One of the items I grumbled in my Vista first impressions post earlier in the week was the Vista security dialogs.
Today I had a real world example of quite what a pain it is. I’d installed Vista 64 onto an empty partition of one of my PC’s at work, which to it’s credit it did in about twenty minutes. However then I decided that I wanted to install the excellent SysInternals Process Explorer, as I have on all my computers at work, and more than that that I wanted it to start when the machine boots. Bear in mind when reading the following that this is all being done using a user with administrative privileges.
I went to the SysInternals section on the Microsoft site and downloaded it. There isn’t any fancy install with the tool, you effectively just copy both the executable and the help file wherever you want, and then create a shortcut – in this case in the startup folder on the start menu. When I tried to copy in the files it first warned me that it was going to ask me for permission, and then asked me to allow it to copy the files. Then I tried to create the shortcut in the startup folder by copying the executable and using the ‘Paste Shortcut’ menu item – however that produced a dialog saying that I couldn’t do that, and offering to create the shortcut on the desktop instead. This in turn produced more dialogs, again with the pair, the first warning me it was about to ask for permission, and the second one actually doing so. Then I needed to copy the newly created desktop shortcut into the startup folder – more permission dialogs. So with the process completed, it had asked me six times for permission to do things.
So having got it installed, I rebooted the PC in order to make sure it started…
It didn’t. Instead I got a dialog saying that Windows had refused permission to start the application. It gave me the option to choose to start it, plus a configuration dialog to change how it dealt with the application. However because it wasn’t approved (this is a Microsoft provided application remember), starting it on logon wasn’t one of the available options. So after all that I couldn’t do what I wanted anyway, the best I could get to was a warning dialog coming up on log in, and clicking to activate the application. The question is why? I’m setting it up from an admin user, I know the application is fine, all I want to do is set it up to run when I log in!
Anyway, it’s not all bad news with Vista – check out this posting on Coding Horror detailing some of the improvements to the Start Menu.