Monday, 15 January 2007 by marstinson.

I was playing around with the Miranda instant messaging client (free download from sourceforge.net). It’s an interesting little utility because it works with several IM services (Yahoo!, AOL, MSN, ICQ, IRC, and Jabber). I haven’t really been into instant messaging for years, though I do use one occasionally. But a multi-protocol client seemed worth checking out, so I did.

My first impression was that it’s definitely plain. Absolutely no eye-candy. Since the version is still less than 1.0, I’m figuring that’s probably to be expected. But in any event, it’s always what’s under the hood that counts the most. First off, Miranda is everything it purports to be. It hooks into all of those services simultaneously, so it’s a kind of one-stop chat device. At least moderately cool, IMO.

As I said earlier, I haven’t really used IMs for years. But over the years, I’ve IM’d on almost all of those services. I was surprised to find that my Yahoo account was still active, even though I haven’t used it in years. And my AOL screen name was still active and working, even though I stopped using AOL more than eight years ago.

That’s a scary thought when you really stop to ponder it (which I did). How many services that you no longer use are still out there just waiting for you to log in again? How much of your personal information is still sitting on someone’s server just waiting for your friendly neighborhood hacker and you’d never know about it because you don’t use that service any more?

I don’t believe there is any legal requirement to do so, but shouldn’t a standard industry practice be to purge client information after a certain period of inactivity? I have no idea what a reasonable period might be, but it’s a sobering thought to know that an account that has been inactive for more than eight years was just sitting there waiting. I was fortunate that there was no major personal information associated with it because I had been very sparing in the information I provided (just an email address and my state and the email address died when I left AOL). But still, what if I HAD provided all of the information that AOL wanted? Scary.

Posted in Applications, Computers | No Comments »

Sunday, 31 December 2006 by marstinson.

Newsflash: Uproar in the blogosphere over Microsoft tactics.

Seems that the good folks at Redmond had an idea. What about sending Acer Ferrari laptops to some of the bloggers on The Hive? For those of you who might not know, The Hive is a web community more or less dedicated to talking about Microsoft products and technologies. Microsoft provides the servers, web access and some of the content and the community does the rest. Anyway, the selected bloggers can take the final version of Vista out for a test drive on some decent hardware and then tell the world what they think about it. Afterward, they can do whatever they want with the laptops: keep ‘em, hold a give-away contest, or send ‘em back. If you think of the cost in terms of a single 30-second spot during the Super Bowl, it’s negligible, and the target audience is the people who are most likely to want to know more about Vista anyway.

Sounds like a great marketing idea, doesn’t it? Microsoft is pretty confident that Vista is going to meet most of the hype, so they’re expecting that they will get good (or at least neutral) reviews. And for those few reviewers who might have major complaints, well, it’s something that Microsoft might be able to fix in SP1. After all, the general rule for a sizable chunk of the business environments is to not deploy a new Microsoft OS until SP1 is out. But, no! Sending laptops to bloggers sounds too much like bribery for some folks.

With a few caveats, I’m not one of them and I don’t see much of a problem. If there is a problem, it’s one of perception.

Bloggers are not journalists as we typically think of them. I do not mean to imply that they don’t report news because in many cases they do, nor do I believe that their opinions are not their opinions or are invalid simply because I might disagree. But journalists are supposed to operate within certain ethical boundaries. If they stray too far from those boundaries, they will find themselves looking for new employment, probably in a new career field. Some do stray, as evidenced by a few notable scandals over the past couple or three years, but the vast majority do not. Bloggers, however, are not bound by those ethics. Within certain legal considerations (copyright and libel, for example), they can write pretty much whatever they want about whoever or whatever they choose.

So what’s the big deal about sending out a few laptops? Perception, mostly. If a blogger who has received a laptop from Microsoft (these are $2000+ machines, by the way) writes a glowing review of Vista, was it because Vista is actually that good or because they got a freebie laptop out of the deal? How about if the blogger writes a glowing review of Vista on their own machine and with their own copy of the OS? That last is strictly hypothetical as Vista has not been released for public consumption yet. And how are you, the reader, supposed to be able to tell the difference unless the blogger tells you where he/she is coming from?

From Microsoft’s point of view, the issue is pretty simple. They want people to write about Vista. But Vista’s hardware requirements are pretty hefty if you want to get the full Vista experience. So to make sure that the reviewer gets the full experience, they are willing to provide the appropriate hardware along with the OS. If you go down and look at my comments on the Beta 2 build of Vista, you’ll note that I couldn’t get the Aero Glass effects because my laptop’s graphics card was not up to snuff. But I also told you where I got the OS and that it was a Beta release so you would know the basis of my comments. It seems to me that if Microsoft wants people to write good reviews of their new OS, then it would be in their best interest to make sure that the reviewer can get the full experience of the OS without forking out a wad of cash to upgrade their current system or buying a new one. Note that professional reviewers (like “PC World,” “PC Magazine,” “Comuter Shopper,” and the like) keep their test machines up to date so that they are able to evaluate the full potential of a piece of hardware or software. Bloggers probably don’t have the budget to be able to do that. So is it bribery or making sure that a reviewer can actually see what the OS can do?

