[Bob Cerelli]

Originally Posted by jonmcc33

It's not "hidden", it's disabled by default

Glad you realize it is not disabled. That was completely false and a lot of time has been wasted clearing that up.

[jonmcc33]

Originally Posted by Bob Cerelli

Glad you finally realize it is not disabled by default. That was completely incorrect

The Administrator account is in fact disabled by default in Windows Vista.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/942956

"By default, the built-in administrator account is disabled in a new installation of Windows Vista."

[Bob Cerelli]

It's great that you can unhide it and log in as the administrator.

Hopefully more than semantics can now be technically discussed. Or maybe not. We'll see.

[jonmcc33]

Oh, I'm sorry Bob. Did you delete your post? I think this has gotten far beyond the subject of the thread by now.

[Bob Cerelli]

Nope. All my posts are there.

Yes, It is now 27 posts have been spent trying to clear up the question of grammar regarding using the administrator account. Hope we are finally done with that. Glad you want to finally move on.

fairnooks was pretty perceptive there.

[Bob Cerelli]

wacky.banana,

So now after the semantics have been resolved (gosh I hope so)

It looks like you found some Vista drivers.
UAC may or may not solve the problem.

Been looking around for a policy setting that could be changed like with previous versions to allow unsigned drivers to be installed but don't see the same thing being there with Vista.

Did find several 3rd party apps to do this but wouldn't want to blindly recommend them.

And after all that it looks like you just may go to using XP which didn't have these problems.

[jbm1991]

Originally Posted by Bob Cerelli

And after all that it looks like you just may go back to using XP which didn't have these problems.

YOU MISSED OUT THE WORD BACK grammar and spelling arguement incoming

[Bob Cerelli]

Gosh I sure hope this doesn't start a whole other set of grammar, syntax and semantics ;-) But we'll see

[wacky.banana]

Rather than jump ship I decided to try what would have been my first/preferred option, which was to initiate a clean install of Vista. Post clean install, I was left with a number of devices whose drivers needed installing or updating.

The web search option gave me a couple of these, including one for my sound card which previous searches had not uncovered. Other items installed off drivers I obtained a few days ago.

The interesting thing, at least for me is this; where there was no Vista driver available but an XP driver existed, I was able to force install the XP driver into Vista without it complaining. Turning off user access control helped reduce/eliminate the usual annoying messages. For other items where there was no XP driver for older legacy devices e.g a SCSI card I run for my slide scanner, then Vista simply would not accept any non XP driver claiming the .inf file/info was incorrect.

So where are we now? Well most of the (test) system works ok, albeit a little slow (I need more ram). For the legacy items that won't work there seems to be no other choice but to install them into one of my XP systems (no great inconvenience as these are all sat on a network).

I am slowly beginning to get accustomed to Vista. What I now know is that unless I wish to make a considerable investment in a lot of new hardware then there is no viable businesss or technical case for me to move en masse to Vista at this time. I will continue to run Vista on one system and learn from that experience.

Going back full circle to what brought me here in the first place, it appears that one can force install drivers under certain conditions (see above). Trying to do so under an upgrade to, say, XP, as opposed to a clean/from scratch install seems not to work.

Hope all this is useful/helpful to others.

WB