Vista deludes itself into thinking driver upgrades are major changes

A FEATURE in Microsoft Vista means that something as small as swapping the video card or updating a device driver can trigger a total Vista deactivation.

According to APC mag, minor upgrades to your desktop will result in your PC going into "reduced functionality" mode, where you can't do anything but use the web browser for half an hour.

You'll then need to reapply to Microsoft to get a new activation code.

Hack, James Bannan noticed the flaw when he swapped over the graphics card on his Vista Ultimate box. A few days later he got a Windows Activation prompt and had to speak to a Microsoft customer service representative before he got all his functionality back and the feeling in his toes.

Wondering why he got the shut down request, Bannon obtained some tools from Microsoft which listed all the hardware changes on that machine since activation. Vista thought his disk controller had changed, so the graphics card change was the final change which tripped deactivation.

But Bannan had not changed his disk controller, all he had done was upgraded the Intel Matrix Storage Manager application. Vista reported this driver upgrade as a major hardware change event.

It appears that Microsoft Vista designers had not worked out that if you change device drivers it does not necessarily mean you have changed your hardware. It could be, as in Bannan's case, you have updated or changed the drivers and not the hardware.

This is quite common as some of the drivers which ship with Vista are out of date or not as good as what you can find on the manufacturer's web site.

Microsoft Windows 7 revealed

Still hesitating about the big move to Vista? Maybe you're best off waiting for Windows 7, the successor to Vista, which Microsoft is already hard at work on. Where's the proof? Long Zheng, the Australian hacker behind the blog istartedsomething, has posted a clip from what seems to be the first public demonstration of the forthcoming operating system. Sure, it's not scheduled to be released until 2010, but still, when it arrives, it'll be super neat-and well worth the wait! Let's cros our fingers that the software is not bloated as always since the kernel has been stripped down to only 25MB.

So what can be gleaned from the video? The portion Zheng highlights is a discussion of the Windows 7 core, which turns out to be a relatively lean machine. In it, engineer Eric Traut shows off a streamlined app called MinWin, not a product itself but probably the basis for future products, he points out. The Windows 7 source code is about 25MB on disk, an interesting comparison to the 4GB that the full Windows Vista takes up. Oh, and there's no graphical system yet, which explains the ASCII logo.

There's also an interesting walk through the history of Microsoft's operating systems. You knew Vista was OS 6, right? And that XP was 5, and NT 4.0 was 4, and Windows 3.1 ... well, you get the picture. If Windows 7 doesn't interest you, watch the clip for a quick walkthrough of Windows 2 and 1 as well.

Source: http://www.istartedsomething.com/20071019/eric-talk-demo-windows-7-minwin/

Microsoft Vista has a memory problem

MICROSOFT'S latest operating system, Vista is running out of memory faster than a politician in a corruption scandal.

According to users, the 'Out of Memory' error, which is the same as Terry Pratchett's 'out of cheese' error, is seriously stuffing up Vista's file handling.

The problem can be clearly seen when a user tries to copy 16,400 files or smaller groups of files that add up to 16,400 between reboots.

After you get the 'Out of Memory' message you will also suffer from menus and tabs disappearing within the Windows environment and even reboots and BSODs are reported.

The problem occurs where users are running Kaspersky security products, but it is not the software that is causing the problem. Other software also suffers but it seems that the Kaspersky software shows the error in its full glory.

The kicker is that despite Microsoft knowing about the problem for months it is not going to be fixed in SP1. Microsoft is currently offering a hotfix for the problem but you have to ask it nicely.

Users have also found some other file handling problems in Vista when it handles more than 1,500. A quick look at the memory use shows that it is causing serious spiking which does not go away until a reboot.