Human Revolution save issue

[PlausibleSarge]

UAC is generally garbage anyways. It pops up so often for typical users that it becomes a nuisance and people click ok without reading the messages anyway, thus negating its use altogether. While I never suggest turning it off, most people do (I know I did, but I'm a MCSA with ISA certs, so I have an idea what I'm doing most of the time)

^^THIS, except for the not turning it off part. You should always atleast turn it down, if not off completely, as it does nothing but get in the way.

UAC is fine. It's overlaying purpose was insuring that end users get a bad user experience with peoples programs unless they are written right, thus forcing application evolution...but by now, it actually alerts you to poor or dangerous programs when they occasionally come around, which is a good thing.

^^NOT THIS

The only way to encourage program evolution is to encourage programmers to do a better job. While most of the time, alot of the easier languages do a reasonable job of annoying tasks like memory management, a human will almost always do a better job if they are well educated. The best way to eliminate slow, ineffective, and bloated programs is to stop writing them, and learning which language is right for the job goes a long way to accomplishing this. Users also need a good antivirus and anti-adware solution that effectively stops programs from accessing OS files and doing certain admin tasks. UAC fails in both areas, as it is only a "safeguard" (and I use the term lightly because it has major flaws) against programs accessing otherwise "admin-only" features, with a useless interface that pops up so often it gets ignored. Many third party antivirus programs do a much better job AND dont try to pop up a window every time you do ANYTHING. When you consider these, UAC effectively fades into obscurity with Microsoft Bitlocker and Windows Defender

/uninformed rant over

[AEmer]

I only see a UAC prompt at most 5 times a month, and almost never in a situation where it doesn't make sense. I hardly ever make changes to my computer setup, because I don't need to.
It's just like superuser elevation on Linux, and it's something practically everybody on that platform use...for good reason. You should be alerted if a program tries to change something on your system.

If you see a UAC often from a specific program, bite the bullet and let it run in administrator mode, if you see it from _different_ programs, you really need to be alerted, because most programs shouldn't do this.

Also, it's untrue that educating programmers helps. In theory it should, but programmers are by and large busy people. If it works, don't fix it, and all that. I'm not saying that's the right way to program, just that it's common in corporate culture. Most firms don't even have an automated testing suite.

They're not going to change away from a deprecated api just because it's deprecated....most of the time, things will keep chugging along with deprecated methods untill they stop working completely.

UAC as it existed in Vista is a softer pressure; if programs give users a bad experience, they'll get updated. By now, almost all programs behave like they should: They store user data in the user data folder, rather than on the rest of the system drive. I don't really approve of microsofts use of the directory structure to clearly mark what's program data and what isn't, but since it's about the only way you can get application programmers to mark up what's user data and what's program data, I can understand the decision.

Either way, UAC has cleaned things up and now you get a warning whenever changes are about to be made to the system, and assuming you keep all your applications on your system drive, they're protected as well...but whenever business as usual is going on, you don't get a prompt.

Also, the bit about UAC being used to motivate application programmers to fall in line? that's part of officially declared microsoft policy for windows vista. I can find the source if you want. You might think that's bad policy, you might say you woulda done something differently, but that doesn't change the fact it was part of the motivation for making UAC.

[gamer0004]

UAC is useful because it allows me to decide which programs are allowed to change stuff on my PC and which programs aren't. Also, screw microsoft for making programs store user data in the user data folder. My documents folder is full of crap I don't want there. And savefiles are often impossible to find because of unintuitive locations (C:Users/Username/Appdata/ and then either locallow, roaming or local... I haven't found any consistency there). The file structure should really be changed.

[nerdenstein]

Yeah, I also find it annoying that programs and games save to 'Documents'. I store all my actual documents (College work and such) in a separate folder creatively called 'Work' because I got annoyed with it.

[AEmer]

Which makes all sorts of sense, but unless you put that data on another drive (which will usually default to being userspace), or manually set up things to be read-write in user-space, it can mess things up for your programs.

Documents and settings is a bad label that was probably chosen because the name is instantly recognizable and gets maybe 80% of what it does right. It's true name should be "userspace" and ideally, microsoft would cram an ugly prompt down your throat of you tried to put your stuff in any other place on the system drive. Additional harddrives should dynamically tie into either userspace, or program space, and you should be able to transfer space between the two (manually or automatically), as well as simply mark if you would prefer some stuff to be stored on a specific or several specific physical drives...

That's the real seperation microsoft was going for, but currently, there's this weird sort-of mish-mash that assumes all kinds of things about the physical hardware that really should be abstracted away. Theres no reason for it. They've kept the path/tree system that originates with unix and have attempted to mix it with traditional security paradigms and then they've had to dumb everything down so their support personel are able to help people out.

I can only say that you should really try to work with the system unless you have specific reasons that you can't, because things can get f'ed up.

Like the guy who has this save game issue; he probably nuked his system, but nuking the system drive is no longer enough, because windows will crap data all over your other drives, and unless you nuke it well and good, some will persist on the system drive too, and it can mess things up thoroughly. Maintaining a computer these days is vastly more complicated than managing one 15 years ago. It's a sad fact largely driven by a corporate culture putting high demand on IT and little demand on users behaviour, and the only solution is to either educate yourself or get a new computer every few years.

[Morpheus]

UAC is generally garbage anyways. It pops up so often for typical users that it becomes a nuisance and people click ok without reading the messages anyway, thus negating its use altogether. While I never suggest turning it off, most people do (I know I did, but I'm a MCSA with ISA certs, so I have an idea what I'm doing most of the time).


Is the problem about "insufficient memory" or "insufficient hard disk space?" Can we see the exact error message? Does it pop up in game or in a windows message?

It was in game:

DXHR save

He asked on some other forums and is waiting a reply.

[AEmer]

make sure to report back once its resolved =]

[paladin181]

UAC is generally garbage anyways. It pops up so often for typical users that it becomes a nuisance and people click ok without reading the messages anyway, thus negating its use altogether. While I never suggest turning it off, most people do (I know I did, but I'm a MCSA with ISA certs, so I have an idea what I'm doing most of the time).


Is the problem about "insufficient memory" or "insufficient hard disk space?" Can we see the exact error message? Does it pop up in game or in a windows message?

It was in game:

DXHRSavemessage.jpg

He asked on some other forums and is waiting a reply.

I'm the one who got him to post that screenie, Morpheus. I registered there to help him out.