Found a Vista Timebomb
Thrax
🐌Austin, TX Icrontian
So as you folks may know, I'm writing a Vista article for the February edition of the Smart Computing magazine. This means, sadly, that I had to install the damn thing to write the article accurately.
After the article was finished, I continued to play around with it to see if I could pare the memory footprint down to what I consider reasonable. 554mb at boot on the RTM is not reasonable. First step was to start axing services left and right. After feeling satisfied with what I disabled, I went to the control panel to find out how to disable UAC.
What did I see?
An empty control panel.
After reactivating my services one by one, I found that the Software Licensing service disables your control panel and access to the device manager if it is not on and running at all times. This service provides support for Microsoft WGA and activation protocols for Vista. And it was gobbling up about 20mb of RAM; lord knows what it's doing with all that memory, perhaps analysing my workspace and calculating all the possible ways to kill me if I turn it back off.
After the article was finished, I continued to play around with it to see if I could pare the memory footprint down to what I consider reasonable. 554mb at boot on the RTM is not reasonable. First step was to start axing services left and right. After feeling satisfied with what I disabled, I went to the control panel to find out how to disable UAC.
What did I see?
An empty control panel.
After reactivating my services one by one, I found that the Software Licensing service disables your control panel and access to the device manager if it is not on and running at all times. This service provides support for Microsoft WGA and activation protocols for Vista. And it was gobbling up about 20mb of RAM; lord knows what it's doing with all that memory, perhaps analysing my workspace and calculating all the possible ways to kill me if I turn it back off.
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Comments
Whenever you get all the services cut back, post a list of the the ones you safely axed.
I made the mistake of running Vista as my primary OS. It isn't all that bad except, as you said, it rapes your RAM. When I try to work in Photoshop it literally CREEPS along... and I have 2gigs of ram.
Did you get a copy of Ultimate or Home Premium? I take it its the RTM version.
You can't blame them for trying to protect their product from piracy, if that's what you're getting at.
I further object to the fact the service is even required in the first place. It's another tendril of DRM, licensing, and other obtrusive DMCA-inspired scheme buried deep within a product. I'm sick of it on mp3 players, songs, CDs, TV shows and DVDs that we legally purchase/acquire, and now my operating system, indeed one of the very things my PC requires to run, has to have it as well?
It's big-brother syndrome. There are other ways to enforce licensing compliance than by rigging essential sections of the OS to disable if the product isn't activated. The simple procedure should have been: Seven days of full functionality if the product is not activated. Control panel and device manager disabled thereafter, until 30 days when the product stops working entirely until it is registered. My RAM is saved, I don't have a service phoning home, and I feel completely less overshadowed.
If it really bothers you that much, just block it with a firewall for the time being.
In any case, the only reason it's in your legit copy is because MS has no way of knowing for sure that it is in fact legit. If Microsoft made it possible to remove the service before or after activating and still function correctly, it would be one hell of a lot easier for a hack to be made to disable it in a way it wasn't intended to on a pirated copy.
"Big Business" has just as much of a right to protect their products from theft as anyone else. In a perfect world without piracy, Microsoft wouldn’t have to use 20 MBs of precious RAM (out of the gigabytes you already own) to protect themselves.
But piracy does exist, so they fight it in the best possible method they can think of. Until this method is broken, this may offer them the most amount of time available to come up with a better approach.
Don’t blame the software developers. Blame the pirates for your missing 20 Megs of RAM. Besides, if that much RAM really makes that much of an impact on system performance for you, then maybe you should look into buying some more RAM anyhow.
WGA turned off and went away after you activated the program, and while it was prone to being hacked, the idea could have been improved upon substantially. Hash-checking the WGA DLLs at the kernel level at boot, for example, would've been a good start. I would have my RAM, they would have their piracy-protection.
WGA on XP doesn't work that well, so they went with knitting it right into the heart of the OS (even the kernel itself for all we know). Any hash checks at boot would be far easier to disable or fool than building protection into the OS itself from the get-go.
Maybe they should just create a process to protect the hash-checking process?
What about that process? You'd need another process to protect that one too, right?
Etc.
Because the process takes a paltry ~20 Megs of RAM?
Big deal. I’m sure you’ll find plenty of other processes to kill which will make a much larger impact on performance then this one.
If that’s all we need to put up with and it lasts months before being broken then I'd call that an accomplishment on their part.
If you could program a method that really does work better for their OS, do it and sell it to Microsoft. You'll make millions. Till then, we'll all have to be content with what they find to be the best possible defense for their own product, and they know a heck of a lot more about what goes on behind the scenes then anybody else.
I walk in to our supplier to purchase some copy's of the you beaut vistabistablaster 2010.
Can you please put you fingerprint here thank you miss. "Okay"
Now can you look into this eye scanner so that we can match the scan to this copy of windows to you. "Okay"
Now we would like to take a sample of your DNA so that your copy of windows can be cross refferenced against your eye scan to ensure online authenticity of the product against MS's database. "Okay"
Now to unlock the product you need to go to a justice of the peace, fill out a stat dec then see your local member of parliment for the activation key.
Do not worry miss, the bonus with this version is that you will not have to worry about satellite tracking until service pack 1 is released :banghead:
Yup ssuurreee yaaa betsyia!!!!!
However, if the service did something useful FOR ME then I wouldn't mind the 20MB footprint, like a combo deal of various services rolled into one. If MS wants to put that on my system and force it on me, fine, as long as it doesn't hinder my experience with what I use my PC for.... 5MB should be more than enough... and I can deal with that.
In any case, another reason to use CentOS/Ubuntu...
Sorry TheMicroMan
A palty 20 MB of ram? I don't know about that. 20 MB of ram to run some crap just to continuously check to see if I have a legitimate copy of their "new" operating system (WinXP SP3 if you ask me) is just bull****. I see no need for this to operate continuously in the background; there is no reason except that M$ has got to be trying to figure a way to **** us out of even more money somehow.
The point is that Thrax isn't qualified to be programming something like this right now anyways. But it isn't any stretch of imagination to think that protecting their intellectual property shouldn't have to come at the expense of that much extra overhead in running the OS. Sounds like either piss-poor programming or else M$ has something else up their sleeve for them to screw us out of more money.
Vista.. more big brother el-crap-ola..
XP Sp3, with a bunch of backdoors that allows MS to spy on you..
If MS wants to combat piracy, reduce the price... (how much is Vista going to be again?)
What concerns me is we really can't "trust" MS to keep out of our systems...
Anyone remember the regwize.exe in Windows 95 and how MS used that?
No telling what kind of info is being transmitted in the background.. What backdoors they have integrated into the system.
BTW: don't count on any "firewall" to stop it from dialing out as mentioned previously and be concerned on the data being transmitted in the background.
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I think you're going way overboard on big brother and MS, which I also see it as. But believe me there are ways of knowing what MS is looking at in your system if that is what they do. If they say, for example, that a certain peice of the OS is checking your statistics in web browsing and is actually checking all your keys and passwords and any other thing that may or may not be questionably legal, then someone WILL know and they WILL put it out for the world to see. You may not know what your system is doing, but if it's going over the network then the NETWORK KNOWS.