nonelvis | (no subject)

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geekiness

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I have just finished installing Parallels Desktop and Windows XP on my Mac. I can't even begin to express how weird it is to be typing in iChat or Safari while seeing the XP interface lurking in a window below.

On the other hand, once I got the right version of Parallels installed, Windows installed easily, and Windows Update is merrily chugging away in the background downloading ... something. PC folks: do I want SP3, or will it make me hate life? Pretty much all I need to do with Windows is look at web pages I am building, so as long as my version of Windows is running the correct security updates, I think I'm all set.

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The first bit of advice I got when I installed XP was "make sure you use a user account separate from your admin account." We've always taken that stuff for granted but ...

Hmm. I am using the admin account. Did the person who told you this recommend the other account for security reasons, which would be the typical reason to do this (at least on a PC)?

Since I'm running XP only when I need to do testing (which may only be a few days per month, and in any case, definitely not all the time), it may be okay to just get by with the admin account. But that's why I'm wondering why you got the advice you did -- this virtualization stuff is still very new to me, and I'd prefer not to screw things up.

ETA: I asked my husband, the Windows user, about this, and he said it was a good idea to make a new account, because some programs don't expect you to be running as Admin. So, thanks for the tip! I've set up a new account ... and for some reason, XP is displaying my new account's desktop picture at a different size than the way it displays for Administrator, despite the fact that both accounts have the same display/resolution settings. Why the hell do people use this operating system?

Why the hell do people use this operating system?

Because there's more hardware available, more software, all of the above is generally much much less expensive, and Apple screwed the pooch -- repeatedly, and with great vim and vigour -- on licensing its hardware and/or OS in ways that would have made its OS more ubiquitous. That said, if it were more ubiquitous, there would also be many many MANY more security threats to the system.

(Yes, yes, I know that was rhetorical, more or less. One sometimes cannot resist poking the Apple fen. Heck, I used to be one of them, until I desperately needed to replace my computer and couldn't afford even a low end Mac on my then-salary. But I could afford a midrange PC laptop for a model that was just being replaced.)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. I think I'm just impressed that Windows can manage to screw up something as basic as displaying the same photo the same way for two identically configured users.

You remind me of something, though -- not that I'm planning on downloading anything on the Windows side of things that doesn't come from a trusted source, but any recommendations on free antivirus software? I've heard so many horror stories about Norton and McAfee that I'm not sure I want to run either.

ClamWin is the only one I know about. It's gotten generally good reviews, as far as I know. (I got Norton free through my last job, and it's been relatively well behaved, so I just leave it alone.) Avast is also supposed to be pretty good, I think, although I thought they'd merged with AVG and started charging, but that seems to be partly mistaken.

Thanks! I've used ClamAV on my Mac before and found the UI basic, but functional.

Yup, security reasons. I downloaded AVG Free Edition and AVG Anti-Spyware to check for viruses and stuff. (And I will refrain from dissecting the anti-Apple BS. :)

I haven't run a virtual PC in a few years, but here's what I remember.

When I installed, I guess it was XP, the first thing I did was to go and ask for all the updates. There were like 23 of them, and some could only be installed by themselves, and others could only be installed in certain combinations of this-or-that-but-not-both. So it took me a few rounds to install stuff, and as I installed stuff, more updates appeared. (I am told this is much better these days.)

I forget how many times I went around on this. Like, most of an afternoon. Rebooted what seemed like 100 times. But with a virtual PC, you can just save off your entire machine as a backup, in case something explodes, so why not?

I told my pals who use Windows, and they were aghast. Eventually I figured out that they would not install any updates unless they felt they had to, because every update had a large chance that something would break. I guess that makes a certain kind of sense.

Then I thought about the Mac attitude, which is, always install updates because they might fix something.

Somehow, this doesn't seem all that much better...

(Well, maybe that's not 100% true. Sometimes updates speed things up, or add whizzy new doo-dads -- not so much, now that Sarbanes-Oxley has set in, but still.)

Unless I've heard otherwise, I always install my Mac and Windows updates, because inevitably (especially with Windows), there are necessary security fixes. Windows Update seemed a lot more complicated than Software Update, but maybe I'm just not used to it yet.

For the most part, I only care about whether someone can crack into my machine if I leave it unpatched. I need to do so little under Windows that there's just not all that much that could break if I take the wrong system update.

I didn't have any experience with XP SP3 when you first posted this, but now I see that lots of users are reporting problems with it. Maybe best to stick with SP2 for now.

And one more thing: if you plan to use both IE6 as well as IE7 (and I assume you do, for webpage testing), you'll need to install IE6 BEFORE applying SP3. Apparently XP SP3 will only install IE7 and higher, but it won't disturb any previous installation of IE6.

Ugh. Good idea.

I didn't think it was even possible to run IE6 and IE7 on the same Windows install! But in any case, I still have the sturdy old Win2K machine running IE6, so I still have access to both browsers.

Yup, when IE7 was still in beta they let people run both and AFAIK left that ability. But I was slightly mistaken: XP SP3 only removes the ability to Uninstall IE7. More here (http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/05/05/ie-and-xpsp3.aspx).

Good lord, maybe they could make this more complicated? "If you installed X, then you can't install Y, unless you took SP Foobar, in which case you can install Z on alternate Tuesdays but only uninstall it if the moon is full."

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