Monday, 10 July 2006 by marstinson.

  I had the opportunity to get my hands on one of the Beta builds of Windows Vista at the beginning of the summer, so I jumped on it. While I am not exceptionally pro-Microsoft, neither am I a rabid Microsoft basher. The reality is that we live in a Windows world and Vista is going to be the major player in the desktop OS market. Mac and Linux proponents to the contrary, Windows is and will almost certainly remain the dominant desktop OS for the foreseeable future. In today’s IT environment, it’s not enough to be proficient with what’s already out there (although that is a major concern), you also have to know what’s in the pipeline and headed for the consumer desktop. So the opportunity to test-drive Vista, even a beta build, was not something that I could pass up.

  First, a bit about my test machine. Much as I might like to be on the bleeding edge of hardware, I’m still a year or two back as far as my laptop goes. I have an IBM ThinkPad G40. All in all, it’s a decent machine. The 3GHz P4 processor has enough horsepower that I can run multiple OSs within Virtual PC simply by beefing up the RAM and plugging in an external drive. The only thing that I wasn’t real impressed with was the lack of wireless capability, so I use a D-Link wireless card. During the course of the normal school year, I pretty much live and die by my PDA, so any OS has to support it and the handheld Office applicaitions that I use. Aside from those concerns, it’s a basic machine without exceptionally high graphics capabilities.  But because it’s more of a desktop replacement machine rather than a true portable, it weighs a ton (about 10 pounds with brick and battery - a bit more with peripherals).

  Because I didn’t want to have to go through the hassle of reinstalling all of my apps, I chose to upgrade rather than do a clean install of Vista. So before upgrading, I did a little housecleaning. I ran the disk cleanup utility to get rid of everything in my Internet cache and temp files. Then I ran a registry cleaner, defragged the hard drive, and ran complete antivirus and antispyware scans. And just to cover myself, I did a complete system backup using Ghost 9.0. Vista comes on a DVD rather than a CD, but DVD drives are as common today as CD drives were ten years ago, so this was not a concern.

  Like XP, Vista has the capability of verifying a machine’s suitability for upgrade. Unlike XP, where you had to do this manually (setup.exe /checkupgradeonly), Vista does it automatically as part of the install process. It gave me a couple of warnings about applications that might have problems:

• Norton Intenet Security 2006
• Norton Ghost 9.0
• the drivers for my D-Link wireless card
• Microsoft antispyware (I hadn’t upgraded to Defender yet)

  The antispyware had to go - the Vista beta build came with Windows Defender. That part was simple enough, so into Add/Remove Programs I go and it’s a goner. I checked D-Link’s website for a Vista-compatible driver for my wireless card - no joy. But at the time of the beta’s release, driver incompatibilities were a known issue and I figured that if push came to shove I could always go for a different card that did have a Vista-compatible driver. So I ignored that warning and forged ahead. Ghost wasn’t that big of a deal. It’s an app that I can live without. The antivirus was another issue entirely. There are only a couple of antivirus packages (that I know of) that will definitely run on Vista. And I had not been terribly impressed with either of them, so I took a pass, crossed my fingers and hoped for the best. In retrospect, that was a mistake, but live and learn.

  To digress a bit, let me pass along my observations about the differences between kids and adults when it comes to computers. Kids aren’t afraid to make mistakes. Their reasons for this lack of fear basically boil down to lack of knowledge. Adults, on the other hand, are terrified of making mistakes. The reasons for this fear is also lack of knowledge. The kids figure that if something goes wrong, someone can always come in and clean up the mess. Adults figure that if something goes wrong, someone will have to come in clean up the mess. So I spend my weekends on the phone, pulling people out of ditches - I need to start charging for phone support. Anyway, from the IT perspective, there isn’t anything, really, to be afraid of. It’s all just a collection of 1s and 0s. Say what you will about living in the digital age, the nice part of 1s and 0s is that they can always be put back in their original configuration. It’s just a question of how long it will take to do it. So don’t panic. If you have good backups and don’t mind spending the time to restore them, you can do anything you want to your comptuer. As long as you don’t physically damage the machine, everything can be put back. End of digression.

  So I left the Norton alone, removed the Microsoft Antispyware and crossed my fingers on the wireless card driver.

  Vista’s installation took a couple of hours. I found this very surprising considering the processor and RAM in my machine, but that’s what happened. I hope that Microsoft does something about this because I don’t see many normal users who are going to be willing to babysit an upgrade for that long (not that there is much to do aside from watch the screen). Those who purchase Vista with a new machine are not in for much of a shock. The initial setup shouldn’t take more than a few minutes since the OS is already installed.

  The first thing that any user is going to notice is that the desktop looks a little different. Microsoft has split the desktop into two sections: the normal desktop and a sidebar for their new “gadgets”. These are little apps that sit on the right side of the screen and do nifty things like track your processor usage, or do little slideshows or something like that. The ones that came with Vista were nice, but hardly anything to jump up and down about. I did like the dashboard with the guages for processor and RAM usage, though.

