Ah, Windows...

Ellen has Vista. What I did to turn this off is turn off automatic sleeping. The computer is now eternally vigilant and attentive to command.

Ha! It reminds me of an experience a coworker had with Powerpoint. She wanted to do a slide show, but no matter what she did, it wouldn't work. It turned out that there was a switch that said essentially not to do a slide show no matter what you do.

Did you get the free Windows 7 upgrade with the Vista purchase? I've been talking to a co-worker who has a test version and is very happy with it over the big V.

If you loathe windows so much, why pay for it? Have you tried a modern version of linux?

1. Search, don't browse. I don't have a Vista machine handy, but on Win7, typing "Require" into the start menu brings up a menu item for "Require a password when the computer wakes".

2. It also brings up a second option, which is basically the screen saver settings -- you'll want to make sure that you don't have the "On resume, display logon screen" setting checked in your screensaver.

3. If it's not that, I assume it's just the fact that scientists warp the fabric of reality around them (as this is the only way to ever make physics experiments work), and this disturbs the computer. Like Harry Dresden, really, only without the jacket.

I can relate, I have a perfectly good scanner that won't work with Vista....

@featheredfrog

I obviously can't speak for Chad, and I don't want to get into a protracted debate on operating systems, but I thought I'd offer a couple reasons why I haven'y fully made the switch (my laptop has a Vista/Ubuntu dual boot and my netbook has eeebuntu):

1) Compatibility. I haven't figured out how to do everythign I want in Open Office, but I think it's a pretty good suite. The problem is, it's not 100% compatible with Microsoft Office. If I'm going to just print it out, that's fine, but if it's something I need to use on a different computer that I don't have control over (which happens often) or its something I have to send to someone who uses Windows, it's simpler just to use MS Office.

2) I haven't found the others to be much better. On my dual-boot laptop:
*Vista and Ubuntu take about the same time to load,
*Vista is more easily compatible with the hardware I've hooked up to it,
*Installing programs is about a wash - some programs are incredibly easy to install through Ubuntu's "add/remove programs" option, but others take a lot of manual, text-based work with a lot of looking things up online,
*I've actually found Ubuntu to be less stable on this particular machine. I'm told that Ubuntu is generally more stable, but on this machine, it definitely crashes more often and requires a hard reboot more often to get out of crashes.

Anyhow, I use both because there are some reasons I prefer Ubuntu, but if I was going to have just one OS, it would probably have to be Windows.

Oh yeah, and a printer-network card conflict that I have to fix every time I turn my computer off then back on, and every time I try to rename a file I get several "are you sure, do you have permission" messages.

Did you get the free Windows 7 upgrade with the Vista purchase?

It's a hand-me-down computer, bought several months ago, so I do not have the upgrade.

If you loathe windows so much, why pay for it? Have you tried a modern version of linux?

I collect and grade lab reports electronically from my students, and that means that I need to have a machine that runs Microsoft Office. Open Office doesn't quite get the job done.

Unless all of my students spontaneously switch to using Linux, I'm stuck with Windows.

@Chad: Or you could try using CrossOver to let you run Microsoft Office under Linux.

Kozlowski mentioned this, but if your screensaver triggers before the machine goes to sleep, you'll need to disable the screensaver password as well. Hey, at least you don't need to enter the password twice, once to wake the computer and once to turn the screensaver off...

You could ask your students to turn in the lab reports in an openly documented format such as PDF, for which there are numerous readers on Linux, instead of letting them use a closed, proprietary format that has to be reverse engineered....

The problem is, it's not 100% compatible with Microsoft Office.

well, no, nothing can be. even MS Office itself can't be guaranteed to be 100% MS Office-compatible, version to version.

that said, i must confess i'm surprised to hear about a machine where Ubuntu crashes hard enough to require a hard reboot. i can't recall anything like that ever happening to me, on either Ubuntu or Fedora. what manner of hardware is this, and can we rule out a physical hardware flaw with good confidence?

CrossOver, which Mark mentioned, has a good reputation. for less demanding applications, the free and open Wine might do. i wouldn't trust Wine to support more than very basic MS Office usage (print out a paper in Word, maybe) but it could be worth trying.

"it's a hand me down computer"

So you're blaming Vista for a setting made by the previous owner? Nice job there Chad.

