I noticed as I was installing this build that it was significantly faster than any of the previous builds, took a grand total of 35 minutes!, and I had no problems during. Afterwards I did have some strange fonts show up in the interface, and you can check those out in the picture album.
The machine that I am currently using is an Acer TravelMate 250, it has 512mb ram, and a 100gb hard drive. I am in the process of taking the ram up to 1gb, but it has not yet arrived.
The laptop has a few specialized buttons above the keyboard, some can be programmed and a couple are for specific functions. This laptop has a builtin 802.11b nic and it is enabled or disabled via a button. In Windows XP I would install the application from Acer to enable the button and then I could turn it on or off, not sure why I would want to turn it off but oh well.
Windows Vista has a new security feature called User Account Control, I believe. The idea is that previous builds of Windows allowed the main user to be the administrator, which from a usability standpoint was great, from a security standpoint this is probably why so many people have viruses and spyware. UAC prevents certain things from happening that could potentially be unsafe.
Now I mention this because during the install of this application UAC popped up and asked me to approve the access, which I did. Which you would think would be enough, but after the install the wireless nic still wasn’t functioning. Turns out the application copies some files onto the hard drive to enable this feature in addition to several others, so I botted into Windows XP to see what files I was supposed to have.
There were three files missing from Vista pertaining to the wireless nic, and doing a straight file copy raised the UAC prompt again saying I needed to allow the access, which I did. I promptly realized that those three files weren’t copied, so I selected just them, and receieved a message that said I didn’t have the right security credentials to copy the files.
This made no sense to me, so I disabled UAC and rebooted, copied the files with no problem, and rebooted. I now have wireless enabled, it just seemed odd to me to have to go through that in order to configure a device.
But I must say vastly more secure than the way it used to be.
Get ready here comes 5472!!!
Jeff Patton - Assistant Director of IT 