Vista power saving never activates... thoughts?

I was hoping for some help with getting Vista's power saving to function. I have a Windows Vista Business Service Pack 1 (x64) installation. I have power options set up as follows:

Turn off the display:
[on battery] 5 minutes
[plugged in] 20 minutes

Put the computer to sleep:
[on battery] 15 minutes
[plugged in] 1 hour

Initially, power saving was working as expected. However, now it never enters power saving mode or even turns off the monitor. I have tried changing the plan settings around (including changing from one plan to another and creating a custom plan with the desired settings) with no success.

Does anyone have any ideas?

** UPDATE 28 Oct ** This was caused by the Vista Photos screensaver! Other screensavers allowed power saving to function, but the Photos screensaver did not.

Windows Desktop Search 4.0 + TrueCrypt = crash?

I used TrueCrypt to encrypt the entire system disk for a Vista x64 installation. Everything was running fine on this, until suddenly I started having frequent (every 40-50 minutes) crashes. I had just installed Visual Studio 2008, so I thought perhaps the SQL Express instance it installed was causing some incompatibility... but after disabling those services, and in fact removing every piece of VS 2008, I was still suffering the crashes.

Finally I waded through the recent updates and noticed that Windows Desktop Search 4.0 had been recently applied. I can't prove this, but I think I may have rebooted (and hence the service got started) during my application updates. Regardless, I stopped and disabled the service and have had no crashes since.

I did set Vista to record crash dumps, but it always fails to load the crash dump driver, and so I was not able to capture any data about the crashes I experienced. Has anyone else experienced problems with this combination of applications? The system drive has a single partition and is NTFS-formatted within the TrueCrypt container, for what it's worth.

Vista Page File in Netherworld

I had an odd problem with a Windows Vista SP1 installation. I suddenly began getting "your computer is low on memory" warnings when nothing really had changed with the way I use the machine. I looked at Task Manager and saw that it was showing page file use of ~1700M / ~1800M. When I went to Advanced System Settings (System Properties) to examine the page file size (Advanced tab, Performance settings, then the Advanced tab again) it showed the total page file size as.... 0 MB!

I knew I had enabled a page file previously when I set up the machine, so I rebooted--and it still showed 0 MB for the page file size. So, I went to assign a new 4096 MB page file. When I did this, it gave me a message stating that pagefile.sys already existed (!) and asked if I wanted to overwrite it. I half expected the machine to die painfully when I approved this action, but it did not... and knock on particleboard, I haven't gotten any of the warnings since.

Visual Studio Extensions for WF conflict with Office Live Meeting 2005

Not sure if this is related to me trying to develop on Vista, but when I run the installer for Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for Windows Workflow Foundation (EN), it tries to repair or reinstall Office Live Meeting 2005 and never actually installs the WF extensions. I had to let it remove Live Meeting (repair didn't work) before it would actually install the extensions.

Missing telnet client in Vista

I needed to check if an SMTP server would respond on the correct port and DNS name. I fired up telnet from a command prompt... and discovered that there was no telnet client. This post indicates it's disabled by default and contains instructions for enabling it again.

Vista RTM and its networking "tuning"

I was having some maddening issues with Vista Business RTM:

• MSN Messenger was constantly getting disconnected, but Google Talk stayed rock solid.
• LiveMeeting (the Windows version) would not stay connected.
• Firefox would halfway load a web page and then freeze.

It seems that Vista was automatically tuning my networking settings. Since declining this assistance, the above programs started running normally. The fix for me was to disable network auto tuning:

1. Click Start and type cmd.
   
2. When cmd.exe appears, right click and select Run as Administrator.
3. Enter the following command: netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled
4. Reboot after getting the OK message.

SQL Server 2005 Developer and AdventureWorks on Vista

I had a problem getting the AdventureWorks sample database that I installed to run under Vista RC1. SQL Server Management Studio kept reporting an error when I tried to access either the AdventureWorks or AdventureWorksDW databases. To get around this, I discovered that I needed to add my Windows user account to the sysadmin server role. After doing this, I was able to access both databases.

On a side note, I can't get SQL Server 2005 SP1 to install. It keeps prompting with a dialog box reading "Error performing inpage operation" regardless of whether or not I run the installer as administrator. Looks like I'm stuck waiting for SQL Server 2005 SP2 for this to work right.

Getting Virtual Server 2005 R2 to work under Vista

I found an excellent post discussing how to make Virtual Server 2005 work on Vista, but the key thing that helped me was changing the authentication on the VirtualServer virtual directory to Basic Authentication (it was originally Anonymous Authentication). This prevented me from having to run IE as an administrator.

Update 16 Oct: after moving my VMs back to my machine, I discovered that the basic auth enabled me to start the machines and use the virtual machine web site, but when I tried the ActiveX control to actually control the machines, it would not accept my user account when prompting for the remote control. Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 beta 2 did not help. I ended up going back to Windows integrated security for the VirtualServer virtual directory and doing a "Run as Administrator" on IE before browsing to the administration website.

Burning software for Vista?

Aargh, it seems to be pretty difficult to find any CD/DVD burning software for Vista. I had been using Nero 6 but it is marked as not compatible upon install (and I've read of other users having a problem with this). Any thoughts as to what I can use?

Early Windows Vista RC1 impressions

My hard drive died, so I rebuilt my laptop with Windows Vista RC1. Here are my initial impressions after a week living with Vista:

Good

• Backup is integrated and does scheduled backups with differentials
• Shore is purty
• New security features exist to allow 'sudo' when executing programs with elevated privilege needed
• BitLocker drive encryption (in Vista Ultimate) is native

Bad

• Trend AntiVirus does not install
• FreeMind
• Open dialog fails (but you can open mindmaps by drag-and-drop or double-click association)
• Save As dialog fails (so, you need to have a blank mindmap to copy for new maps); existing maps can be saved
• Uses a ton of HD space (~10GB just for Vista alone)
• Nero 6 doesn't work
  

Other Points of Interest

• .NET Framework 1.1 is not installed; have to install it and the SP1 patch for it to function