Why?

Saturday, 12 August 2006 by marstinson.

Today was the first real opportunity that I had to take this puppy out for a spin in a full-blown production environment. It’s one thing to piddle around with software at home or in the office and another thing to have to do your daily grind with it. Some interesting problems cropped up.

The first problem almost fried my laptop (literally). I was running a couple of minutes late getting out of the house this morning, so I didn’t take time to shut down the laptop. Instead, I just closed the lid, packed it up and left. Normally this will put the machine into stand-by mode or whatever you specified when you set up the OS. Like XP, Vista offers a variety of choices of what to do when you close the lid, press the power button, etc. As it turned out, none-of-the-above was the result. Got to work, sat through a couple of short meetings and then pulled out my laptop for the normal workday thing.

Turns out that closing the lid did absolutely nothing except hide the fact that nothing happened. Net result: battery power drained to almost zip. If I’d gone 5 or 10 more minutes, it would have been completely drained. Temperature inside my laptop bag? “Slow oven” comes to mind, and then there was that unmistakable smell of overheated processor. Far as I can tell, no permanent damage was done, although the overheating may have contributed to later problems. We’ll just have to see. Anyway, off to the races.

Network connectivity proved to be very problematic. Initially everything appeared to be be more or less normal. Vista recognizes when you change networks. I use a private IP addressing scheme on my home network and the school uses a different one. No wireless connectivity yet, but I’m told that it’s coming. Anyway, as soon as I plugged in the patch cable, Vista acquired its IP address and went to town. I was able to access my email, use IE for browsing, remote in to other machines, and so forth. Vista’s network discovery protocols seem to work a bit more efficiently than the old NetBIOS stack did, which was a pleasant surprise. Everything appeared to be working to or in excess of expectations.

By lunchtime, however, the situation started to deteriorate. I lost access to email first. I had not yet had an opportunity to set up Outlook to connect to our servers (we use Novell GroupWise), so was relying on web access rather than POP/SMTP connections. The first thing to disappear was my access to the login page through my “Favorites” shortcut. Hmmm. OK, fine. If the shortcut won’t work, there’s always the link on the intranet homepage. Homepage loads fine, but clicking the link does nothing. Puzzling. Well, perhaps it’s IE? I normally run three browsers: IE, Firefox and Opera. It’s not that I’m a rabid anti-IE guy or anything, though. Because I do a bit of web development, I want to make sure that whatever I do will render properly regardless of the browser being used. Firefox behaves in pretty much the same way that Netscape does, so anything rendering well in Firefox will do the same in Netscape. Got to admit, though, that I do like the way that Opera has implemented the W3C standards, but I digress.

Installing the other browsers was something that I had overlooked when setting up my laptop, so it’s off to Mozilla.com to get the Firefox installer. Firefox was one of the apps that continued to work well when I tried the upgrade a couple of months back, so I wasn’t worried about compatibility. In it goes and I’ve got email access again. Well, sort of. I had email access for about 5 minutes. Then the bookmarked shortcut stopped working and the link on the intranet homepage died. “Curiouser and curiouser,” said Alice. Unfortunately, the only thing that I had time to do was to verify with our IT department that the servers were working properly - eveyone else still had email access.

Then I can’t even load the homepage. And not just the homepage - I can’t load anything on another system, whether on the intranet or internet. That sound you hear is my molars turning into powder because I’ve got people who need some files that I’ve been working on and I can’t use the district’s email or any of my personal email accounts to send them. So when everything else fails, it’s “sneakernet” time and I spend the rest of the day running around with my flash drive in hand - “did you need a copy of (whatever)?”

While all of this is going on, I also have a crying need to get into a few .pdfs and the Acrobat Reader is another application that I had forgotten to load. But I also know that there were some hiccups with it a while back, especially a compatibility issue with Vista. Fortunately this cropped up while the browsers were still working (sort of).  I found a couple of blog threads that seemed pretty clear that the 7.0.8 version of Reader would work on Vista, but it apparently creates issues for Outlook 2007. Well, Outlook isn’t high on my radar at the moment, so I’ll risk the issue in favor of being able to get to the data that I need and get to it now.

Only one problem - Adobe’s website doesn’t let me in with either IE or Firefox. I can understand not letting me in with IE. I’ve run into the IE7 compatibility issue before at Symantec’s site. But Firefox? I mean really. Everyone works well with Firefox. This just cannot be. But in this case it is. I can’t get the installer from Adobe. But where there’s a will, there’s a way. And willpower is about all I have at this point. A Google search turns up a few sites that host the 7.0.8 installer and I’m able to get it put on and get the data that I need.

Then the next problem - “Yo! Mark! What’s with those Word files you brought me? I can open your template just fine, but all I get with the example file is gobbledegook. Did you drop a corrupted file on my drive or something?” Hmmm. I don’t think so, but who knows? Let me bring you a clean copy. Clean copy is junk, too. Office 2007 backwards compatibility issue? Dunno. OK, work-around time. Since the problem is just the example file, let’s try Office’s new “save as a .pdf” feature. Problem solved, sort of. Still can’t use the example file in .doc format on an Office 2003 installation. Because I was aware of the potential for this problem, I’m defaulted to the Office 97-2003 “Compatibility Mode” when creating files, but “compatibility” doesn’t seem to mean the same thing that it did a few years back.

The rest of the day ran pretty much like that. I can pretty much do whatever I need to do as long as I’m working locally. But no network access after about lunchtime. I still don’t know if all of this is a hiccup in Vista or whether it’s just the fallout from the overheated processor issue at the beginning of the day. Rebooting didn’t resolve any of these problems during the day. But after a complete shutdown and letting the machine sit for a few hours after returning home, network access seems to have been restored. I mean I’m sitting here typing this, after all.

But it does raise the question - with a couple of hundred “eager young minds” due on my doorstep on Monday, do I keep trying to run with Vista or do I fall back on the XP that does what I need done? Microsoft was quite correct in their warning that Vista should not be run on a production machine, especially one that contains critical data. But do I dare to keep trying? The last thing that I need is to create lessons that depend upon network access and then not be able to deliver the lesson due to technical problems. It’s something to think long and hard on, but Monday’s coming and I’ve got to go one way or the other by then.

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