Freecell card pack

[Peter Webb]

MS auto-update recently installed SP1. It overwrote FreeCell.exe, which I
had substituted with an earlier release of FreeCell. The Vista version has
extremely crappy card graphics, which are unattractive and hard to read.

This raised a couple of questions:

1. Why did Microsoft need (or want) to change the FreeCell card design for
Vista, which previously were the same as in Solitaire (and you could
reasonably argue that Solitaire was a large part of the success of Windows
3.0) ? Just compare the graphics on the Vista versions of Solitaire and
FreeCell and you can see how much worse the FreeCell cards are, when
previously they were the same as Solitaire.

2. Why did SP1 feel the need to overwrite FreeCell? Did it harbour some
security vulnerability that could be used for DDoS attack or something?

 

[Mike Brannigan]

MS auto-update recently installed SP1. It overwrote FreeCell.exe, which I
had substituted with an earlier release of FreeCell. The Vista version has
extremely crappy card graphics, which are unattractive and hard to read.

This raised a couple of questions:

1. Why did Microsoft need (or want) to change the FreeCell card design for
Vista, which previously were the same as in Solitaire (and you could
reasonably argue that Solitaire was a large part of the success of Windows
3.0) ? Just compare the graphics on the Vista versions of Solitaire and
FreeCell and you can see how much worse the FreeCell cards are, when
previously they were the same as Solitaire.

2. Why did SP1 feel the need to overwrite FreeCell? Did it harbour some
security vulnerability that could be used for DDoS attack or something?

The decks in FreeCell and Solitaire are the same in the SP1 release.
The use of common code ensure shorter development and testing cycles and
reduces the size of the test matrix.
The SP1 install overwrote your older FreeCell.exe as it overwrote ALL older
out of date operating system shipped files on your system,

 

[Dave]

<shakes head>