As a long time linux user and recent OSX laptop user, I hadn't used Windows with any regularity since 2001. Recently I bought a copy of Windows 7 to run some niche software that lacks wine support and is cumbersome to run in a vm.
My first impression was that Windows 7 was great, it appeared to have removed many of the rough edges from XP and Vista.
Soon enough though I began to run into issues relating to legacy programs' security needs. Turns out, the only option I had was to run the programs as Administrator, since the crippled version of Windows 7 I bought has the ntfs permissions essentially disabled.
Why of all things would the secure filesystem be one of the disabled features on the consumer focused OS version?
This realization was a bit jarring, b/c I felt that the "tax" to use the OS properly in this case was fairly high. I can see charging more money for actual features, but NTFS permissions are clearly used behind the scenes in the Home version, so it feels more like using crippleware than opting out of advanced capabilities.
So I hope that Windows 8 uses a more reasonable way to determine what is a basic and what is a pro feature.
The Home version just lacks a nice GUI for the security stuff. You can still manage file and directory permissions from the command line using cacls.exe.
My first impression was that Windows 7 was great, it appeared to have removed many of the rough edges from XP and Vista.
Soon enough though I began to run into issues relating to legacy programs' security needs. Turns out, the only option I had was to run the programs as Administrator, since the crippled version of Windows 7 I bought has the ntfs permissions essentially disabled.
Why of all things would the secure filesystem be one of the disabled features on the consumer focused OS version?
This realization was a bit jarring, b/c I felt that the "tax" to use the OS properly in this case was fairly high. I can see charging more money for actual features, but NTFS permissions are clearly used behind the scenes in the Home version, so it feels more like using crippleware than opting out of advanced capabilities.
So I hope that Windows 8 uses a more reasonable way to determine what is a basic and what is a pro feature.