Yesterday I experienced the joy being in Kazakhstan on a dial-up connection and trying to sort out this ridiculous design flaw in Vista. I bought the laptop last month to try out Vista, and yesterday I got the friendly blank screen with the notifcation of an 'unauthorized change to windows'. Of course, firefox is my default browser, so the 'follow this link' prompt was 100% useless with no way to dial the internet connection.
The only way to even get a connection (I'm assuming without my firewall or antivirus running) was to bring up an 'open file' dialogue in firefox and run ie to prompt the dial-up connection to run. Then I was left with the task of trying to identify any one of 5-10 3rd party (supposedly vista compliant) pieces of software that might be causing my troubles.
Doesn't it strike anyone as completely stupid to design a system like this? Maybe for the NSA & NASA, where OS integrity is vital to national security, but for the average home user who just wants to read e-mail and play mp3's this is downright criminal. People shouldn't be paying money for something this disfunctional, I hope there is a class action for the poor folk who actually went out and bought a non-OEM version of Vista.
Now that my rant is finished, how on earth do I go about fixing the problem? Any advice appreciated
zhennian( at )fastmail.fm
Thanks Bill,
P.S. Please please release a hotfix/update to make it 'optional' to have such draconian OS integrity measures.
