect antidote to people who insist Vista is just XP in a new UI.  And, once again, everything I see convinces me that nothing could be further from the truth.

There has been a chiming-in from many quarters about Vista's UAC, and one of the most commonly-repeated sentiments I have heard about it is, on the face of it, very hard to argue with.

People are so trained to dismiss pop-up dialog boxes that any protective value that UAC provides will quickly be destroyed.

How true is this?  It's true that when you're setting up and configuring a Vista system -- especially when you're installing software -- the UAC box pops up a lot, and becomes rather wearisome.  But once you have things set up, and you're not facing the UAC box as regularly as you might, it regains a good deal of its former attention-getting value.  Especially if you spend an entire workday without seeing it once -- as I have spent days on end without ever seeing it -- and then have it pop up to alert you about something that might be genuinely worrisome.

Expert that I am, I leave UAC on, because I'd rather have the momentary inconvenience of the UAC prompt than the possibly far greater inconvenience of a piece of malware or some other mess-up.

Some people have advocated logging in under the disabled Administrator account, not an admin user, for the duration of the setup process -- or disabling UAC entirely for that period of time.  This means no UAC prompts while you're performing various administrative actions and getting software configured.  I'm not crazy about this idea for a couple of reasons:

1. It's a little too easy to get used to that and remain logged in as full admin, and thus defeat the protections the system has made available.
2. Setting up a system tends to be an incremental process.  Granted, there's a whole bunch of stuff you generally install at once, but then after that you keep adding things, and just to switch out to the full Administrator account to do that as you need to is irritating.
3. You don't get as good a feel for when the UAC prompt comes up this way.

I suspect a lot of the reflex-dismissal issues are due to people developing that habit from reflexively killing unwanted pop-ups of all kinds.  Pop-up advertising is no longer the plague it used to be, thank goodness, so maybe with time people will realize that a UAC box is not something you can just swat away unthinkingly.  And on a properly-configured Vista system, it comes up rarely enough and with enough forewarning (such as when you click on a UAC-branded button in the Control Panel) that there's plenty of ways to retrain yourself.

That brings up another argument: Why should a user have to train themselves to this?  Possibly for the same reason they have to train themselves not to disconnect a hard drive when it's being used, or not to simply turn the power off to their computer from the wall switch instead of shutting down cleanly.  It's not the most elegant solution possible, but it's a compromise that Microsoft adopted to allow people to retain at least some modicum of their old (and, admittedly, bad) computing habits without exposing themselves to danger.  They can use it well, use it badly, or not use it at all -- each with its own attendant benefits and risks.

Is it possible to become inappropriately acclimated to UAC warnings?  Sure.  It's also possible to drive through STOP signs and red traffic lights, and anyone who's done that more than a few times knows that it tends to be a self-correcting issue.

Ed Bott has an excellent breakdown, step-by-step, of the "Vista upgrade loophole" that you've probably heard a great deal about by now.

Most of it is typical echo-chamber* stuff, and most of the reports I've read so far have gotten the basic facts wrong. The Setup feature they're describing isn't a loophole at all. It's a perfectly legal workaround for an amazingly stupid technical restriction that Microsoft imposes on upgraders.

... The fact that you have to use a kludgey workaround to use the license you've purchased and are legally entitled to is Microsoft's fault.

(Ed likes to use the term "echo chamber" to describe the way a bad opinion or faulty observation can be picked up on by one member of the blogonetosphere and then just echoed unthinkingly by everyone else.  It's the kind of thing I try to avoid whenever I can, even if sometimes the temptation to just say "Right!" is terribly strong.

Microsoft gadfly Joanna Rutkowska is at it again.  She's reported what she believes to be a security hole in Vista's UAC -- the fact that application installers automatically run with elevated privileges, and cannot be run in a reduced-user context.  This prompted a reply by none other than Mark Russinovich (now with Microsoft officially), who pointed out that there is indeed a weakness -- however subtle - in UAC that allows for a possible, but difficult-to-execute, exploitation.  Rutkowska, however, isn't amused, and considers the fact that installers run as admin to be defective by design.

