Yes, I upgraded to Vista when I bought the pieces for a new computer. I did my research and came to the conclusion that for most of what I do I would not run into the many problems that have been described. A couple of days into the experience and I am still confident of that. However, there is one thing that really annoys me.
Vista doesn't trust you.
Oh, I've turned off the User Account Control. I don't need it asking me if I really meant to do everything I do. No, I'm talking about the fact that there are certain things that you need administrator privileges to do in Vista, just like XP. No problem, I figure. I created my account as an administrator. No dice. Apparently being an administrator in Vista doesn't mean that you can do administrative tasks. Ok, so I'll run the shell (cmd) as an administrator. That ought to do it. No dice, again.
Well, ultimately I did what I wanted to do. I was trying to install Flash Player on my new machine. It didn't want to do it in Firefox. Just for fun I thought I'd try it in IE (not that I'd use it there, this was more for curiosity's sake). Well, the IE installation didn't complete, so I tried to remove it. (And that's where all the administrator fun came in.) Never did get it removed. No big deal. It will just sit there until either MS or Adobe can get their products to play nicely with each other. I was able to install it in Firefox thanks to the hint from this nice little site.
And now I'm back on track to putting my system the way I want it. But I now understand the frustration many people have had with Vista. In the end it was not a critical problem, but more of the sort of thing I wanted to follow through on just to see how (or indeed, if) it could be done. Now I know that Vista has some quirks when it comes to file permissions. Basically, it doesn't trust you--which can be sort of an inconvenience during installations. Sadly, Vista does not appear to have an equivalent to chmod 755.
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