[img]


Well, no one recognised the location ?

It's across the river from Chelan, Washington I believe.     (See Mt. Ranier in the background? )

I thought you Seattle area natives would have figured it out  

It was one of the first soaring locations in a MSFS.


I've messed about with the Vista Beta2 for about 20 hours and so far I've been mainly attempting to see how many services can safely be shut down in an attempt to reduce some of the system overhead.

There are considerably more services in Vista than WinXP and many are inter-dependent making safe shutdowns a tad tricky.

Some 400mb of ram is used just booting into Vista. This is by far the most complex piece of bloatware I've ever witnessed, and surpassed my wildest expectations!

I've managed to disable many of the inbuilt security measures and keep the system running. I also believe that many of the services I've seen are capable of, or even soley designed to report back to MS or whoever.
Attempting to disable some of these services is either completely locked or results in fairly strong warnings that the system will be rendered disfunctional.

I attempted to install three third party firewalls so far and they won't work on Vista, so no security is available to block the reporting functions within Vista or protect me from other threats if I choose to not use or trust the inbuilt Vista firewall.

The good news is that the interface itself can be tweaked back to a Win'98 style and performance can be improved markedly by doing so.

The bad news is that simple maintenance such as uninstalling a program can be daunting at first until you get to know your way around.

I always maintained that WinXP was responsible for keeping people ignorant of learning the PC file system by introducing an interface that shows "virtual" locations on the PC while the physical data is in hidden directories. Vista has taken this approach even further, deepening the mystique of our PC's. I had feared this would be the case.

The novice Vista owner will be learning to use the complexities of a huge operating system and it is unlikely they will learn much about file handling and actual locations of data on their PC's.

I understand that Windows must be everything to all users, but Win Vista is a diabolical piece of overkill for the average PC user. If Vista cannot be de-automated on an internet connection so that it does NOT report my activities, personal data, software installations or anything else to third parties, then on principal, I do not wish to have it installed on my personal computer.

Call me what you like, from old school to a software pirate, a fool or a stubborn idealist, I do not believe that anyone has the right to pry into my business on a continual basis. I don't pry into anyone else's affairs and I don't want anyone watching me. I have nothing to hide at all, (I bought and use only two online games), it's simply a matter of principal. If Win Vista (in a similar form to the build I recieved) becomes the mainstream online platform, I will be seriously looking for an alternative Op Sys.

Currently, I'm using WinXP and I've never been happier with any software product, I've learned to optimise XP into a secure and extremely stable, high performance platform. Microsoft finally got it right with XP, but I fear the worst for the future of personal online computing if Vista takes over from XP and there is no alternative from such an overwhelming and intrusive Op Sys.

Perhaps a "light" version of a MS op sys could be made available without all the inbuilt spy crap? I would pay "more" for "less" if they would just let me compute without looking over my shoulder. The monitoring of the public is really not needed or desirable over our PC's.

Are we going to give up our privacy for a gimmicky desktop? Come on people, let Microsoft know that this BS is not on.

As for software piracy, surely there are ways to write software so it can't be pirated, there is no need to monitor every PC in the world to "catch" someone with a pirated piece of software. It's just an excuse to spy on everyone with no basis in reality. What are they gonna do,........ hunt you down across the globe for running a  $100 program you didn't pay for? GET REAL  

To whom it may concern:
There is no doubt that Vista is shaping up to be a wonderful OS, and it's a credit to the developers. The spy functions are unnecessary and immoral in the commercial release, please leave them out or give users the option to opt out. Also, we need a basic op sys for internet communication, gaming and email. It can't be THAT difficult or complex can it?

A simple choice would be nice at the installation screen:

(  )  Install Vista with full PC monitoring and secure business functionality

(  )  Install Vista with complete privacy and secure internet functionality for home use


I know Vista will be released in several versions, any chance of a really basic personal version you think?  
Something akin to a stable Win'98SE with basic drivers just to get me on the net so I can download my own?  Don't worry about security either, I'll download a free firewall, that should make it easy for you.  

Such an OS should install on today's PC's in about 3 minutes, that would be sweet thanks.  

So yeah, with all the PC's in the world today obviously M$ are going to keep close tabs on every single one to make sure you're not stealing their, or anyone elses software.