Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

Windows Vista likes to play “Mother may I?” and ask you EVERY damn time it wants to do something if it’s allowed to, even for services that should be certified as its own:

Why should I have to approve its own activation component? Its rundll components? It’s hardware installation components? I believe in a more secure architecture, but really Microsoft, this is taking the security iniative a little too far. As a consumer, I just want it to run–security decisions should be made behind my back. Especially for operating system components. What does it say for your system when it doesn’t even trust itself?

Ever wondered if you can run Microsoft Windows Vista on, say, a non-intel Apple computer (like the 12″ powerbook)? Well, here’s proof that you can:

This is not a fake screenshot or photo–Microsoft Windows Vista is really on that Apple Mac instead of OSX, and it’s not an Intel x86 chip in there, either, it’s running OSX on a single traditional G4 processor. How did I do it? Simple: I got Windows Vista running in VMware 5 Workstation, which is a major pain, and then used Remote Desktop from the Mac. Did you know there’s a remote desktop client for the Mac? That’s the easiest way to get Vista on your mac.

Installing Vista on a virtual machine is a little more annoying. First, you need a 16GB virtual disk before the Vista beta will let you install it. Second, you need to format this space and then on reboot manually boot from CD again. Third, the virtual shared folder abstraction doesn’t work in Windows Vista for some reason.