OT: Make a limited XP account without losing settings?

It has been loosing traction for some years now. It has two strong competitors now, Sun's VirtualBox and the newcommer M$ virtualization. On technical merit VirtualBox will win, beating VMware (and xen) soundly.

Don't think M$ counts beyond the WinXP box within Win7.

Sun's now suffering Oracle's management shakeup, anything could happen there. Last I looked Xen wanted dedicated hardware, bare metal install.

I've got MSFT's XP Mode installed on Win7 x64, not used Vmware or VirtualBox for months.

Last time I had Vmware installed on Win7 beta, an upgrade wrecked my Win7 install :( I've not needed vmware enough to try it again since, will probably run it on a partition copy now, so I don't lose the OS again.

One thing I do hate is installing windows, same crap sequence each time of endless reboots and patch downloads. Too many years go by and MSFT don't improve their act.

Grant.

Do you know what methods?

For "all Microsoft" shops, Virtual PC is actually prety popular, AFAICT.

Most mainstream Linux distributions these days have just as many security/bug patch updates as Windows does. I mean, it really is pretty much a weekly ritual with all OSes these days...

Wikipedia has a nice chart comparison the various virtual machine engines:

---Joel

Agreed. I think a lot of people -- especially those who are responsible for the upkeep of their own PC -- don't realize just how very tightly "locked down" a lot of PCs in this world are, and similarly just how much demand there is from IT guys to provide these controls in the first place.

I don't recall the exact number, but in Windows XP there were something like "many hundreds" of group policy settings, whereas in Windows Vista and Windows

---Joel

Not very good in use, after using vmware. I have tried it. MSFT bought up a small virtual machine company to provide them with the XP on Win7 option, since they had to drop some backward comparability to move forward. I think they already buried the option to run linux under windows.

It's not the patch ritual so much, and Linux doesn't have as much happening as MSFT.

Main difference between Linux and windoze is that the only time one needs to restart linux is after updating the linux-kernel. All other updates involve simply restarting the appropriate service, not the entire box.

Trouble with Linux is that there's no Linux Incorporated, instead you have a few big players like Redhat, Suse, some good solid distros with different aims (I use Slackware), and then the myriad derivatives, some well known like *ubuntu series (derivative of Debian), and a lot of wannabe distros coming out each month.

Hard to generalise them for some aspects.

And it's a very rare thing that a severe security issue is found in the linux-kernel.

MSFT's main problem is they kept backwards compatibility too long, thus inheriting a poor (none!) security model. Unix always was multi- user and security aware.

Confusing, too much choice ;)

We're way OT for s.e.d too.

Grant.

That's a few clicks: Start -> Control Panel -> Sounds and Audio Devices

-> Sounds -> Sound scheme (dropdown list) = No Sounds) -> OK.

Grant.

You can learn tons of stuff here:

and here:

Crickey, it has gotten worse than *nix ever was. That would be a good selling point for Linux/BSD/Solaris/*ix/*ux.

Except MSFT sell more aggressively, and, there's a pack of PC 'experts' making lotsa money tweaking those settings for mere mortals. Bit like lawyers and the laws, or taxes and accountants? Simplify law and taxes and millions of white collar leeches lose their livelihood.

If people thought a bit more about their computing needs they'd not use MSFT, but most go through school not realising there's an alternative out there. MSFT eliminated choice way back, a PC comes with which OS? Sure some few offer Linux option these days, but for a long time there was effectively no choice.

Then look at the tools you have now, that mainly run on PCs. Back in the 80s it was a tossup whether to go PC or unix workstation, for things like CAD.

Grant.

Plus go through every little program (such as Thunderbird) that had it's own sounds turned off. So what you have pieced together one by one you have to do all over again. Not all that efficient. Technically there is no reson why any of that should change just by switching privilege levels in one and the same account. I guess it's a bug in the OS.

You can't copy the current admin profile to a limited account? Hmm, just looked, needs roaming account, which needs a supporting server, which needs...

In early 1995 I paid $50 to be on the Win95 pre-release program. Had to take the June'95 CD to library to copy out the 12 floppy install floppies, didn't have a CDROM back then.

Ignored Vista when it came out (stayed with WinXP) but I was on the Win7 beta program, with lots of others. Still waiting for MSFT to it right. But MSFT keeps adding complexity, rather than trim back to a nice tight OS experience.

Core2Quad chip here in this box is rarely exercised anywhere near full power on Win7, yet the machine is dog slow at times, due to MSFT's old message passing top-level design.

I much prefer unix-like OS, use root for system admin, normal user for most stuff, plus there's a 'quickie' access to admin level for one liners. And, a decent, powerful command line.

Many freebie tools only available for windoze, like Microchip MPLAB environment for PIC chips. Why fight it? I take best of both, and write stuff for Linux now, not windows.

Grant.

You get hundreds more group policy settings if you install Office, too. :-)

can't)

Hmmmm. THere is a FOSS tool for PICs that is trying to be the equal of MPLab, are you working with / on that tool? I actually got it to talk to my PICKit 2 hardware.

...

I think Jan P. is using Linux toolchain for PIC development. Don't recall who else do9ng PICs here.

I have enough problems picking up PIC assembler (totally different to the chips I worked on years ago) and the MPLAB environment, without worrying about some FOSS tool that may or may not be doing the right thing this week.

I don't care about FOSS tools when there's a free windows toolchain available. Not a Linux bigot ;) I doubt I'll write windows code again, unless it's OS agnostic.

I'm just starting with PIC chips, be writing ADC / DAC related stuff very soon, to 15 or 16 bit resolution. So far I've explored the things enough to be able to move on to projects using them.

Much to learn.

Grant.

there

Windows

It was not a tossup until the early to mid 1990s. PCs just did not have the power of unix based workstations, but there was big price difference as well, for both HW and SW.

there

Windows

In '85 we went for three by $25k PC workstations, PC-AT, '286 :(

Instead of a $250k unix box with four graphics terminals. And, the 6MHz original PC-AT was a little bit slow. The colour monitors were $2500 each, from Canada, with five Coax cables going to them.

CAD Software (pcad) was $19k / seat. Crap, but not much choice back then.

Grant.

Conversely, if you *want* the 10,000 policy settings, you can use SELinux ;)

The main problem with any kind of configurable policy is when you need to use a program written according to a "works on my system" principle.

The whole Vista UAC mess was an attempt to implement relatively modest security policies without breaking a zillion applications written by people who thought it was perfectly reasonable to assume that normal (non-Administrator) users would be able to write to the "Program Files" directory.

This left Microsoft with a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" choice. In spite of the inevitable customer dissatisfaction, they had to make using such applications sufficiently annoying that any developer who failed to update their practices would lose significant market share, otherwise developers would just continue developing for the Win95/FAT model (with no access controls) forever.

Not quite agnostic myself, but i truly hate rebooting into another OS just to use a nice but different toolchain. My life would be simpler if the tools worked in wine. It wouldn't stop them from working in M$ OSs either.