Ramblings of a Coder's Mind

Microsoft is usually eager to release updates to its products. I have been seeing Vista SP2 news and downloadable links all over the internets. Release Candidates have been around for a while now but I never got any of them because I didn’t want to spend an hour or so on the update (that’s how long SP1 took to install) and then possibly have to do it again when the final SP2 comes out. I was just waiting for Microsoft to push SP2 through Windows Update.

Microsoft has come up with the RTM for Vista SP2. They have asked manufacturers to start shipping with Vista SP2 until 7 comes out. But they seem to want to hold off the release (for some reason not clear to me) until the original release estimate they had given, the end of Q2 (end of June).

May be it has something to do with what Bill Veghte had to say..

“If you’re just starting your testing of Vista, with the release candidate and the quality of that offering, I would switch over and do your testing on the release candidate, and use that going forward.”

- Bill Veghte, Senior Vice President for Windows Business @ Tech Ed 2009

So I’m guessing Microsoft wants to push Windows 7 further. They are marketting it towards that set of population which didn’t like Vista, either because of the Mojave factor or its “high” hardware requirements (mostly the former I presume). As for organizations, if XP legacy is an issue, surely Windows 7′s XP Mode is there to help ;)

I still feel Vista doesn’t get its due credit, may be not as bad as Windows ME but Vista does deserve more credit. Most techies will tell you how much they love Vista but most laymen users generally prefer XP. I for one haven’t had many compatibility issues, nothing Compatibility Mode didn’t solve.

I like Windows 7 but at least for now, I shall still be in love with Windows Vista despite my systems having already moved to Windows 7. For its time, it was a truly great OS. It had tid bits of features that gave users a better UX and simultaneously had showstoppers to provide the WOW effect ;)

The one last machine I have on Vista is going to updated with SP2 tonight. I suggest you do the same :)

So finally I got bugged with UAC enough to switch it off a few weeks back. Not all of it though. Just the module for approval from an admin and the elevation without prompting. Here is how you can do it.

Click Start > Type “local” and enter (to open Local Security Policy) > Local Policies > Security Options > Browse down to the set of UAC controls.

Now I disabled the “User Account Control: Admin Approval Mode for the Built-in Administrator account” and set the “User Account Control: Behavior of the elevation prompt for administrators in Admin Approval Mode” to “Elevate without prompting”

So far, everything is going quite smoothly. Then to disable the irritating red icon in your task bar open Windows Security Center (again start > type it out and select. Don’t you just love Windows Vista’s new search? ;)) then on the left side, select “Change the way Security Center alerts me.”
Now select “Don’t notify me and not show me the icon (not recommended)” I would have honestly liked an option saying, “Notify me (once) but don’t show me the icon.” Too bad we can’t do that.

And that is it. No more UAC asking you to accept every action you make. Yay for power users ;)

I had to reinstall vista once and so vista copied its already existing files into Windows.old like any other decent OS does. This was of course a move to help me keep the data I already had in C drive at that time.

Now that my work with it was done, I couldn’t delete it. UAC was constantly telling me I didn’t have the rights to do so. The sad part is that I am the administrator and those files aren’t of any use to me. I tried switching off UAC but that requires a reboot so I started searching for alternatives since Vista wouldn’t let me edit the rights directly either.

Thanks to Rotem for linking me to Tim Sneath’s MSDN blog which explains a method to reset rights over a folder.
The problem quite clearly is that Vista doesn’t remember which group holds rights to editing those folders/files.
The secret lies in two command-line utilities.

takeown is an old command which resets ownership of the mentioned file/folder while icacls is used to provide a group with the rights to that file/folder.

As Tim points out, you can create a batch file with the following two lines.

takeown /f %1 /r /d y
icacls %1 /grant administrators:F /t

It is imperative to note that the batch file needs to be run as an administrator. This can be done by right clicking the file and clicking on run as administrator.

You could also do what I did. Open command prompt in administrator mode (start > type “cmd” without quotes > right click > run as administrator), browse till the folder/file in question and then use the same two commands by substituting “%1″ with the name of the target file/folder.

Hopefully you were smart enough to figure out that you do need administrator rights to pull this off. So if you’re a script kiddie planning to pull off something on vista, this is not what you’re looking for.

So the next time you cannot delete a file in Windows Vista even though you have administrator rights, try using takeown and icacls ;)

I’m on Windows Vista Ultimate right now and here is what I feel. Its a really good OS since it performs quite well if you have a good box like mine (good being an understatement to most). But the problem is its extremely freakishly irritating rights system. I haven’t really looked around that much but I hate it when i have to confirm every rename 3 times. One for some permissions system and one whether I should allow this action by an “Unauthorized user” I hope they have a setting saying “Allow the administrator to do what he wants” because this is getting out of hand ¬¬.

Oh yes, the backup option in the disc backed up my Adobe settings but not my mIRC settings meaning I’m script-less :( All those weeks of work developing scripts to make my mIRC perfectly suited to my needs for nothing! I have to do it all from scratch. That’s the thing I’m most pissed at.

Despite all that, its an OS that I would like to use if MS doesn’t screw it up with its monthly changes in WGA type systems.

Update:

Veteran Microsoft reporter Paul Thurrott agreed, contending at the time that the implementation of UAC in Vista build 5342 is a “sad, sad joke” given the number of dialog boxes that one must wade through to do simple tasks. However, Thurrott appears to have retracted those comments, claiming in his Windows Vista Beta 2 review, that UAC had been “completely overhauled” and is “less annoying,” although he acknowledges that Microsoft is “still struggling to find a balance between security and annoyance.”

Looks like I’m not alone ;) Thank you Wikipedia!