Vista Help! What is going on!!

Ok, Ive just bought a new Laptop, which comes with vista (Ive lost my windows XP disk!, so i am finally forced to use it for "windows things" :( . Im gonna be installing Ubuntu on the second half of the disk later for my main stuff (really NOT looking forward to that! but should rock on this when setup though :)

However i hoped as this new Lappy comes with vista and is all-powerfull i would have less problems...
(Ive tried vista before on my other (vista barely-capable) PC for a few months and eventually went back to XP when nothing seemed to work right)

Ive been using it for 10 minutes and have already got problem NO1:

Here it is: (this would work first time in XP)
My computer > map network drive > x:=\\lin-server\progshare
"My computer > map network drive > u:=\\lin-server\utils
Ok, fine that worked after a few are you sures
got my file windows showing all my files.
however, when i try and run any exe or install from eg.:
"u:\avg\avginstall.exe"
i get:
(yes)
then it says:

Eh?!?!?

[edit] But it can obviously see them as it lets me copy them to my documents???!!!

If you can run the installer from Documents, then its a permissions problem... This sorta happened when I tried to access my XP partition and I had to change permissions for that.

No big deal really! :P

Dabz

Could be :/ where do i find these permissions?
Accessing mapped drives and running exes is essential to me.

If it is indeed permissions, why cant it say "permission denied" rather than "not found"?

Also i dont get why i need local permissions to do stuff on a remote share anyway. Surely these permissions should be on the host drive not the guest (which they are (all can view/execute))

Argggh! This is insanity! I cant seem to get any kind of permission for this universally simple task.

I still cannot run stuff off my network drives. Does anyone know what could be causing this or where i "tick the box"?, the other problems i can live with i guess as i dont need it for that stuff, but all my data + b3d dev stuff are stored on network drives.

In its defense though, the interface is very pretty and nice to use (i couldnt use all the eyecandy before).

Lol i guess no posts means that theres either theres a bug, no-one knows or no ones using it :/

anyone got an full version (not oem) of xp pro for sale?

Maybe switching off "User Account Control" would help...

or switch the installer to XP compatible mode and rightclick - run as admin

that normally helps to get around this.

But I agree with berten: disable UAC until Vista SP1 is released!

Tried it (run as admin), No Joy.

I havent quite worked out where the actual setting for UAC is yet (other than yes and no!), but why do i have to turn off the whole feature??? this totally súcks.

Great! got rif of it by disabling UAC completely, so much for that fine "security" feature.
There wernt even any options to trim it to my needs,
simply do you want to use it:

- Yes
- No

What would have been much better would be:

Do you want to use it:

- Yes reccommended (im a moron)
- Yes but exclude my lan/subnet/list of hosts (Advanced) (this would suit me fine if anyone knows a way)
- Yes but if I tell you to run something MYSELF as admin(directly, with a clickatyclick) just bloody do it! (Self assured)
- No Run anything you like weather i tell you to or not (XP Classic)

So uhh... did it work then?

There is no other option beside yes and no, as UAC is active on a very low level. Its not some kind of "just another guard feature" like Windows Defender.
Due to its problems, its normally suggested for advanced users to disable it until MS has fixed the UAC problems.

welcome in vista world. format.

Yeah, kind of, but it seems to take ages to open the file after you click run-->yes i wait several minutes for the setup box sometimes (almost as if its copying the file locally before running it!).

Also i notice ZIP file access is very very slow. it took almost a whole minute to open a zipfile and almost another 8-10 minutes to unpack it. It was only about 40 meg with prehaps 10-20 files in it. This is even worse when unpacking from a nwk. drive.

The other problem im having is IE7, it crashes (locks up) constantly.

ditch vista

I would love to, but have ultimately lost my XP pro disk. (plus i gotta learn this horror fully at some point for my day job in IT support . Thankfully no one has upgraded on a corporate level yet as it doesnt work with several of the company systems!

Vista now uses the NTLMv2 protocol which can cause problems with OS that dont support it XP/Linux. You can change this back to the NTLMv1 quite easily in Vista Business/Enterprise/Ultimate with the group policy editor, not so with the Basic/Home/Premium Editions.