In theory, this means that someone could deliver a trojan to you branded as a benign application and trick you into installing it -- something that was possible in XP as well, but which hasn't been made any less difficult in Vista because of UAC.  My question is, is this the sort of attack that UAC should try to protect people from?  I'm not sure it is, since detecting and blocking trojans are more properly the province of an antispyware or antivirus application.

I would like to see the option to run an installer without privilege elevation, but for me it's not a deal-breaker.  Also, at this point, there's really no mechanism to allow an installer to tell the OS that it doesn't need to run as admin, but perhaps this will spur Microsoft to build in such a functionality later on.  "Why should a Tetris installer be allowed to load kernel drivers?" Rutkowska points out, and in that respect I'm in agreement.  I just don't think this means UAC is worthless / owned / compromised / etc.

I've observed some odd behavior with the search indexer in Windows Vista, especially in the way it behaves with Outlook 2007.  Sometimes I'll find that certain messages are simply not showing up in a search, and when I open Outlook's indexing status I find it has gotten stuck, like so:

The number never updates.  This leads me to believe the way the search indexer interfaces with Outlook 2007 is still a little buggy.

There are some other odd behaviors.  On a whim, I tried to rebuild the index and disabled Outlook from being indexed, so I could see how long it would take to only index one set of items (the Start menu).  When I started the rebuild, it reincluded Outlook anyway.

I suspect this is an issue for Office 2007 SP1, but I'm going to post about this peculiar behavior over at the MSDN forums and see what turns up.  I know other people have had problems with the way the indexer "talks" to Office 2K7 and vice versa, so I ought not to be alone here.

I feel a little foolish for not taking picture of this earlier, but when I was having my issues with my other video card, I checked out the Reliability and Performance monitor just to get an idea of how those crashes were affecting the system stability rating.  The chart was nosediving like the stock market after a heavy selloff.

Now, after switching back to the ATI card and a stable driver, here's what it looks like:

I had a hard time not feeling smug.

My tech-journalist comrade Scot Finnie has decided to forego Vista for the Mac as his OS and machine of choice.  The article's got a lot of meat to chew on -- mainly in the form of his quest for replacement apps, not all of them obvious, for the Mac.

I like the Mac.  I've said before that I'd probably be using one now if I wasn't already a PC person.  At some point, if the cash is there, I'd like to add a Mac to my arsenal of hardware -- but right now, the work I do is firmly PC-centric, both because of my habits and my inclinations.  It's not something I'm inherently against; I'm just more comfortable with sticking with what I know, and helping others get the most out of it.

The problems I was having with Vista and my NVIDIA video cards appear to be a known factor.

The problems with the early ATI drivers on Vista were problematic enough to make me believe the card itself was defective: the system would freeze, hard, with no crash dump and no emergency video recovery (one of the neat new things about Vista's graphics subsystem).  The NVIDIA GeForce card ran, but slowly, and every other time I rebooted it would BSOD.  Eventually it would BSOD every time I rebooted, and finally just stopped booting altogether.  I was tempted to believe any number of things were wrong, up to and including the possibility that the video card simply didn't like multi-processor systems.

After new ATI drivers arrived directly from Microsoft, I switched back to ATI and haven't had a problem since.

Anyone who's used Windows Vista for more than a few minutes knows that even an administrative user will run in non-admin mode.  If you want to launch a CMD prompt, you have to right-click on the icon for it and select "Run as administrator."

That's a few too many clicks for my taste, so I scratched around for a faster way to do such things.  One of the things I found is that if you type a command in the Start button's launch menu and press Ctrl-Shift-Enter to launch it, that command will launch in administrative mode (after a UAC confirmation).  Try it with cmd -- you'll get an admin-level CMD prompt.

And so now word is circulating of a dangerous exploit for Windows Vista.  A kernel-level driver attack?  A buffer-overrun issue?

Nope -- it's apparently a way to exploit Vista's Speech Control system (which, by the way, is disabled by default) by tricking the user into going to a website that plays soundfiles crafted to trigger commands.  This is of course assuming that the speech-recognition system even recognizes the commands as spoken by a voice it's not been trained on in the first place.

Somehow I'm not sure this falls into the same category as stack-smashing.