Scanning motherboard CD-ROm as I type

Jesus Christ the internet - and particularly this forum - are slow this afternoon.

This agrees with kalmar - one of the comments says

Yup. If the option isn't there, try the registry edit in the link above.

Does that not mean you need the PC on to hear anything from your bawx, though?

Just to confirm I had this trouble with Vista and fixed it by poking things.

So it's possible.

Aha! Working now. Cheers Bikster, had to fiddle with the line-in levels in "speakers", why the hell it'd be there instead of on the line-in settings I dunno

yes, as it always has been.

Welcome to the world of Vista. Today children we are going to look through the round window. Sadly UAC needs your permission to open the curtains...

Stage 1 of making Vista better, disable UAC it sucks large hairy nuts.

Yay for Dimrills new fully operational PC!

Anyone who didn't read Zardoz' last post in a mental Emperor Palpatine voice is banned.

There's absolutely no excuse for that.

Pfft - it's fine, man.

That's like saying Craster'.

So would you recommend YoYoTech, Dimmers? It was well packed, nicely built, etc etc? I might get one soon. It's either that or a new graphics card for my ancient Shuttle to drive my new monitor, but AGP cards are stupidly spendy -£40-50 on a card for a dying PC seems daft.

Yep, sound as a pound. Lovely cabling in t'case too.

Eugh. Why not just get one of these for a couple of quid?

I think you've just answered my question that I hadn't asked yet! Vista needs me to triple check EVERYTHING!! All I want to do is delete a photo.. don't make me tell you to do it 4 times!

Yeah, UAC is a bit nannying if you know what you're doing with a computer. I have it turned off.

But if you didn't know how to turn it off or what it was, then I suggest that you should probably leave it alone.

Every reviewed PC I have seen looks the same. I didn't think they were just doing that to score points either, it genuinely looked like they spent time before hand plotting out which way to send the wires etc.

I know it sounds silly, but things like cable ties aren't free and it all adds up. I had to buy 6 of them the other day from my local hardware shop. 8p each.

Cable work says a lot to me. It basically says "I care about what I'm building". Total PC gaming reviewed a Medion this month and no word of a lie your hamsters would have been proud to live in it. Total frickin rat's nest in there.

I've never turned UAC off. Coming from Unix it feels natural to require elevated priviledges for system operations. It's too chatty, and required too often, but both those things are better in Win7; they are transition issues I think.

As for cable ties, 10 years ago I spent £15 on an enormous tub of them from B&Q. So far they look like being a lifetime's supply.

Whence using VHP I had to turn UAC off because it was stopping media center from playing any of my Divx that were'nt certified WMA

Plus with all the tweaking and registry editing I do it was driving me up the wall.

I'm going solid state in a couple of weeks (well, that or Raptor) and I'm going to install Vista basic for DX10 gaming. It's worth it for G.O.W alone (I've seen it in DX9 vs 10 and there's no comparisson).

The filesystem virtualisation is an abortion that should never have happened; that only exists with UAC.

But I only turn it off temporarily to install a new version of TVersity. I like my user accounts controlled. It's about time developers started being forced to take this stuff seriously.

Of course, any app that's written in a sensible manner - namely that it stores user data in user locations - won't ever need to invoke the filesystem virtualisation anyway.

What about apps that want to share data - and not just a little bit - across user profiles+? Like all of ours?

There is no official way to do this*. Even C:\ProgramData invokes it. The only workaround is to have your installer create a directory and allow Full Control rights to Everyone. Which is shit.

Especially when part of the reason you're doing this is to stop using HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE (to share small amounts), which you're not supposed to do any more**.

Edit: Anyway, my point - well written apps won't invoke it, faulty apps will cause all sorts of really weird issues as different versions of files are silently created all over the place, without actually solving the problem.

+ This includes "a logged-in user" and "a service running as SYSTEM, with no logged-in user".
* Wasn't, when we were tearing our hair out. Don't know about know, because we don't need to worry until they move the goalposts again.
** But can, if your installer modifies its permissions, it turned out after the person doing investigation here decided you can't, so wrote a registry replacement layer.