Here are a few links of interest.

http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS4434907782.html

http://forums.cnet.com/5208-12546_102-0.html?forumID=133&threadID=236402&messageID=2597573

http://www.windowsecurity.com/articles/Managing-Windows-Vista-Group-Policy-Part1.html

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issues/2007/04/CableGuy/

http://forums.cnet.com/5208-12546_102-0.html?forumID=133&threadID=263845&messageID=2582679

If you need more search on LLTD and NTLM.

One more thing what make and model of laptop is it and have all the vendor updates been applied (ACER use a custom data encrytion program on their Vista Premium laptops that can cause D.E.P. with certain programs without the updates).

Thats good to know thanks :)
Its fujitsu and yes they have.

Heres a list of books that I find helpful with regards to Vista.

Windows Vista: The Missing Manual by David Pogue (Pogue Press/O'Reilly)
Windows Vista: Inside Out by Ed Bot/Carl Siechert/Craig Stinson (MS Press)
Windows Vista: Administarator's Pocket Consultant by William R. Stanek (MS Press)

Got these on order but looks good
Mastering Windows Vista Business: Ultimate, Business, and Enterprise by Mark Minasi , John Paul Mueller (John Wiley & Sons) Administering Windows VistaTM Security: The Big Surprises (Mark Minasi Windows Administrator Library)
Group Policy: Management, Troubleshooting, and Security: For Windows VistaTM , Windows® 2003, Windows®

I'm pretty sure it does actually. How else can it execute it on a local machine...


This is supposedly fixed in SP1. In the meantime, use something actually useful, like WinRAR.


I have troubles with the 64bit version, but never had any problems at all with 32bit Vista's IE7... also it's really picky with programs that install plugins... be sure you have the LATEST Flash Player and switch off anything unrelated to IE7.

I'm buying a Dell laptop soon and I'm going to argue the case for not installing any goddamn OS on it before they ship it.

I have a feeling I will lose that argument.

Dell ship Linux laptops. Just get one of those.

"Dell ship Linux laptops. Just get one of those."

I thought they stopped doing that years ago?

I thought theyd only recently started it,
Dell: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6610901.stm
Hp: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3518558.stm
Lenovo: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6933859.stm

I had another extremely annoying problem today with vista. Me and my girlfriend are playing co-op of baulders gate and the vista machine refuses to talk to the other pc at all. I have dissabled everything, firewals, UAC, defender, all the security i could find and it still wont work. I even got a simple crossover cable between the 2 pcs and set them with a basic ip each. The vista machine could ping itself and the XP machine but the Xp machine could only ping itself, not the vista machine.

I eventually found it, its called "network discovery" (on off)
ARGH!!! why the hell cant they simply call it "Un-Hide PC and respond to ping requests?" (yes, no)

It seems to me that vista isnt more secure than XP at all as you have to turn off all this so called security simply to use it and there doesnt appear to be any proper options, just simple Yes or NOs

hmm.. so it looks like dell are still doing Linux PC's (they have been doing these since 98'ish). I read some where a few years back that they stopped shipping Linux with their PC's due to lack of demand.

Just one question with your laptop. Does it connect to your internet/lan with Vistas own software or does it use a vendor (laptop manufactures own) specific software (it does cause some headaches I had this problem with a wireless lan and the vendors software was the root of the problem).

Just out of curiosity look in the control panel for Administrative tools->Local Security policy and in the Local Policies->Security Options in the left hand pane in the right hand pane there should be Network Access: LAN Manager authenication doubble click it to bring up a dialog and change the setting to Send LM & NTLM - use NTLMv2 session if negotiated.

There is no Administrative tools->Local Security policy on my machine. Are you sure its under admin tools?

Ive just noticed skype doesnt work either, some error about date encoding or something. Also my wireless card keeps becomming disabled, when this happens it wont re-enable at all except a reboot.

I chatted with Dell pre-sales today and they confirmed that the laptop I want is not available with anything other than 3 different flavours of Vista. There is no option to have it pre-installed with XP and there is no option to have the laptop supplied sans-OS.

