October 7th, 2007 by Jemaleddin Cole

Jared has been run­ning Win­dows Vista on his new com­puter for a while, and he keeps run­ning into the same problem.  When he wants to install a game from a CD, he double clicks on the icon to run the auto­play script, but because Win­dows is now scan­ning every­thing that passes through memory to make sure that you aren’t a pirate (see the Longest Sui­cide Note in His­tory), this takes a few sec­onds. Jared gets bored and ends up either click­ing on another window, or click­ing on the CD icon again.

The reason this is a prob­lem is that when the auto­play even­tu­ally runs, it kicks out the Vista “Are you sure you want to run the appli­ca­tion that you just ran?” dialog box and blacks out the screen. Or it would, unless you  hap­pened to click on any­thing else, in which case the dialog dis­ap­pears. You can’t alt-​tab to it and you can’t see it on the screen. The only way to get back to it, as far as I can tell, is to Ctrl-​Alt-​Delete and choose the task man­ager at which point the dialog appears.

I don’t really want to teach Jared the three-​finger salute because I don’t want him mess­ing around killing processes, but I’m also tired of him coming to me scream­ing that he can’t install his game.

So is there a way to turn off these warn­ings, or an easy way to get back to them that I can teach Jared?

Category: Technology
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5 Responses to “Vista Confirm and Cancel Dialogs”

  1. This is another edi­tion of easy answers to hard ques­tions.

    TB: So is there a way to turn off these warn­ings, or an easy way to get back to them that I can teach Jared?

    S: Yes. Install Win­dows XP.

    — skank October 7th, 2007 at 6:18 pm #

  2. Seri­ously, I had three chil­dren I never let any of them install soft­ware and two of them were older than Jared when I got my first DOS-​based PC. It’s easier and safer to do it your­self.

    Hard to believe but my 14-year-old son deleted the DOS root direc­tory and I had to rein­stall the oper­at­ing system and all the appli­ca­tions.

    — skank October 7th, 2007 at 6:26 pm #

  3. Win­dows XP - that’s a good one. Turkey.

    Yeah, back in those days your kids couldn’t down­load appli­ca­tions off the inter­net from Nick­elodeon and install them. And your kids didn’t have dozens of CDs of soft­ware from their old com­puter that they may or may not ever want installed. And even if you didn’t want them installing soft­ware, you have to let them have admin­is­tra­tor accounts because pretty much none of their games will work oth­er­wise.

    So thanks for the tip, smart-​guy. ;-)

    — Jemaleddin October 7th, 2007 at 9:55 pm #

  4. Yeah, con­sid­er­ing all the things my kids couldn’t do back then, they really deserve a pat on the back for find­ing other ways to make my com­puter inop­er­a­ble. :)

    Have you had to refor­mat the boot drive on Jared’s puter? Didn’t think so. That’s a very smart boy. He knows how to avoid dis­as­ter unlike some folk I might mention…

    And why stick with Vista? It’s the new ME. Just say no to Gates’s latest rip off.

    — skank October 7th, 2007 at 10:31 pm #

  5. Well, I had to format and rein­stall XP on his old com­puter 3 times - that’s the limit where system doesn’t get any faster when you try it again. Hence the new com­puter.

    And since it already has XP and is already work­ing, it ain’t broke, and I ain’t fixing it. :-)

    — Jemaleddin October 7th, 2007 at 10:48 pm #