That sounds like how I'd expect it to work, tbh. If you want to share data, create a shared directory. Can you not create a group for your programs?

Sharing data across user profiles, but only on that machine? Can't really see why you'd want to, but I can accept that if you do, there's no decent solution for it.

Note that access to HKLM is virtualised under Vista, too.

Having to set permissions as well, though? It's not possible to do it without Administrator privileges, which means it can't be done at runtime (the traditional way).

See my note about a service and a user-mode app wanting access to the same file. Or two of your apps, which you want to do properly and support multi-user, which need the same file(s).

Yes. Or "also fucking useless, creating more problems than it 'solves'". Unless you do the same "create a key, give Everyone Full Control" hack.

I'm thinking from a more Unix perspective here, but yeah, that's how I'd do it - create a user group (if needs be) for my programs and make a folder with full access for them. You could create the folder for everyone to have full rights, but that's not ideal. You'd need elevated status to do either.
Once it exists, though, you can do what you like to it at runtime.

I understand what you mean completely, it's just a massive faff for shared files that, frankly, aren't a security concern. What's wrong with (the Windows equivalent of) good old "chmod 777"? I'm pretty sure that still works in Unices.

And at least a Unix-like just tells you to fuck off, instead of silently creating a new version of the file just for you.

Edit: Er. 777, obviously.

Actually, what was wrong with ProgramData, exactly? I just created a folder in there without a UAC prompt, created a file and put some text in it, logged off, logged on as another user, and could edit that file. Anything created in ProgramData is read/write to authenticated users, it would appear.

Did you try saving that file, then logging back in as the first user and seeing which version you got?

Edit:

UserA: Create C:\ProgramData\Directory\File.txt
UserB: Modify it
UserA: Open it, see if you get the modifications

We ended up with different versions of File.txt, in our testing. It silently created them. No errors, just different contents. FSVirt is utterly evil for that reason. Unless they changed it after getting moaned at enough for fucking devs about.

Yup, it contain's UserB's updates.

I always thought programdata wasn't virtualised, for that very reason.

That's extremely weird, because we very definitely had fs virtualisation issues. Perhaps it was to do with the file being created by a program executing in the SYSTEM account. Which obviously does introduce security issues, if someone manages to somehow malform an XML file enough to break out of MSXML. Hm.

CBA reading all this thread, But Dimm-o:

How quiet is your new, beastly PC?

Noicely quiet. Considering me old one used to move my beard with the sound it created, this one is like a kitten farting sweetly in comparison.

I reckon if you held the kitten close enough to your face it'd still move your beard.

I basically took this computer and made everything slightly better, etc, and it came out at £733.11.

Would it have been cheaper to just start out with a £700 PC from that site?

mine was/is



@£474.82

two words. Water Dragon.

OoOoo ! the rotten Cnuts have put the price up !

Pod -- when I looked at the YoYoTech site in that sort of >£600 price bracket, I came to the conclusion that CyberPower were a bit better for the money. The PC I bought from my previous employer was a CyberPower one and it's most nice.

Cheers, but so far they all look ridiculous.

I hate buying computers. My last one cost me £75. It's not that bad either.

Click through the customise screen and they have a huge range of cases, including some that are just big slabs of aluminium (mine is like that).

If range and diversity confuse or dismay you, pay Apple large sums to make the choices for you.

I have not bought a PC in years, my last one was given to me.. just needed memory and a graphics card..

I wouldn't spend money on a PC either (and never have). My Mac is worth it though

Yeah. I fucking love my Macbook Pro.

Jesus - a 4GB quad core machine for £300. That's not bad. Admittedly, I did trim it back to the plainest case with onboard video. Then again, them's my requirements*.

Shame it's not a laptop, really. Maybe I should upgrade to 11n wireless and use a really cheapy laptop with Lunix to full-screen VNC to one, it'd probably cost less and the battery'd last longer.

* No, I don't know what I want a 4GB quad core for. I just know it wouldn't be for games.

Blah blah that is a PC blah blah.