Windows frustrations

I’m reading Hackers by Steven Levy right now. This book is about the first people to really program computers with enthusiasm and an eye towards some of the anarchic possibilities of the machine. And the obstacles they overcame were tremendous. Writing entire video games in assembly language, re-implementing FORTRAN for different platforms (heck, writing anything in FORTRAN at all is a trial), working with computers the size of entire building floors, dealing with the existing IBM priesthood… There were plenty of obstacles to getting work done with a computer back then.

And, there still are, I have to say. I’m currently writing this from my first laptop ever. I love it. The mobility, the freedom, especially when combined with a wireless network card. This computer came with Windows XP and I plan to leave windows on this box, primarily so that I can do more J2ME development.

Now, the first thing any Unix user learns is that you shouldn’t log in as root any more than you absolutely have to. The reasons for this are many: you can delete system files unintentionally, there’s no log file to recreate disaster scenarios, and in general, you just don’t need to do this. The first thing I do every time I’m on a new desktop Unix box is download a copy of sudo and install it. Then I change the root password to something long and forgettable, preferably with unpronounceable characters. I do this so that there’s never any chance of me logging in as the super user again. I will say that this has caused me to have to boot from a root disk a time or two, but, on the other hand, I’ve never deleted a device file unintentionally.

Anyway, the purpose of that aside was to explain why I feel that you should always run your day to day tasks as a less privileged user. Even more so on Windows than on Unix, given the wider spread of Windows viruses and, to be honest, my lack of experience administering Windows. So, the first thing I did when I got this new computer was to create a non administrative user. Of course, for the first couple of days, I spent most of my time logged in as the administrative user, installing OpenOffice, Vim and other software. I also got my wireless card to work, which was simple. Plug in the card, have it find the SSID, enter the WEP key and I was in business.

That is, until I tried to access the Internet via my wireless card when logged in as the limited user. The network bounces up and down, up and down, and there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it. Every second, the network changed status. To be honest, I haven’t looked in google because I can’t even think of how to describe the phenomenon. But, when I’m logged in as the administrator, it’s smooth sailing. There are some things I plan to try, like creating another administrator and seeing if that account has similar problems. If that’s the case, it’s probably not the fact that my limited privilege account has limited privileges, but rather that the network software hasn’t been made accessible to it. However, this situation is especially frustrating because the time when I least want to be logged in as an administrative user is when I’m most vulnerable to worms, viruses and rogue email attachments–that is to say, when I’m connected to the Internet.

I remember fighting this battle 3 years ago, when I was using Windows NT on a team of software developers. I was the only one (so far as I know) to create and use regularly a non privileged account. Eventually, I just said ‘screw it’ and did everything as the administrative user, much as I’ll do now after a few more attempts to make the unprivileged user work. Windows just doesn’t seem to be built for this deep division between administrators and users, and that doesn’t seem to have changed.