
Parallels is driving me nuts. If I try to run Vista, it maxes out the CPU constantly, even in the background. In contrast, I’ve had two VMware Fusion VMs (Vista and XP) running in the background all morning, and I forgot they were there.

Parallels is driving me nuts. If I try to run Vista, it maxes out the CPU constantly, even in the background. In contrast, I’ve had two VMware Fusion VMs (Vista and XP) running in the background all morning, and I forgot they were there.
I installed Vista under Boot Camp today, and my Mac wouldn’t boot into Mac OS X afterwards. It was sitting there on the blue screen with the mouse cursor. Of course I blamed it on boot camp at first. I plugged it into Ethernet (wasn’t getting an Airport connection at this point) and ssh’d into it from another machine. Turns out it was hanging on this umount /Volumes/Foo that I had stuck into rc.local a long time ago. I have no idea why installing Vista would trigger that behavior, but it’s gone from that file now and boots up fine. Who do I talk to about getting that hour of my life back?
Anyone who’s talked to me about Vista in the past couple of months knows that I’m impressed with it. And I’ve even been known to say kind things about how Microsoft cleaned up the User Access Control (UAC) prompts in post-beta versions of Vista. But I read today that an installation package with a lot of digitally signed files can take a long time for the UAC prompt to come up; up to an hour in this case:
When installing on Windows Vista with User Account Control (UAC) active, there can be a substantial delay before the initial setup dialog is displayed. During this time, a UAC function is verifying digital signatures within the installation package. This service pack carries a large number of files causing the process to take up to one hour in some cases.
This explains a lot, actually. I’ve run into this exact problem (well, not an hour, but sometimes a few minutes or more), and the result is that I ended up clicking the installer several times wondering WTF is going on. Even if there’s no quick solution to this problem, Microsoft might want to have some kind of progress indicator explaining what’s going on. Although it seems sensible to turn off UAC while I’m installing this package, I’m going to leave it on and see how long it takes for the prompt to pop up.
Update: it took only three minutes to appear.
If you’re trying to get an OfficeJet d135 working with Beta 2 of Vista, you’ll probably get an error when you try to install the driver. If, like me, you did an upgrade installation from a previously-working XP installation, your printer may just mysteriously stop working.
I found that the DeskJet 990c driver that’s built into Vista works fine, and handles color as well as the two-sided printing accessory. (If you want to change your driver, open the Control Panel, click Printers under Hardware and Sound, and then right-click on the printer. Instead of choosing Properties, choose Properties from the “Run Elevated” sub-menu. Then use the Advanced tab to change the driver).