Which is just plain ridiculous if you ask me. Whatever happened to giving the customer what they wanted?

"There is no Administrative tools->Local Security policy on my machine."
I thought so. The above alows you to customize UAC and is only avaliable in Buisness/Enterprise/Ultimate.

Never used skype can't see the point of it. But a search on the net may prove fruitful.

It took me about a day to get Vista and XP to talk to each other with UAC enabled (with help from the net and the books I mentioned above). I got Ubuntu to talk to it in a fashion about two days (its a samba problem and its best to use CIFS (I just can't be bothered to set it up properly).

Look into LLTD (Link-Layer Topology Discovery) update for Windows XP.

I've used Vista about 9 months now and still only scrached the surface.

If you need to activate the disabled Administrator account (if Basic/Home/Premium support it).

In the start menu find the Command Promt Box, right click it and select run as administrator (thats if UAC is enabled).

Type in the dos box
net user administrator password (replace "password" with your password)

then type

net user administrator /active:yes

you will eventually get to grips with Vista it just takes time, patience, reading and a lot of searching.

Thanks Dawlane, Im slowly getting there.

Ive got home premium version. Which is **aparently** a lot better than the other "home" versions. Still no "WOW!" yet (quite a few "Wtf!"s though :)

Lol its taken me about a day too get vista to talk to my server and im still not 100% sure what i changed, although to be fair it took me just as long to get ubuntu to talk to SMB before i knew what i was doing.
I just wish it would stop crashing randomly quite so often!

I finally got skype working, by logging into the linux version and entering a date of birth!!! It appears the windows version crashes on vista if the date is not set :/ Then as soon as it lets you log in to the windows one you need to uncheck "show my date and time".... Weird.

Still cant work out why the wifi card keeps greying out, it works fine in ubuntu so is certainly not a HW problem. I have the right drivers and everything installed but still causes probs occasionally. When it does, i notice the network connections window takes about 5 minutes to load which is annoying. The connection cannnot be enabled again until i reboot.

If I'm right and fujitsu are using there own connection methods, try turning of the auto search for wireless networks and selecting your prefered network, this should solve the problem.

My opinion of those people who say UAC/File Premissions is a waste of time or turn it off, is that they haven't the patience or just can't be ars**d to do the research or spend money and buy books on the subject. MS would be forgiven of all sins if they acutally bundled a propper manual with Vista (hell all there OS's, but then thats how they make money, making you buy additional books that only give you half of what you need to know).

With regards to the skype issue, I do know that they added a new feature that was many aimed at domains (something about syncing time and time zones). You could only change the Time Zone but not the actual time and date (some sort of security issue I believe).

I am one of those people who think that UAC is a good thing and one of M$ better ideas. I took to Vista almost straight away ( I think it must have reminder me of Mac OS X (wonder if apple will sue m$ or will it be the other way round? ).

You can run most pre-Vista software as long as it doesn't use/install any pre-Vista codecs (Explore spits the dummy out and gives you Rundll32 errors when it try's to create thumbnail images of media files. You wil also get a solutions box with something like Intel ViiV Update caused a crash (if you get this on a machine that doesn't use Intel chipsets then it is a doddgy codec))

I totally agree, access controls are a great thing when it works properly and is not too intrusive and is easily invokable.
Take the permissions thats built in to linux/unix for example, you need to supply the SU password each time something outside the account needs changing. Its just so simple to understand and it works well, especially in SE-linux like ubuntu where there is no useable 'root' account, only a list of users who are allowed SUDO access.
Windows has been screaming for proper controls for years. Now it finally has it, they make it seem needlessly overcomplicated and puts everyone off using it.

I've had network driver related problems ever since Vista existed - while XP runs fine as always. It's either the drivers or Vista, it's too hard to tell where the fault is exactly. With the number of driver updates I've been through, I'm guessing a this stage it's Vista.

There is an update that isn't available through Microsoft update yet that may or may not help. I installed it yesterday and noticed no negative side effects ;] But this was recommended to me through Problem Reports and Solutions and is related somewhat to network issues, so maybe give it a shot:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941649