And even looking at it in the worst possible light, is it really bribery? Although I’m sure there are some people out there who will switch to a new OS simply because their favorite magazine or blogger said it was way cool, most of us will switch to Vista for a few very concrete reasons: it does something that we want/need to do and can’t in our current OS, it will come preloaded on a new machine, or we’ll upgrade just for the sake of running the latest and greatest. Reviewers have virtually zero influence with people who are going to switch for the first two reasons and people who are going to switch for the third are going to do it anyway. The only things that a review can influence in that regard are whether the switch takes place sooner rather than later and, perhaps, the version that the consumer decides upon.

Microsoft, I’m sure, is hoping for “sooner” (first quarter earnings and all that), but “later” is still money in the bank. If my understanding of Microsoft’s licensing terms to manufacturers is correct, you won’t be able to buy a box with XP on it after January 2008, so “later” is not that much later. As for the version, anyone want to take bets on the sales of ”Ultimate” versus “Home Basic” and “Home Premium”? Speaking from the gaming perspective (which is probably the better reason for going with “Ultimate”), there is currently only one graphics card out there that is built for DirectX 10 (the GeForce 8800 from nVidia, though I’m sure that ATI won’t be too far behind) and zero games that can actually take advantage of it. Even “Halo 2,” which is being tailored specifically for Vista and is not supposed to run on XP, is sticking with DirectX 9 so that players will not have to fork out $500-$700 for a new graphics card to play it.

So let’s see… If people are going to switch OSs because they need or want some new functionality, a reviewer isn’t going have much of an impact on the decision; the OS either does what they want/need or it doesn’t. If people are going to buy a new computer that comes with the new OS, a reviewer isn’t going to have much of an impact on the decision because the computer manufacturers are going to make that decision for the consumer. So that only leaves those who are going to voluntarily switch OSs either through a clean install or an upgrade of their existing OS (assuming, of course, that their hardware can handle it). And the odds are very good that these folks are going to do it anyway.

Frankly, I don’t see a major problem here. This is not a case of “here’s a new car, now say something good about it and you can keep it.” This appears to me as a case of “here’s a new OS and some hardware that will let you see what it can do. Kick the tires, take it out for a spin, and tell us what you think about it. And you can do whatever you want with the hardware when you’re done.” As for the ethics of doing it, I still don’t see a problem. I cannot count the copies of software that I have received from various vendors using a “try it; you’ll like it” approach. So it’s not like this is some new tactic fresh from the “dirty tricks” department at Redmond. The only difference that I see is that in this case the vendor made sure that the hardware was up to spec.

Get a grip, people.

Posted in News and Politics, Vista | No Comments »

Sunday, 19 November 2006 by marstinson.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I use the Outlook Journal quite a bit. One item that has annoyed me about it is the number of Journal categories that I don’t use and the lack of any capability inside of Outlook to add/remove/change those categories. For example, there are several categories of Journal entries that are suitable for use in an office environment where you use Exchange, but nowhere else. All is not lost, however. You can change the categories (at least a bit) to suit your needs. This involves editing the registry, however, so it is best done with a great deal of caution.

Make a system restore point before proceeding and definitely back up the portion of the registry that you’re going to change before you make any changes. To do this, go to the registry key where you’re going to make changes, right-click on the parent folder and select “Export”. Save the resulting .reg file somewhere easy to locate (it’s only going to be a few kilobytes of data). You can reimport the old data by double-clicking it.

Unless you really feel like messing up everyone else who uses your computer, make the changes in the following registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Outlook\Journaling

The sub-keys are the categories for the Journal. You can rename them as you like, although you’ll may want to tinker a bit with the large and small icon entries to get the icon you want associated with it. I have not really messed with those, but as long as you have a good backup… Whatever you do, DO NOT CHANGE OR DELETE PHONE CALL. This is the default category and Outlook has hissy fits when it can’t find it. You can totally hoze yourself by messing with it, so just leave it alone.

Note that you are making changes in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER hive, so whatever changes you make will only affect the currently logged-on account. Which means, oh great guru, that you can create a dummy user account, log on with that account, mess with those entries all you want, get them looking and behaving the way you want them to, export the changes and then import them with the account that you really want to change. Afterward, you can just delete the dummy account and its profile.

Again, make sure that you create a system restore point before making ANY registry changes and create a backup of the registry keys that you’re going to change BEFORE you change them (after you change them would be a good idea, too, but only if they’re working correctly).

