On Sun, Jul 24, 2011 at 9:15 PM, vefatica <> wrote:
> On Sun, 24 Jul 2011 20:49:02 -0400, DMcCunney <> wrote:
>
> |---Quote---
> |> It is possible to turn off UAC and DEP ... right ... how are they done? *I want
> |> to run everything as administrator and with admin privileges without ever having
> |> to respond to a prompt ... possible?
> |---End Quote---
> |Probably, but why?
> |
> |Bear in mind why Vista/Win7 went the route they did. *Would you always
> |run as root in Linux?
>
> Yes I would. *And I did for the few years I used Linux (and before that,
> Coherent).
I've been a Unix admin, and spent the odd few hours locking down the
system to make sure people could not casually *get* root. The notion
gives me hives. (My experience has been that it gives hives to anyone
who deals with *nix for a living. Hobbyists doing it for fun haven't
had the experience of "You shoot yourself in someone *else's* foot"
that you see too often on true multi-*user* systems.)
One of the OSes I have installed is a Linux variant called Puppy
Linux. I got it because I was looking for a distro that would run
acceptably on low end hardware. I'd been given an old (circa 2002)
Fujitsu Lifebook by a friend who had upgraded but loved the old box
and wanted it to go to a good home, not a dumpster. She warned me it
was "slow slow slow".
It has an 867mhz Transmeta CPU, a 40GB UDMA 4 HD, and a whopping 256MB
of RAM, of which 16MB are grabbed off the top by the CPU for code
morphing. It came to me running WinXP SP2. Gee. No surprise it was
slow. XP wants 512MB to think about running.
Puppy is reasonably peppy on the machine as long as you stick with the
bundled apps, all of which were chosen for small size. Go beyond that
and things change rapidly. Firefox 4, for example, takes 45 seconds
just to load an initialize with a minimal configuration, and is
perceptibly slow when up. (Click a menu choice. Wait a few seconds
for the click to be recognized and acted upon...)
For reasons that elude me, the developer who created it made a Puppy a
single user system where you *always* ran as root. The mechanism for
creating other IDs had been ripped out. Puppy gets away with it
because it *is* a single user system, and hey, MS-DOS and Windows had
the same "The logged in user is administrator with all powers." up
through XP.
But I also have Ubuntu installed on the box, and spend most time in
it. It's a little slower, but still quite usable, It's a lot closer
to a standard Linux distro, and I don't *want* to run as root all the
time. There are simply too many quirks and potential problems when
you do.
With Vista and Win7 MS switched to "The logged in user is a Power
User, not Administrator", and must take extra steps to *become*
administrator." Personally, I think this is the tack MS *should* have
taken much earlier, like around the time they switched to the NTFS
file system that supported the idea of multiple users with different
permissions. I've spent too much time professionally cleaning up
messes on company systems that would not have occurred if the user had
not been running as Administrator.
Win7 has streamlined things, so it's a lot less obnoxious about
enforcing things than Vista was. The restrictions are still there,
but easier to deal with.
> |---Quote---
> |> In response to one thing Rex said ... faster ... I'll believe it when I see it.
> |> I have XP trimmed down to 12 system processes (10 if I stop the SMTP server I
> |> run as a service, and DiskKeeper), 17 processes right after a logon. *It's fast
> |---End Quote---
> |I have 68 processes running in XP at the moment, on a 2.6ghz CoreDuo
> |box with 4GB RAM. * It's fast enough, thank you.
> 68 processes ... wow! I'll bet 30 of them are the OS doing things you don't
> need or want.
You'd *lose*. I started in computers on an IBM mainframe, and worked
my way across and down. I have a decent idea of what is running and
why, and always have. There may be things running I could live
without, but the system is fast enough that I have no reason to expend
additional time and energy to identify them. This is not a hard-core
gaming system when I want to squeeze out that last few FPS for Quake
III Deathmatch. It's a multi-purpose general use desktop, where the
goal is "fast enough", not "as fast as possible".
> |*It takes a few minutes to boot, but I don't especially care, because
> | I reboot only when a software upgrade requires it, I'm fiddling with
> | hardware, or I boot |into Linux instead. *Most of the time, it's simply
> | on 24/7.
> Same here. *Typically I buy a computer and turn it off 6-8 years
> later when I buy a new one. *At home I'm at 87 days uptime. *At work I was
> nearing 200 days until last week when a crew excavated their way right through
> my building's power supply line.
I'm not fanatical. I shut down and reboot frequently enough. But I'm
not one of the folks who always shuts down and powers off at night and
turns on and boot up in the morning.
And the current system is built from components and has been upgraded
in place for years. The case is the only remaining original part.
> |---Quote---
> |> (and it does all I want). *In my experience, every new OS from MS is slower than
> |> the previous one, given the same hardware (and does more things that I don't
> |> want).
> |---End Quote---
> |It's the "same hardware" that is the sticking point. *I'm willing to
> |bet the vast majority of Windows users do not upgrade an existing copy
> |of Windows. *They get a new version of Windows because they get a
> |whole new machine that has the new version pre-installed.
>
> I figure my 2.5 year-old 2.66 GHz quad-core is good for a few more years.
Probably. Clock speed isn't the usual limiting factor. Most home
systems are I/O bound, not compute bound, and the CPU spends most time
in a wait state waiting for I/O to complete. As the wag put it, "All
machines wait at the same speed."
> So what about the "upgrade" route? *It would be appealing because (I hope) it
> would respect some of my customizations (OS in c:\, profiles in e:\Users, all
> software over whose installation I had control in d:\) and, of course, all the
> software installations themselves. *I've always preferred new installs figuring
> upgrades left a lot of fat hanging around. *But I'm getting tired of doing it.
I believe it would respect things, but haven't played enough with Win7
to state definitely.
Here, I essentially have three physical drives, with 4 logical file
systems. I multi-boot 2K, XP, and Ubuntu. Those live on two
partitions of one drive. The second drive is the master data drive
shared by everything. My My Documents folder actually lives there,
and is seen as My Documents by both 2K and XP. The third drive holds
my software repository and is storage for stuff I don't necessarily
need access to. It occasionally gets swapped for a different drive if
I'm doing particular things.
> Win7 uses "Users" instead of "Documents and Settings", right? *What about
Yes.
> "Program Files"? *Have they switched to a name without spaces? *I simply refuse
> to deal with having to quote names.
See Rex's comment.
Personally, file names with spaces is the the way this particular OS
does things, so it's what I do when I'm on this particular OS.
Quoting names have never been a real imposition for me. As OS quirks
go, it's trivial.
And Program Files is split in two. Current systems are all 64bit
CPUs, but software is playing catchup. So there is a section for 64
bit stuff, and an X86 section for legacy 32 bit code. (There is a 32
bit edition of Win7 that probably doesn't have that split, but most
folks will have no reason to get it.)
And see thedave's comments about Win7. He's exactly right.
______
Dennis
