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A program needs your permission to continue

July 13th, 2008 · Posted by Skuds in Technology · 3 Comments · Technology

I have been playing with Windows Vista a bit over this weekend.  I don’t have it myself, so I have not had a lot to do with it – nothing against it but the case for upgrading my OS from Win XP is not compelling: better to save to £70 an upgrade would cost and put it towards a new PC when the time comes, and I’m never 100% happy about upgrading the OS on a computer anyway.  Over the last couple of days I have had to expand my experience of it a bit though because I bought a new computer for the Mrs.

As usual, most of the effort involved in setting up a new computer is in trying to copy across all the data and settings from the old one.  In fact I copied Jayne’s old hard drive in its entirety to an external drive for backup purposes, and also did an export to it from the file transfer wizard.  Imagine my delight when the file transfer wizard on the new PC said that it couldn’t import the settings because they were exported with an older version…

Still, I got there in the end.  Setting up the access to the router, putting in all the mailbox settings, installing Firefox and AVG antivirus.  At every step you get the message “A program needs your permission to continue” which soon gets familiar and irritating.  I guess its a good thing, and does provide some protection against dodgy software, and in normal running would not be popping up every few minutes, but when you are doing a lot of updating in one go it can be a pain.

Vista itself looks pretty good, and turns out to be easy enough to set up, even without looking at any documentation, although the differences take a bit of getting used to.  The real result was not having to install Office.  I bought a copy of the MS Office ‘student and teacher’ edition with the computer but the computer had a trial of MS Office installed already and I could just input the product key from what I bought to turn that into a proper installation without even taking the disk from the box.

While the kids are away I also went to install Office on the girl’s laptop – the lack of it has been limiting her ability to do homework, apparently – although its now borderline acceptable behaviour for a parent to go rummaging around on a teenage daughter’s computer unsupervised.  I’m glad I did though: I found out that, despite me having installed Firefox for her, she uses Internet Explorer.  Must have words about that when she gets back.  Before finding that out I had to wait while umpteen different things loaded at startup – instant messaging, Skype, and the like.

It makes you want to bang your head against the wall: you get them a computer with shit-off-a-shovel speed potential and they clog it up with social networking, IM, extra toolbars, and all sorts of junk.

On top of all that, I had to go down and setup Jayne’s old PC for her sister – it was a step up from her old Win 98 machine.  That all came to grief on the most trivial thing.  The ‘new’ PC only has USB ports on the back and all available keyboards had PS/2 plugs on.  Could I find an adaptor anywhere?  In the end I went out and bought a new basic keyboard.

On the face of it this weekend has been a bit of a busman’s holiday for me.  Hardly a break from the day job of looking after IT.

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3 Comments so far ↓

  • skud's sister

    Another thing to watch out for with Vista – although it may not apply to stuff Jayne uses – is comapatability. We’ve had customers with problems loading discs on things like Sams Teach Yourself C++ in 21Days (very reputable, a good seller nationally) and it generally turns out they are not compatible with Vista… Not the publisher’s fault, the customer’s or ours but there appears to be no way round it that we can see. It has also come up with discs attached to dictionaries (that have been updated in the last 12-18 months) so maybe Microsoft want you to just use their spellchecker (and learn to spell in an American stylee…)

  • PooterGeek

    This might come in handy.

  • Skuds

    I think Jayne will be OK – its mostly Internet and games, and a lot of the games are either online ones or flash-based downloads.

    Nice suggestion from Damian, but I kid-proofed my PC by never letting anybody in the house touch it. Ever 🙂 The rest all have their own and if they stuff them up they are the only ones to suffer.