Posted in Applications, Computers | No Comments »

Sunday, 19 November 2006 by marstinson.

Haven’t written anything in a while, so it’s probably time that I did something just to let folks know that I’m still alive and kicking.

The iPaq saga continues. Thus far I haven’t run into any major issues with the iPaq. I work with Excel files frequently and have run into a couple of annoyances, though. First off, whatever you do, do not transfer files to Windows Mobile until you have unfrozen the panes in any spreasheets you are sharing between desktop and handheld. The silly thing absolutely will not scroll past the freeze point on the handheld. Using the auto-filter feature isn’t quite as bad. On the handheld, it treats everything as hidden rows and columns. Unhiding isn’t that big of a task, but I cannot count the number of times that I have forgotten to unfreeze, sync’d with the handheld and then been unable to work with the sheet on the handheld. So it’s back to the laptop, unfreeze, resync and then I’m good to go.

Oh, yeah. Don’t be surprised when your fonts change. Excel’s default font is Arial, but that’s not what the Excel Mobile uses. Generally not an issue except in those cases where you have changed the background color of a cell. In that case, selecting all and changing the font will not change the font in the colored cells. You’ll have to do those one color at a time.

The handwriting recognition on the iPaq is no good in my book. Of course I’ve often been told that I should apply to a medical school to teach a handwriting course to aspiring doctors, too. So I use the on-screen keyboard a lot. Not a big deal since I’m a decent touch-typist in the first place and don’t have to hunt for keys. The only complaint I have in this department is that I keep missing the spacebar and closing the keyboard by mistake. The autocomplete feature (that’s where you type in the first few letters and it offers you a suggestion for the rest of the word) is sometimes helpful, often not.

Calendar, tasks and notes seem to sync up pretty well in Outlook. I definitely don’t like the fact that you can’t use the Outlook Journal on the handheld, though. I keep track of a lot of conversations, meetings, phone calls, letters, email and whatnot through the Journal on my laptop (very convenient). But there is no Journal feature on the handheld. Anything that I want to do in that department either has to be entered as a note or as an appointment. After I sync, I have to open up whatever I created on the handheld and then copy/paste it into a new Journal entry. Major pain in the patootie.

I had a serious issue with battery life for a while after starting to use the iPaq. Silly thing drained down to nothing in the course of a few hours to a day, so I was constantly having to plug it into the charger. A bit of digging around in HP’s support site and a couple of chats with the techs eventually got me to a firmware update that resolved that issue. My battery now lasts for the better part of a week. At the same time, I upgraded the ActiveSync software to the latest version (4.2 as of this writing) and haven’t had a lick of troube since.

One caution on upgrading the ActiveSync and firmware, though. Make sure that all of your synchronized files are current and backed up before you do any upgrade. Once you upgrade, your desktop will see your handheld as being a new device and it will no longer see your previous synchronization settings or files.

The WMP has been an absolute god-send from my perspective. Once I resolved the issue of synching the music files, I just plugged my speakers into the headphone jack and hit “Play”. Oh, yeah. We be jammin’.

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Saturday, 16 September 2006 by marstinson.

Moved into the Big Leagues, sort of, with my recent graduation from a Palm Zire 31 to an iPaq Pocket PC. Just as an aside, the PPC seems to prove the corollaries to Moore’s Law. Moore’s Law says that processor power doubles about every 18 months. Moore actually said that the number of transistors on a processor seems to be doubling about every 18 months (and it was only an observation, not a rule), but it has essentially the same effect. That  being the case and all other things remaining equal, the corollaries to Moore’s Law say that you should be able to buy the same product at half the price in eighteen months, the same product at half the size in eighteen months, or twice the product at the same price in eighteen months. So after unpacking it and checking out what was there, it seems that it packs about the same punch (with multiple times the memory) as the 386 machine that I had sitting on my desk about 10 or 12 years ago.

I purchased it as a factory refurbished unit on eBay and ended up with the same product and a 3-year warranty at $100 less (including shipping) than I would have paid at my local CompUSA. So, all in all, I’m thinking that I got a decent deal on it.

After unboxing it and doing and requisite amount of drooling and “wooooooo!” on my new purchase, I sat down to set it up. A couple of things immediately jumped out at me. First off, much to my dismay, it will only sync through its cradle, unlike my Zire, which sync’d through a standard USB. I got a little attachment that let me recharge it without the cradle, but nothing else as far as sync’ing. I found that to be a bit disheartening because it means carrying around more cables and junk, which is definitely not something that I need. The other thing that hit me was the almost complete lack of documentation. I’m not saying that I didn’t get manuals with it, because I did. But the manuals only dealt with the initial setup and hardware end of things; nothing on Windows Mobile or the applications that came preinstalled. If anyone else finds themselves in the same boat, Microsoft was kind enough to make their documentation available online.

