December 2006 - Posts
OK, this isn't really a problem with Vista per-se. But I've noticed that when running Firefox 2.0 on Vista, it's constantly spinning the CPU at 15-25%. Restarting Firefox doesn't seem to help, I have just a few tabs open, and they aren't doing much of anything, And yet the CPU utilization for the process is constantly between 15-25%. I certainly didn't have the problem on XP. Is anyone else seeing this?
UPDATE - It looks like the Mouseless Browsing extension was the cause of this. After disabling it, CPU utilization of Firefox drops to negligible when idle. Either a) this was a problem on XP and I never noticed it, or b) the extension does something which causes the CPU problem on Vista but not XP. More research required here. Too bad, I dig that extension.
Unfortunately, I've had to disable UAC on my Vista install. I was hoping to run with it enabled, at least for a while, so I could grok the issues of developing with and for it. Sadly, it seems somewhat broken on my machine. As I described previously Most of my Control Panel applets, as well as some other apps (like RegEdit) simply failed to run with UAC enabled, displaying a "path not found" error. A few I could work around using Run As Administrator, but in many spots I didn't even have that option.
I'm assuming what was supposed to happen was that an elevation prompt was supposed to be displayed (I don't have a clean install of Vista to compare against, so I can't say for sure). If anyway knows a way to fix this problem, drop me a line. Until then, no soup for me.
After upgrading my machine to Vista yesterday, I went home and connected to it via Remote Desktop (from an XP client). It worked fine. However, when I came in to work this morning, I found both my screens blank and unresponsive - I got a mouse cursor and that's it. I could still connect to the machine through Remote Desktop and all my apps were still running fine, but sitting down at the machine, I got nothing. The only thing I could do was remotely restart the machine.
My instinct is that it's a video driver issue, but that's just a guess. More experimenting is required.
At long last I've upgraded my machine to Vista. Yes, I used the "u" word. Although I'm usually a clean-install kind of guy, I just got my machine a couple of months ago, and didn't have the heart to rebuild it all from scratch. So I took a chance and went the upgrade route.
My first comment on the upgrade is that it's s..l..o..w. Man, it took forever - at least three hours, probably more - and that's on a very fast machine. I started it at 5pm last night, and when I left at 6pm it was still on the "gathering information" phase (the first step). I clicked "next" at 9:30am this morning (don't know how long phase I took after I left), and it ran until 11:30am. The good news is that it didn't require a lot of handholding.
I've only had a half a day of playing with it, but so far things seem pretty solid. I do have one problem, though. The Administrative Tools Control Panel applets don't run unless I right-click and choose "Run as Administrator". Otherwise, I get a "path not found" error. I would expect an elevation prompt (I'm using UAC), not an error. Do other people see this? It may be upgrade related - I haven't done a fresh install yet.
I've been pondering upgrading to Vista over the last couple of days, but hadn't pulled the trigger because of uncertainty about support for Aero glass on my machine. In particular, I run dual 20" monitors at 1600x1200 resolution per monitor, and wasn't sure if the 128 MB of video memory on my video card was sufficient to support glass in this configuration. Lots of Googling didn't turn up any answers, so I turned to the always reliable win_tech_off_topic group.
Drew Marsh was good enough to point me to this document, which I hadn't turned up in my search. It describes the rules Vista uses for determining when Aero glass is enabled, including the memory and bandwidth requirements for various resolutions and in different monitor configurations. Very useful - thanks Drew.
The good news is that it looks like I'm OK with my paltry 128 MB of video memory. Upgrade is a go!
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