Thursday, 10 August 2006 by marstinson.

First off, this is not a bitch session. Vista is still in beta testing and the whole purpose of beta testing is to identify as many problems as possible (and fix them _before_ sending the product out to an unsuspecting public). Considering the number of problem reports that I get from my system, only one has an identified solution - it will be fixed in RC1. The remainder are still showing “no solution found”.

One scary problem is that a corrupted CD-R causes Windows Explorer to crash. In and of itself, this is not such a big deal. Unlike Win9x, Explorer in the more recent NT systems just relaunches itself after a FDGB (faw-down-go-BOOM). The surprising thing is that this issue has now been around for more than 10 years and does appear to be any closer to a solution than under Win95. OK, when Explorer explodes, it doesn’t take the whole OS down with it. This is a step in the right direction. But why, after 10 years of tinkering, does Explorer encountering a corrupted file not just generate a simple “oops! Sorry, dude, but that file is, like, hozed. Have a nice day.” and just keep on trucking?

A couple of notable problem areas that are almost certain to disappear by later this year: incompatible applications and scarce drivers. The vast majority of apps that were written for XP continue to function under Vista. But there are a few that will not run, even in compatibility mode; most annoyingly, the Palm Hotsync Manager. Users have been asking about this problem on Microsoft’s Vista forums for about two months now and not a peep from the good folks at Redmond. In my case, the HotSync manager believes it’s working over the COM1 serial port. I don’t know whether the fault for this lies with Vista or with Palm, but I strongly suspect the OS since the application correctly recognizes its USB connection under XP.

Antivirus is another concern. At the moment only Trend Micro’s PC-cillin works with Vista, though the other vendors are undoubtedly ramping up and will undoubtedly have a compatible product by the time Vista hits the shelves. I’m hoping that proves to be the case because Trend Micro’s product is a beta, too, and will expire at the end of October. With nothing else on the horizon, that means running without AV protection - a scary proposition at best these days.

One area where Microsoft has made a significant change is with system security. The Administrator account is gone. Instead, the first user account created during a clean install has administrator privileges and can then grant or withhold those privileges for later user accounts. To make matters better, all accounts run with reduced privileges unless something requires higher ones. At that point, a dialog box opens letting you know that something needs privileges and offering you the opportunity to provide the appropriate credential. I see this as a good thing and a bad thing at the moment.

This is good because you know what’s running (or trying to run) on your system. It’s a bad thing, though, because of the incessant number of these pop-ups. It’s a royal pain when you’re trying to get something done and have to stop every few seconds to provide credentials to a known-good app. But, in keeping with my earlier comment, the number of these interruptions should decrease as applications that don’t need higher privileges make their way onto the shelves.

The big question is whether businesses with a lot of capital invested in existing applications are going to want to spring for the newer apps just to get away from the disruption. Or will they turn to a different OS as a more efficient way of eliminating the problem? I don’t see Mac as a serious contender for this solution due to the expense of having to replace hardware AND apps, not to mention having to install the guilty OS. But there are some very good Linux distros out there and I can’t think of any good Linux apps that require root privileges to run. Here is one area where the good folks at Redmond could learn a thing or three from the open-source community.

Along these same lines, applications that you want to run at startup require authorization before they are permitted to launch. The bad thing is that Vista can’t seem to recall that you’ve said “OK” the past fifty times any particular app tries to launch; it continues to ask. Hopefully this issue will be resolved before anything hits the shelves.

Again, don’t get me wrong. Vista looks to be a vast improvement over previous OSs and it IS in beta, where these things are supposed to be identified. But I think I’m going to join with the folks who believe Microsoft needs a Beta 3 before going the RC route.

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Thursday, 10 August 2006 by marstinson.

Time finally permitted, so I decided to take another stab at installing and running Vista on my laptop. This go around, I decided to do a completely clean install (blow partitions, format and install from scratch) rather than upgrade XP. My system is an IBM ThinkPad G40 with 768MB of RAM and a 40GB HDD.

 Vista installed much faster as a clean install than it did as an upgrade. The whole installation took about a bit more than an hour. As expected, it did not recognize my wireless card, so I made sure that I had the CD handy in order to install the driver (I know from my upgrade experience that the XP driver works under Vista). Since I was not going to be able to retain my applications, I decided to scale back to just the necessities: Palm Desktop, Macromedia MX 2004 Suite, and the Office 2007 Beta 2. Anything else can be handled on an as-needed basis, but those apps are critical to what I do.

Rather than hunt for the CD, I decided download the lastest Palm Desktop after I got my wireless working. I had the install CDs handy for the others.

My wireless NIC ran into problems right off the bat. When you choose to install the D-Link drivers from the CD, you also get the configuration utility (whether you want it or not). The configuration utility would not launch properly. I finally just pointed Vista to the appropriate .inf file on the CD and let it install the card drivers on its own. This proved to be a much simpler solution and worked quite well. I know that there was an updated driver for XP on Microsoft Update as early as mid-December of 2005, but there was no sign of it when I ran Update after installing Vista.

With a working internet connection, I downloaded the latest Palm Desktop for my Zire 31. The package installed quite nicely and ran like a charm, but absolutely refused to sync with the Palm device. For some reason it thinks it’s connected via a serial cable to COM1, which is not the case. I do not see any settings that can be changed to get it recognize that it’s connected through a USB port, so the Palm device is just dead weight at this point as far as my laptop is concerned. I’m either going to have to live without it or start synching with my desktop machine. I’ll probably opt for the latter - a fix from Microsoft and Palm do not appear to be in the immediate future and the Vista forums only report the existence of the problem with no solution provided.

Macromedia MX 2004 Suite installed cleanly and runs just as well as it did under XP. I was able to restore my sites from a backup copy on an external drive and it was just a matter of setting up the remote server connection to pick up exactly where I had left off earlier today.

Office 2007 Beta 2 also installed cleanly and ran like a charm. I was unable to locate the converter packs for Office 2003 and earlier, but perhaps this was just because I didn’t have an earlier version installed.

 One issue that cropped up early on was my USB optical mouse. Vista recognized the device and installed a PnP driver with no problem. However the mouse configuration utility that it also installed (ico.exe) immediately pegged the processor to 100% usage and refused to come down. Lowering the process’s priority only served to allow other applications to have first dibs on the processor cycles, but usage remained at 100%. As soon as I killed the process, processor usage dropped to 1% to 2% and I did not find any change in the mouse’s functionality.

I’m still waiting on my own copy of Vista to appear from the good folks at Redmond (it’s only been close to 9 weeks since I ordered it). In the interim, I’m using a friend’s CD (the beta license allows installation on 10 computers, so I’m legal as far as I know) and everything else seems to be working quite well. Since school starts up on Monday, it’s going to get quite a workout over the next few weeks.

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