  The Start button is gone. Instead there is a Windows logo button in the lower left that does the same thing. The start menu has a few minor changes. Those who like the classic menu can still revert to that, although (in the beta build, anyway) the OS version is no longer on the side of the menu. Since my laptop doesn’t have the greatest graphics card, I did not get to testdrive the aeroglass style, so Vista looked and behaved pretty much like any other version of Windows. So far so good. And, joy of joys, my wireless card driver actually did work under Vista, so I’ve got Internet connectivity.

  The second thing that I noticed was that the OS was generating a tremendous number of system errors. The errors all related to antivirus services, so I decided that the antivirus had to go, too. I had suspected that this would be the case. Antivirus programs are generally written for specific operating systems. Sometimes they will survive an upgrade, but not very often. So off I go to uninstall Norton. This turned out to be a bigger hassle than I had anticipated.

  First off, the fact that the antivirus application itself would not run under Vista was not a big surprise. What I didn’t expect was that that uninstaller wouldn’t work under Vista, either. Hmmm. OK, we’ll use the OS to remove it rather than the uninstaller that came with the application. No joy there, either. So off to tech support I go. Symantec’s technical support has apparently been outsourced to India. Fortunately, I was working through a chat session rather than being on the phone, so accents were not an issue and the techs were nice enough. I had to do a few sessions because a few reboots were required.

  One of the things that I hate about level 1 tech support is that the techs automatically assume that you’re clueless. 90% of the time, this is probably a valid assumption, but not in my case. I have only two questions:

• can Norton be made to run under Vista?  
• if so, how?
• if not, how can I uninstall it?

  The first tech that I had to deal with couldn’t seem to get his head around this question and spent the better part of a half an hour trying to troubleshoot things that had nothing to do with this. I finally manage to get through to him that Vista is my OS. “Oh, Norton won’t run on Vista.” (no duh!) OK, that’s cool. Can it be made to run on Vista? No? OK, that’s not an unexpected answer, either. Is there an uninstaller package somewhere on Symantec’s site? Yes? Cool. Could you give me a link? Thanks, have a nice day, and off I go.

  Big mistake. Symantec’s website isn’t compatible with IE 7 (Vista’s native browser) and all of the nice little online apps that they use won’t work due to browser incompatibility. I didn’t think to fire up Firefox at the time, but it probably wouldn’t have done any good for other reasons. So back to tech support I go. I get a different tech this go around. She’s apparently been at this a little longer than the first guy and it doesn’t take long to explain that I need a downloadable uninstaller, which she provides. Thanks, have a nice day and off I go. The only problem is that the downloadable uninstaller isn’t compatible with Vista either (I didn’t think to try compatibility mode).

  So now I’m stuck with an antivirus service that won’t start and nothing that will uninstall it. Well, there’s only one thing for it. I’ll have to do it manually. So the first thing that I do is fire up regedit and start manually cleaning out all of the “NAV” and “Sym” entries from every registry key that I can find. A couple of hours later, I’ve had enough. For the time that I’ve spent on this issue, I could have just restored the Ghost image that I made earlier, uninstalled from XP and then done the upgrade again. And that’s exactly what happened. Problem solved, except for the fact that I don’t have an antivirus application. But a quick trip to the Vista website hooks me up with a one-year trial subscription to the Trend Micro antivirus application.

  The next problem that I encounter is that my PDA will no longer sync with Vista. If it was just the Office apps that were the problem I could live with that or at least work around it. The only thing that I absolutely had to have was a way to work with native Excel files, but that could wait for a while. But no. It was the whole shootin’ match. The OS detected that the PDA was attached to the laptop, no problem, but I couldn’t get it to sync. OK, it’s summer and this is a problem that can be dealt with later (I hope). As it turned out, this was not the case and I eventually had to go back to XP.

  But not for the reasons you might expect. Once I had cleaned off the offending applications, everything worked quite well. I had a few hours of very slugging performance as Vista went through the process of indexing everything on the machine, but eventually that little chore was finished. I was not thrilled at the prospect of Vista constantly chewing up a half a gig of my RAM, either. No, the reasons for the return to XP were simply that there were a couple of applications that I absolutely had to have for some training workshops that I was teaching in June and those apps would not run well due to the demands that Vista was placing on my resources.

  So, in short, if you’re thinking of upgrading to Vista when it becomes available next year, make sure you have the horsepower to run it (take the recommended specs and add another 50% to 75%) and make sure that all of your applications are compatible. You’ll save yourself a lot of headaches. I’ll probably go back to play around with Vista a little later when those applications aren’t so necessary. Hopefully Microsoft will resolve those little problems within the next few weeks.

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Sunday, 9 July 2006 by marstinson.

Woo-hoo! It’s a blog posting. I guess this means that this place is actually, like, live or something.

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