I hate Vista
I took my beloved Macbook Pro in to the Apple store yesterday for an attempt to discover why it gets so hot it could cook bacon. That left me without a computer last night, and this was completely unacceptable. I decided to boot up my PC that has been pretty much sitting idle since I last spoke about it. Yeah, it kinda gets neglected.
After installing about a million updates for Windows, I tried to get World of Warcraft in a working order (while I haven’t spoken about WoW in a while I might possibly be more addicted to it right now then I’ve been in a long time, but that’s a topic for a later date). I decided to remove all my old UI addons and just start over since everything I had was so out of date. I was quickly hit with the dreaded User Account Control prompts. “Are you sure you want to do that?” quickly followed by “Do you want to allow permission to do that?” Um, yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. After clicking about a million boxes just so I could delete some files I was getting frustrated.
Then I installed the WoWAce Updater. This is a nice program that will auto download and install addons for you. You just go in and select them and then it does its thing. Well, it was just erroring and erroring. After some searching on the forums I found that I needed to change the folder permissions on the Addon folder it was trying to download to. Hmm, ok, but I’m an Administrator, shouldn’t it just work? I check the folder permissions and admins have full permission, wtf? I decide “hell, I’ll give Users full permissions too.” And that seemed to do the trick, ok, cool.
I load up WoW and my screen explodes in a overload off too many addons, with error boxes popping up left and right. Hmm. I check and ALL MY OLD ADDONS ARE STILL LOADED. I search my harddrive, they’re not in the World of Warcraft Addon folder anywhere. HOW ARE THEY RUNNING? I poke around some more and find a backup directory of old addons in a random folder no where near the game, which I delete. I run the game and they are still all there. I search my ENTIRE HARD DRIVE for those files and they are NO WHERE. So now I’m getting pissed. I blame Vista.
I decide to remove my entire folder for Addons instead of just bits and parts. So I try to move it to my desktop. After clicking a bunch of times that yes, I really want to do that, it then pops up a dialogue telling me I don’t have permission. I AM AN ADMINISTRATOR!!!! I do some searching, change some permisions, and try again. And fail again. I AM AN ADMINISTRATOR!!! Vista doesn’t care, it’s “keeping me safe”. I try changing some other stuff after reading online but ultimately, I do what I should have done from the first, I turn off User Account Control. Thank you. It’s quiet now.
I move the folder and reboot WoW and no addons at all, that’s an improvement! I carefully copy back in everything piece by piece, waiting for it to find deleted addons, but it never does. After maybe an hour or more of fussing, I’m finally in game and ready to play. But boy am I tired.
Ultimately, the performance of my PC is lacking. I mean, that’s alright, it’s probably over 3 years old, it’s amazing it’s still viable at all! But I think I might upgrade the video card and that could be sufficient to keep it working well enough for a few more years. Provided I can find a copy of Windows XP to downgrade to. 
June 25th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
Ha! I shouldn’t laugh, but there’s a reason even I only run XP
BTW, my Macbook Pro is also a real egg fryer, though only when I’m playing WoW or doing really compute-intensive hacking. One thing that helps is I elevate the back (jury-rigged with just a piece of plastic), though there are a bunch of people who swear by the cooling stands. If you hear anything interesting on the cooling front please let me know; I’d just assumed that this was “how it is” while gaming on it.
June 25th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
I’ve been doing some reading on it, and it sounds like it does just get crazy hot when playing WoW. My concern was that I’ve had it a couple years and it seems to be running HOTTER now than it did, so what changed?
We shall see what the Apple store says. Probably “don’t use on your lap, n00b!”
June 26th, 2008 at 4:50 am
I downgraded from Vista on my Dell laptop after iTunes kept skipping — MS thinks it’s Apple’s fault and vice-versa — and after similar frustrations with that ridiculous user account control system and after the MacOS -wanna-be background indexing guaranteed to stretch the limits of my hard disk’s MTBF.