This option is already in Vista, both for admin and non admin accounts. Check your local security policies. It is in Windows 7 as well of course. But they have changed UAC slightly in 7 so you can set the level of prompts it should give you. (All the time, as Vista, only for certain OS changes etc). Also you can already run like the setup you explain in XP. But then you need to run as a non admin user and you will have to "sudo" everytime you need to run something in admin mode. This is also not the default install behavior (but if you are a Linux user you should be no stranger to tweaking and modifying your system properly as it comes with the turf) Vista and Windows7 automatically "sudos" you and by default runs your user in a non privilieged mode (albeit in the administrator group, you have 2 secutiry tokens, very handy), that's the difference. Overall the security model in Windows is better than in Linux (without additions of SE or some other ACL framework). Just because more Viruses are found in Windows doesn't not mean the core is more or less securable.

You sound like you have a very weird setup. And the issues you present are very abstract so hard to give any advice on. But all to his own. I run a little of all OS:es, but if there is one OS that has a tendency to easily break, it is my linux/ubuntu.

What exactly sucks so badly?

I think the web OS, if you want to call it that, I wouldn't, and the desktop OS will be side by side. Used for completetly different things. On the server side we will always need a good OS, this is bascally the same OS as the desktop OS. Many people prefer (and should rightfully prefer) to run their apps locally, with only the services in the "cloud". This can be done nicely today, what is lacking is a good way to distribute processing when needed and make that easy and secure. I don't think the desktop OS will go anywhere in a long time, and I really despise using web applications today, they are slow, usually with a very bad UI and are totally dependent on having a connection. I mean just a simple data management UI on the web where you want drag and drop really looks like something from the 80:ies UI experience wise. (Yes you can make it looks nicer through silverlight/flash/javafx/javascript, but guess what, that's local computation..) Even the new mesh technology uses a "local" only story for development. That is you have your web runtime locally in your desktop OS, which handles all the fuzz with the "cloud" for you (well, that is the idea at least, it is still in tech preview so I hope they will get it right). I really hope the trend will turn towards rich local applications that can use cloud based states and data through synchronization. That way all processing is done locally but the data and state is manage centrally. To centralize things is usually a really bad idea and mostly only appeals to IT admins because of the ease of maintanance. It is also a hard problem to solve instead of distributing the computation power to where it makes sense. Also running a web host is not such a simple thing. An OS's main responsibility is to abstract and provide access to the hardware, may it be a camera, harddrive or a graphics card and any other peripheral device. That's the IO part, the other important responsibility is to schedule tasks and provide a way to switch between them. Today we have also added a networking responsibility to it compared to 10 years ago. What in this abstraction could the web OS do without? As I see it none, thus a desktop OS will be there, but the apps might work more fluently and hopefully will migrate its state (in a user controlled fashion) between the machines the user wants to use. Cheers, Niclas

Your cyclic XP SP3 reboot could come from this http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953356/en-us Especially if your machine come from a retail install and now a clean install by yourself.

It is surely not the Vista OS that is the problem, that is just faulty logic, you have millions of users without this problem, I am one of them, I have faster copying in Vista generally due to better cache handling. My guess would be either a failing harddrive or that it has gone into a wrong PIO/DMA state or that you don't have the proper driver. If you check in the device mananger under your IDE or SATA controller what does it say?

If you think Adobe the CS3 suite is not resource hungry, than you haven't used it. I can barely make it run at all as soon as I have started Flash CS3, it is such a hog I can have 4 visual studios running for the same amount of resources. It is also one of the most difficult programs I have tried installing when their licensing does not work properly and we even had to call to get it registered before it started working (locks you out after 30 days). The Adobe update is even worse, if it even happens to start just because you start one of the program your computer will totally bog down as it takes a full CPU doing whatever it does, and every now and then the updates fail to install. I don't recoqnise at all the problems you have had with MS update (had one problem just recently where nvidia drivers weren't updating properly, but that's the first time I had problem.). Visual studio has alot less flaws than for instance eclipse does and the editor in adobe flash is a joke, 30 years of computing that's what they came up with as an editor for action script? You are doing something wrong if you have all those problems I would say. that's where you should start looking...

You didn't really put it there, the system did, it is just trying to protect itself from people yanking the file out when they shouldn't. Normally you delete these files by disabling paging and disabling hibernate. Deleting the hibernate file can be extremely hazardous as it might contain data you actually want. Not sure how the security tab looks like in all versions of Vista, but in Ultimate you have an advanced button, when you open that you will have an "Owner" tab, where you can take ownership.

You can easily accomplish the same thing in the security tab, found in the file properties. But if it wasn't intuitive that you weren't the owner and that was the problem, then well it wasn't really unless you know a few good reasons as to why you cannot delete files in NFTS/Windows.

I would suggest download the Windows Debugging Tools and use windbg to open up the minidump that is created at the crash time to figure out which driver is causing the problem and fix it. Normally after a BSOD you will get a dialog in Vista telling you that Windows crashed, and in he dialog you will get links to 2 or 3 files, 2 of them are just collected environment info, one of them is the .dmp file. Open it in the windbg type .symfix !analyze -v This will take awhile as the symbols will be download for you OS setup, and then finally a report will spit out that usually gives you a stack trace location the problem. If not, you will bave to read up on some more advanced topics of windows debugging. Cheers

Hello, In what way is usability worse in Vista than XP? For a Tablet PC Vista should be a much better choice as the Tablet functionality is actually included in the OS. For XP you need a Tablet version to get all the features out of your Tablet. I for one found Vista a bit odd at first, but after about 3 days I realized the usability was actually better from the point of view that I find stuff I need faster, mainly due to the search function in the start menu. Now I find XP very award and hard to work with, actually frustrating to work with as getting things done is much harder. Anyways. Good luck

This is really interesting, could you give some pointer as to what Java can do that .Net can't? So far most things I have come across are usually smoother .Net due to better tooling and the language itself seems generally more powerful, but that is to be expected as it is a language that came after Java.

That is your prerogative and I would say your loss. Could you be more specific as to why Vista sucks and perhaps we could help you resolve those issues. Because you will really have a much smoother ride doing 64 bit computing in Vista than XP, take it from me I have done both.

What was the problem more specifically? You can submit those problem to connect and perhaps they will get resolved in the future.

Why do you want to like Linux? If I were you I would bother less about which OS you are using and more about a working computer whatever OS gets you there. I myself like working computers

Not sure what you are getting at, the Vista installer is having less questions and is several times better than the XP installer. It handles imagining through the Windows PE environment and installation is at least as smooth as XP.

I have been running Vista 64bit for about half a year now. I have had almost no problems at all. I have had problems with audio drivers for my Creative sound card, but that's about it. I would really chose Vista 64 instead of XP 64 as the compatibility is much better and the WoW64 layer is smoother and the security is also better. To know which edition to chose (32bit or 64bit, Vista or XP) you really need to look at what hardware you will be using. I am a very new system, I have all the latest version most programs I use (which makes them Vista compatible). Most programs have update for Vista. My hardware is as follow ASUS Formula II (Nvidia 780i chipdset) 8GB memory Q9450 Creative SB X-Fi Nvidia 9800GTx And I run only newer software.