Clouded in mist

Yay! I can see them shadows at last! Now I can play all of them last generation games in their full graphical glory.

My new system (actually an upgrade) was set up over the weekend and consists of the following:

• Intel Core2Duo E6750
• Asus P5K
• Corsair Twin2×2048-6400 2GB
• Asus Geforce 8800 GTS 320MB
• Silverstone OP650 650W
• Asus 1814BLT DVDRW SATA

Didn’t actually need the DVD drive but getting it would eliminate having any IDE ribbons in my system, making its interior much neater and less airflow obstruction. It is a pretty modest system still, nothing really high end since my budget didn’t allow for it, or I would have thrown in a WD Raptor 150GB and another 2GB of ram. The above cost me slightly over SGD$1.5k.

I’ve decided to stick with Windows Vista for good this time (sick of hearing me go back and forth between XP and Vista yet?). So far, the installation has gone along rather peacefully, with the exception of Adobe’s product, which refused to install and kept throwing me an “Error 1327″ and something with regarding an invalid drive, which happened to be the one mapped to my storage server.

It turns out that UAC was the culprit, and thanks to Adam Carr and Chester Collada on the Adobe forums, it managed to solve it. The problem was that when Vista is placed into an Elevated Permissions State by the UAC, access to network drives mapped prior to that were denied. Remapping it with full admin privileges solves the problem. One way to do this is to open an elevated command prompt and typing the following:

net use <Drive Letter>: \\servername\sharename

As much as I enjoy UAC for it’s security features, it’s becoming a major pain the ass for these reasons:

1. Push to talk key for Ventrilo does not work when window loses focus, unless it is being run with elevated rights.
2. Any program that does not have admin rights and tries to write into %ProgramFiles% fail, in which a huge number of programs and (especially) games attempt to do so. Most of them don’t request for privilege elevation on launch and thus fail silently, or just blow right up.
3. While undoubtedly a security feature, programs that launch multiple processes which require elevation of privilege fail too, because subsequent processes aren’t elevated.

There has to be a balance between security and usability, and Vista seems to be breaking that balance. The most secure system is useless if you cannot do anything on it. There’s a lot of bloggers out there, who claim that, after the initial software setup, installing whatever you require, UAC gracefully takes a step back and become less of a nuisance. While I won’t entirely disagree, this people obviously are not gamers, and have not experienced the grievances of having unexplained crashes and other silent failures, which can all be ultimately traced to permissions being denied by UAC.

I’ve not decided to rid myself UAC just yet, but I’m edging towards that decision by the minute.