Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Carping about Vista Crap

Vista has been good generally, but I have noticed a few things that had me blowing a gasket, at least early on when I didn't understand what caused the odd behavior.

This might not be a Vista thing per se, but the touch pad scrolling doesn't seem to work reliably. Especially when running applications with elevated privileges ("as administrator"). E.g if the task manager is started with "normal" user privileges (UAC is enabled, of course), the touchpad scrolling works. However, when "view processes from all users" is enabled, the touchpad scrolling stops working. A similar difference in behavior is observed when regedit is started with / without elevated privileges. This leads me to believe that this might have something to do how mouse event messages are received by "elevated" applications.

I doubt, though, that this is a Vista thing because mousewheel scroll seems to work in the same situtation (when using a discrete USB mouse instead of the trackpad). So my blame right now lays with Synaptic.

Second, i see Vista BSOD fairly consistently when I use VPN. After I Idle on VPN for a while (haven't measured exactly how much time), I get a BSOD. I haven't had pause yet to analyze the error code and determine if this is due to a driver or some arcane interaction between Vista and its driver and its power management.

No comments: