Vista Review

One of my objectives in reviewing Windows Vista is to determine what you can and can’t do versus previous versions – notably Windows XP. We’ve all heard of the DRM or digital rights management that Vista is supposed have built into it. Some have said it’s no problem, and others have screamed that it will take away many freedoms that we should inherently have.

So far I’ve tried to intstall 2 pieces of software on my new Toshiba laptop loaded with Windows Vista Home Premium that did not work at all, and I couldn’t believe the way that each behaved. The first is Alcohol 120%, a piece of software that allows you to burn CD’s and DVD’s. I use it because it’s pretty painless to burn an ISO image directly to a DVD. I’m in a cover band and we record the live shows, and I burn the video to DVD for promotional purposes. I have an ISO file that I use to burn dvd’s from when I need to create more. So – I installed Alcohol, and 80% of the way through the install my Windows Vista Premium goes to blue screen of death! Wow! I had not gotten one of those since the old Windows NT 4.0 days. It was a memory dump error. The laptop rebooted…and then as soon as I logged in – blue screen of death again! Reboot, another blue screen. Reboot safe mode, still blue screen memory dump. I ended up having to get out my Toshiba restore DVD and booting up from that – and then choosing “repair” and a restore point (just before I installed the Alcohol software) to get it working again.

Once I got my laptop working again, I did some google searches to try and figure out what had happenned. I saw quite a few forum posts about Alcohol not working with Windows Vista RC1, but not any about Vista Premium, or any of the versions out now. It may be that my old version just doesn’t work, and I need to install the official “Vista” version for it to work again. The problems with RC1 were supposed to be cleared up with an Alcohol official Windows Vista version. The interesting thing I found though, was that the problems with RC1 amounted to Vista having a hardware or driver “lock” on the dvd burner. Meaning, no piece of software could access the CD drive for burning cd’s or dvd’s unless they were certified by Vista as having authority to do so. This is why Alcohol had to release a new version that was Vista ready, and older versions of the software didn’t work. Is the blue screen of death just an error or glitch, or Microsoft’s blatant attempt to keep you from using software they don’t want you to? We may never know. So – the end result is that Windows Vista decides what I can burn CD’s and DVD’s with – and not me. If I’m using software that I purchased and like to get this done – if it doesn’t have a “Vista Capable” version then I’m just screwed. I hope to God that this isn’t something in the DVD burner firmware, and if I choose to install XP or Ubuntu on a dual boot – I have no problems.

Now – on to my second test, my attempt at installing Frostwire on Windows Vista Home Premium. Frostwire is a port of Limewire, a very popular P2P file sharing application based on Java. Looking at doing the dual boot on my laptop, I was going to download Ubuntu Edgy Eft ISO images to burn to CD using Frostwire. The software has very good legal uses for downloading – especially open source things, but 95% of what most people use Frostwire for is usually illegally downloading mp3′s and music files. So after the Alcohol experience, I figured that this ought to be interesting. I already had the latest version of Sun Java, so the install went pretty smooth. When it was finished I fired up Frostwire to see what would happen, and it tried to make network connections, and kept trying, and trying, and trying. After a few minutes, it would just timeout and say “could not make connection to the Internet, please check your network connections”. I tried both browsers, and neither would bring up any web pages. I checked email using Thunderbird, and that worked just fine. I checked my router, but since email was working I didn’t think that was an issue (which it wasn’t). All the other computers in the house had no problems with Internet connection. I opened and closed both browsers on my Vista laptop multiple times and still no web pages. Email was still working fine. All this time I had Frostwire open. I checked all the options in Frostwire, and it just would not connect to the Internet. I checked Windows Firewall and it was already set to allow Frostwire through. I didn’t have any other firewall running, and I know of no other place that could be blocking it. I did many pings on the command line to web sites, and they all came back with no packets lost. Even though I have McAfee Security Suite running with no firewall – I turned it off as well, and Frostwire still wouldn’t connect.

Frustrated, I tried to exit Frostwire and do other work. It hung on exit and would not shut down completely at all. Even when I tried to end the process. So I ended up having to reboot again. As soon as I did both browsers could access the Internet again. Thinking it was a glitch, I tried Frostwire again, but as soon as I did – both browsers lost Internet connectivity again, but mail delivery still worked. I did this many times, and rebooted vista many times. I didn’t find anything on the Internet about this, and in the end could only conclude that Windows Vista somehow locked down all http traffic (or certain ports maybe) when Frostwire was running. It was as if Vista said “hey you’re running Frostwire and most likely doing illegal things…screw that, we’re gonna lock you down…”.

So, until further notice there will be no use of either Alcohol 120% or Frostwire on my Toshiba Satellite laptop with Windows Vista Home Premium.

*UPDATE*

I also installed and tried to use DVD DeCrypter. This is such a quick and easy piece of software to use. I have 4-5 dvd’s of live band footage I wanted to rip some chapters of to the hard drive quickly for editing. It would appear DVD DeCrypter “does not have authority to access the dvd drive”. WTF?? This is my laptop, my hardware, and I paid for the software that came on it. I have legitimate and legal need to rip personal video I own from a DVD to my laptop and I can’t do it with third party software I want because it isn’t “Vista authorized”? Microsoft probably calls it protection – but I say you better get some protection, because you are about to get another screw job.

Please visit our Vista Review Forums for more about software that doesn’t work in Windows Vista!

This post is from Vistareview.info – we give you real Windows Vista upgrade stories, so you can make an informed decision whether or not to upgrade now (or later….or ever!).

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 1:54 am and is filed under cons, drm, software conflicts, windows vista. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.