Asha'man X
Expert Member
Our school got a new Acer Extensa laptop yesterday, and it is a nice machine indeed. I chose for it to come with Vista Business, since we are trying to move forward with the IT, not stay in one place. It's meant for the lady doing admissions and the school newsletter and website.
After removing the bloated trialware, the laptop is running very nicely. Unfortunately, then I hit one major brick wall, and one general irritation with Vista's logon prompt.
The first issue is that Dreamweaver MX 2004 will no longer run, despite running under Vista Business on the lady's own personal laptop. The only difference is that this new Acer has SP1 on it, hers does not. Somehow that just kills Dreamweaver, no matter what I try with run as and compatibility modes. From what I read on the net, it appears to be a known issue, and the only suggestion is to upgrade, which the school can't do right now.
That means that I must format the machine tonight and install XP, which is going to eat up my time. It's no one's fault really, and it's not Vista to blame. From what I understand, some later editions of Dreamweaver also have issues and Adobe couldn't care.
My frustration with the log on prompt is another matter. There they took the perfectly logical system of all previous NT based computers and stuffed it up. To remember to type domain\user or user@domain is a tall ask for people that struggle as is with computers. With XP, as long as "log on to" was set to the domain, anyone could log in no problem. Now it's easy to get confused between domain and local account on the computer.
From my research, you can't change the logon prompt to anything like a "classic prompt", which is a real pain. For me, this is a major hindrance to use, especially if your domain or usernames are long.
It's a pity, because Vista really does run pretty nicely otherwise.
After removing the bloated trialware, the laptop is running very nicely. Unfortunately, then I hit one major brick wall, and one general irritation with Vista's logon prompt.
The first issue is that Dreamweaver MX 2004 will no longer run, despite running under Vista Business on the lady's own personal laptop. The only difference is that this new Acer has SP1 on it, hers does not. Somehow that just kills Dreamweaver, no matter what I try with run as and compatibility modes. From what I read on the net, it appears to be a known issue, and the only suggestion is to upgrade, which the school can't do right now.
That means that I must format the machine tonight and install XP, which is going to eat up my time. It's no one's fault really, and it's not Vista to blame. From what I understand, some later editions of Dreamweaver also have issues and Adobe couldn't care.
My frustration with the log on prompt is another matter. There they took the perfectly logical system of all previous NT based computers and stuffed it up. To remember to type domain\user or user@domain is a tall ask for people that struggle as is with computers. With XP, as long as "log on to" was set to the domain, anyone could log in no problem. Now it's easy to get confused between domain and local account on the computer.
From my research, you can't change the logon prompt to anything like a "classic prompt", which is a real pain. For me, this is a major hindrance to use, especially if your domain or usernames are long.
It's a pity, because Vista really does run pretty nicely otherwise.
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