Built from source.

Feel like wasting several hours? Try installing Windows XP with Boot Camp 2.0 (the version released as part of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard) using NTFS, the file system required for partitions larger than 32 GB. Then watch as it fails miserably, again and again.

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
<Windows root>\system32\hal.dll.
Please re-install a copy of the above file.

Sound familiar? You didn’t do anything wrong—this is actually Apple’s fault. Hal.dll, the “hardware abstraction layer”, doesn’t have any particular significance; it just happens to be the first file that Windows looks for as it’s loading. Attempting to replace this file with the copy on disk won’t work, and your boot.ini is probably fine.

So how do you fix it, then? The solution is a bit involved, but not too bad all things considered. Here are the steps:

1. If you haven’t already removed the bad installation, you’ll need to do so. In OS X, open Boot Camp, click Continue, select “Create or remove a Windows partition”, click Continue, and then click Restore.
2. Create a new partition as you did before, and start the installation.
3. After the computer has rebooted and it’s booted from the CD, type “R” to go to the console. You should be dumped to the C:\ prompt.
4. We’re going to reformat the drive as NTFS ourselves instead of letting the Windows installer do it. Type the following and hit Return:

   format c: /q /fs:ntfs

   Then type this to reboot the computer:

   exit

5. Hold Option after it restarts, then boot to the Windows installation CD again (I believe it boots to the CD by default at this point, but this is just to be sure).
6. Install to C: (be careful not to select your OS X volume!), but—and this is important—choose NOT to reformat. Leave the file system as is.
7. Continue the installation process as you would normally.

That’s it! If things went well, the lovely 256-color Windows logo should load and you’ll be looking at Napa Valley in no time.

Check out the public beta!

Now Firefox users can use Windows Media Player within Firefox in a plugin designed by the WMP team. According to Hank Janssen, who posted the plugin on Microsoft’s open-source website, Port 25, it is “designed to support” all varieties of Windows XP and Vista. However, he also mentions that it’s backwards-compatible with WMP versions as far back as 6.4, which seems to imply that it might also work on Windows systems as old as Windows 95. That’s just speculation, though.

In any event, you can download the files from Port 25’s website. You can also find this link from the Firefox Add-ons page.

Windows Vista isn’t as bad as Windows Me, but compared to 2000, XP, and Server 2003, it’s a disaster.

In the last few years I’ve grown to prefer OS X, but don’t let that fool you—I’ve used every Windows since 3.0. I actually liked XP quite a bit; however, Vista is not XP. There are just too many problems with Vista to ignore, and as it stands now, you should not install it under any circumstances.

Most of the problems center around User Access Control (UAC), Microsoft’s new ACL-based security strategy. ACL is a broad concept used in web applications and programs like Apache to determine user access rights. The idea is that rights cascade from most general role to most specific role, such that user ‘jsmith’ may be in the same ‘users’ usergroup as ‘rjones’ but have more or less control than ‘rjones’ does.

The problem is that Vista’s ACL implementation is the worst I’ve ever seen.

The Mac ad with John Hodgman pretty much nails it. Every time you want to do something in Vista, no matter how seemingly trivial, it stops everything to nag you, “Do you want to do this?” Sometimes, you have to go through two different prompts just to approve it. That would be fine if the prompts were infrequent—say, when you are installing a program, changing the system configuration, or when you run a new program (but only the first time). Instead, it prompts you constantly, incessantly, not remembering your previous selections. It’s as if Guy Pearce from Memento was handling your security.

You might say, “People complained when Windows was insecure; now Microsoft adds system-level security and you’re still complaining.” But the problem is users, not the fact that they weren’t prompted nonstop every time they tried to use their computer. And as with every other frequent prompt, users will begin to ignore the UAC nags. Users don’t read prompts. Actually, users don’t read much of anything unless it’s directly related to what they’re trying to do. But the way to combat that is not to prompt them constantly, teaching them to ignore yet another warning. It’s to make the warnings as infrequent as possible, so that the user realizes that something out of the ordinary is happening.

If you really hate it, you can turn it off, right? Oh, naive user. Turning off UAC altogether removes all prompts—including the ones that Windows requires to perform certain tasks. Do you know how annoying it is to attempt to rename or delete a Start Menu item, only to have Windows shrug off your command with a terse, “You need permission to perform this action”? Or to type “net stop apache2″ in the console in order to restart Apache, and have Windows dully tell you, “System error 5 has occurred. Access is denied”?

Simply put, the UAC implementation in Vista is braindead. And unless their QA department has completely dropped the ball, I think Microsoft knows it. I think they decided that shipping was more important and that they would fix the most glaring bugs with the first service pack (a reasonable conclusion, I suppose, after six years of development). The problem is, we fools that adopted early have to fight with our computers in order to do anything.

But UAC isn’t the only headache in Vista. Among the others:

• Frequent explorer.exe crashes
• Desktop and explorer windows not refreshing—ever!—unless manually forced to do so
• Like XP, a complete inability to customize the Aero skin with my own colors
• Settings, often with older programs made for XP, not being remembered (likely related to poor backwards compatibility with UAC)
• My Recycle Bin disappeared from my desktop altogether, even after a reboot—turns out it set itself not to display all on its own

A UAC kludge to save your sanity

There is something of a fix, though. If you’ve installed Vista Business or Ultimate, you can keep UAC turned on but tell Windows to shut up, er, auto-approve all prompts. The application you want is secpol.msc and detailed instructions on using it can be found at Tweakvista.eu.

A word of warning, though: if you have a hard time managing your own security, don’t turn off UAC. I’m not responsible for any changes you make to your computer.