To give HP and Microsoft credit where it’s due, the initial setup was a snap. I installed the battery and hooked it up to the charger (it came about 98% charged). After a little while, the charging light stopped flashing, so I dropped in the CD and installed the drivers and ActiveSync (I didn’t need any of the other bundled software), rebooted and plugged the cradle into a USB port. DIY-ers TAKE HEED: as a general rule for any HP product, install the drivers before you hook anything else up. Plug-n-Play detected the new device, installed the appropriate drivers and began to sync up immediately. No fuss, no muss, no bother. And on an even brighter note, unlike my Palm device, the iPaq will sync with multiple PCs. The only restriction is that you can only sync your Outlook email on one machine. No biggie (I’ll probably change my tune on that in a few weeks, but it’s no biggie today).

 The acid test (and the reason I went with an iPaq rather than with a fancier Palm) was sync’ing Windows Media Player. After all of the hassle that I’ve gone through over the past few weeks to whip my jams into some semblance of order, I decided that not listening to them would be a crime. So the prime requirements were that whatever device I ended up with had to be able to deal with Office files in their native formats, had to be able to sync with Windows Media Player and had to use SD cards for storage expansion. Just about everything else was negotiable. As it turned out, the iPaq met the requirements at a price that didn’t make me do much more than wince a bit.

The first order of business was going to be to set the thing up to use my home wireless network. This is where I first noticed the almost complete lack of decent documentation. Had I not known a bit about configuring wireless devices, I’d have been in a world of hurt as far as setting it up. And to make matters worse, finding my handheld’s MAC address was a good two-hour task. Most laptops have a nice little bar-coded sticker somewhere in or near the battery compartment that has the MAC address of the wireless card for that unit (PC cards have a sticker on the back of the card itself). But not the iPaq. No stickers and nothing in the documentation. And since I’m pretty clueless on Windows Mobile (this is my first device with that OS), I spent the better part of two hours tapping this, that and the other, hoping to kind of blindly stumble onto the information that I needed.

See, my home wireless network uses MAC address filtering as one of its security meausures. Not only to you have to know the SSID of the network (which is not broadcast) and have the proper key, the device’s MAC address also has to be on the “approved” list or it’s not connecting. Period.

Anyway, I decided that I wasn’t getting anywhere and hopped online to HP’s technical support site, hoping to get a little joy from that end. Boy, was I sadly mistaken. After being told that someone would be with me in about 5 minutes (automatically generated chat message), I sat down to wait… and wait… and wait… and wait. After close to 30 minutes, I gave it up as a lost cause and went back to my “tap and hope” scheme. It eventually paid off and I found the MAC address, which just goes to show that even a blind hog finds the occasional acorn. With that in hand, I set up my access point and everything was off and running.

Web access was decently speedy, and all of the web pages that I went to loaded and worked relatively well. Except for Microsoft, the web designers didn’t take handheld displays into account, so everything was a bit cramped, but otherwise functional. I was not able to get into my Hotmail account initially, but was able to get in a day or so later. Maybe I was doing something wrong, maybe there was a problem with rendering. Who knows? But it worked eventually, which was all I wanted in the first place.

Anyway, as I said earlier, the acid test was Windows Media Player. One of the first things that I tried to do was to sync my SD card with my laptop. It was pretty much a situation of drag the song that I wanted to the sync list (or right-click and tell it ”add to the sync list”) and then click “Start Sync”. Worked just fine except for one itty-bitty problem: it took two to three minutes to synchronize each song and wouldn’t do more than 15 or 20 songs at a time before generating errors. On a song-at-a-time basis this is probably not that big of a deal. But when you’re trying to fill a 1GB flash card, that’s a couple of days of waiting for the sync to finish. And that was also unacceptable.

So, my next idea was to try to use the SD card as a simple storage device. It sync’d up just fine with WMP and only took a second or two per song. But anything that was DRM-protected (which is most of my library on the laptop) refused to play on the hand-held. Anything that was non-DRM-protected (like my ripped CDs) played just fine. Hmmmm. There has to be a better way of doing things.

HP’s technical support was about useless on this issue. And while an answer to my questions about the time it takes to sync might eventually appear on the Microsoft Newsgroups, I’ve seen nothing in 24 hours. So it appears that if I want to synchronize my music on the iPaq, my only viable options are to make sure that everything gets converted into non-DRM-protected .mp3 files and then transfer those to the SD card by treating it as an extrnal storage device. Happy, happy, joy, joy.

Beyond that issue, though, the iPaq is a neat little device. Again, I’m rather disappointed to find that it cannot be sync’d except through its cradle. But as another bright issue, battery power seems to be lasting a lot longer than my Palm. I went to do some shopping this morning, jamming the whole way. It took a couple of hours and had drained less than 10% of my battery. In comparison, a couple of hours of jams would have knocked about 50% of the battery off of my Palm.

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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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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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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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