The password problem is not a default setting. Using a second hand linux box without wiping it will lead you to similar problems depending on the paranoia level of the previous owner.

But go ahead, take the easy way and blame Vista instead of learning the software, just as you once had to learn XP or Linux.

Why would you even want it set to power down the screen or use a screensaver on a home computer? just turn the screen off when you're done with it.

Because it's not at all obvious that this is a setting made by the person who set it up, rather than the default?

Sheesh, already.

Because it's not at all obvious that this is a setting made by the person who set it up, rather than the default?

Actually, these are just the default out-of-the-box settings, as the hard drive was wiped and Vista installed clean before I got it. The previous owner never used it with Vista.

I realized about ten seconds after hitting "Publish" that I had forgotten the "I am not interested in hearing about the wonders of Linux" disclaimer. I knew that would come back to bite me in the ass.

Okay--it seemed like the kind of thing he might've done, akin to the really long password that we couldn't remember and I had to wipe with an external tool.

(The previous owner is my father, who died before we set the computer up.)

I download a new patch from Adobe or MS every month to protect my computer against the dangers of PDF and Word documents. Macro viruses are mostly gone, but now we have to deal with buffer overflows and similar attacks in Word documents. Since patches typically arrive well after the security hole has been exploited, I don't accept PDF or MS Office documentats from students. I require RTF (Rich Text Format) instead, which every version of MS Office supports, along with pretty much every other word processor. I also accept DVI files from the students who use TeX.

So, I upgraded my desktop at home recently to a machine running Vista. If your box ran at 100 GHz with four parallel cores and 128 GB RAM in a 64-bit OS... and you installed Vista... you would have a diversity computer demanding equal rights.

@Nomen Nescio

I've only had a couple crashes requiring a hard reboot, but that's a couple more than I've had running windows on the same machine. With the whole small numbers thing, that may not be a reliable statistic, so maybe that comparison isn't really useful. On the other hand, the crashing that doesn't require a reboot happens a lot more when I'm running Ubuntu than when I'm running Vista. Firefox, in particular, likes to crash.

As far as the compatibility, 100% may be a lofty goal, but my real point was that in many cases it's easier to just use MS Office than to deal with the level of incompatibilities that exists between it and Open Office.

I have had a similar situation and tracked it down, I think, to various security programs that have 'System settings protection'.

I have to go to that program, disable 'protect system settings' and then make the changes in Windows. And, if I feel it is important, because Windows in essentially defenseless against external attack and trojans will mess with its system settings and granting themselves access, turn back on the 'protect system settings' within the security program.

It gets interesting if the machine has two or three security programs each with their own 'protect system settings' lock.

Spybot Search and Destroy, an otherwise fine, and free, malware remover and protection program has "tea timer" which has to be accessed through the "resident" section of the "tool" list. It works at keeping Windows protected but it does sometimes cause frustrations when its engine overrides operator actions.

Chad - have you considered going with no password at all on the system for anything?

Control Panel --> User Accounts and Family Safety --> Make Changes to Your User Account --> Remove Password - it will ask you to type in your password one last time and you are done.

This will not remove the administrator prompts when you go to do something that requires admin privileges it simply won't require a password anymore.

I would also reccommend turning off the UAC (User Account Control) so the computer doesn't prompt you for every small thing and so this bizarre form of firewall doesn't block your software from starting or accessing the internet for updates.

for years, people kept complaining that windows made it too easy for viruses, trojans, and the like to flourish. MS didn't do much about it, for the longest time, and for a simple reason: the underlying fault was that every single user had all the powers of a systems administrator, to change anything at all at will, which powers were then inherited by every program they ran --- locking out viruses would have meant overhauling the security system entirely, to limit the powers of regular users (and therefore their programs).

but eventually MS just plain had to do that. took them at least two major revisions of their OS to do it (XP and Vista), but they did it, and the effort had clearly apparent results right from the start (XP is much less vulnerable than its predecessors; Vista, for all its flaws, is more secure still).

so what do users do? well, Doug and Erin seem to be disabling it all for the sake of convenience...

Just remove the password from your user account. Then you'll never deal with that anywhere again. If you didn't want it password protected, you shouldn't have set up your user account with a password when you set up Vista.