The Windows Vista feature you’ll never see

Windows Vista 1 Minute

Long Zheng came up with this improvement to Vista’s User Account Control:

Great idea!

By the way, if you follow Microsoft, you really should keep an eye on Long’s blog, istartedsomething. His observations are consistently sharp, informative, and entertaining.

Published by Ed Bott

Tech journalist. Author of 25+ books. ZDNET Contributing Editor since 2006. Contact info: https://edbott.com/contact-me/

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6 thoughts on “The Windows Vista feature you’ll never see”

  1. Ed, on a slightly more serious note, I have used XP on two computers on a daily basis since it first came out. I have never once seen BSOD on an computer running XP. I don’t remember either computer ever crashing or freezing because of an OS problem. Individual programs or processes have occasionally (well, extremely rarely) crashed or frozen, but not my entire system along with them. In my experience, XP has been a remarkably stable and well-performing OS.

    Of course, it was a totally different story on the Windows 9X and Windows Me OS. What a mess! 🙂

  2. My own BSOD experiences … the last time I had one was when I did something I really shouldn’t have, involving an unsigned driver that really didn’t belong on my computer.

    I haven’t had a BSOD from casual, day-to-day use in more time than I can remember. I’ve had app crashes, but far less of them than I used to (as in, an app crash is something newsworthy for me and not business as usual with Windows).

  3. The only times I’ve seen Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 bluescreen is due to a bad driver or hardware error. I’ve had my current home PC for two years (yeah I know time to upgrade) and it has never once blue screened. I don’t think Microsoft will ever out live that reputation.

  4. I agree that Blue Screens are rare on Windows XP. And unlike Microsoft operating systems not based on the NT kernel (Windows 9x and Me – I call these Toy OSes), they are usually related to driver or hardware problems.

    Having said that, I am currently dual-booting Windows XP and Vista. I get a lot of blue screens with Vista; but, worse, I get lock-ups where the Explorer shell just freezes. Music continues to play in the background. The NUM LOCK key still works. But the only way to recover is to hit the reset button or power cycle.

    Ha! Ha! I think that dialog box is very funny, though.

  5. Har har har. The blue screen appears because some kernel-mode component has done something illegal and it’s better to bring the whole system to a halt than to continue and allow potential data corruption. The amount of code necessary to bring up a UAC prompt is pretty incredible.

    The right solutions are to start getting third-party code out of kernel mode (this will start to happen in the Vista time frame with the User-Mode Driver Framework), an easier to program driver model (Kernel-Mode Driver Framework) and more rigorous testing for code that does run in the kernel.

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