More Windows Vista: The Saga Continues...

By
"Linux sucks twice as fast and 10 times more reliably, and since you have
the source, it's your fault." -- from Google Codebase Search


I have Vista Ultimate running on two PC's now, my notebook, and my "Main machine" where it resides on one hard drive, dual booting with Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 Edition on the other drive.

I'm getting to like Vista so much that I've even changed the Outlook default .Pst file to the one from the x64 OS so that I'll have the same Outlook data whether I boot into Vista or Windows Server.

At this point, I have everything pretty much set up the way I want, and I've gotten past a few of Vista's quirks with security and such to the point where I feel happy with the OS.

There are some plus items I've noticed about Vista, and also a few minuses:

Plus:

1) It boots FAST. Much faster than Windows Server.
2) You can put it to Sleep (like "Hibernate"). Your Computer's power light goes out, it "looks like" its off. But, when you press CTRL-ALT-DEL it comes to life in just seconds and all your stuff is still there. A big convenience feature.
3) It appears to be pretty good with memory and CPU management, especially with more than one program going.
4) Speech Recognition. They have made SUBSTANTIAL improvements. You can sit there with a headset mike and literally do anything you want, hands free. All it takes is a little study. "What can I say?"
5) the Copy folders/files dialog has been enhanced with conflict resolution and similar useful features.
6) For Developers, IIS 7 provides a number of enhancements, more programmatic API control, and improved stability, diagnostics, and throughput.

Minus:
1) The sidebar is still buggy and its a real memory hog. However, I'll give it the benefit of the doubt for now, since I probably will be developing a few freebie Sidebar Gadgets soon!
2) The Windows Mobile Device thing that replaces ActiveSync doesn't support Bluetooth. Apparently, corporate customers bitched to Microsoft, and they took it out. That's the pits, and you can't even install ActiveSync anymore.
3) The Copy folder/files dialog, because of the enhancements and computations of estimated time, etc. is now considerably SLOWER than in Windows Server 2003/ Windows XP.
4) The Microsoft Marketing Machine ("MMM") has completely failed me in describing whether Vista "Ultimate" is really the highest-end server-type product, or whether there will actually be a Longhorn Server that is still to appear. I strongly suspect that I am not the only person who is confused about Microsoft's proclivity for tinkering with the nomenclature, to the total and utter confusion of the end user.

Anyway, there will be more, I just wanted to get this started, and it'll be updated over the long weekend and beyond.

N.B. -- My first Sidebar Gadget: "Feed Search".

Linux What?


As if that weren't enough, have you ever searched Google Codebase? There are some pretty funny results. You can search for "Windows Sucks", but you can also search for "Linux Sucks" and get 5 pages worth of results!
Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

Comments

  1. Unknown9:53 AM

    Quite informative first-hand experience of Vista "Ultimate". Thanks, Peter!!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Some observations on Script Callbacks, "AJAX", "ATLAS" "AHAB" and where it's all going.

By
I've taken a more than cursory interest in the whole Remote Scripting (.NET species) vs. AJAX and now ATLAS discussion, mostly because I started using Remote Scripting since Microsoft first released it, and because I continued to refine it after seeing Brent Ashley's excellent work with JSRS, which was one of the first "real" cross-browser solutions back in 2000 (that's the turn of the Century for you history buffs). Now Bertrand Leroy, a Microsoft guy whose work I like , has authored some very interesting ASP.NET 2.0 script callback stuff that he points to on his blog, and he is obviously (at least, to me he is) involved quite heavily in the development of this new ATLAS infrastructure that they'll preview at PDC. Leroy's most recent post brings to the surface what I agree are the major differences between the "AJAX a - la .NET" approach as popularized by Michael Swartz with his AJAX.NET library, and Leroy's RefreshPanel, the ASP.NET 2.0 b...
Read more

IE7 - Vista: "Internet Explorer has stopped Working"

By
Image
This one was a bitch. All of a sudden for no reason at all, out of the blue, I get this dialog "internet Explorer has stopped working". I didn't install any new software, crap- I didn't do anything! So here I am using FIREFART to go on the internet and find out what to do! Damn! Good thing I've got the sucker on the same machine (I'm not "anti-Firefox", i just don't use it that much except to check my page renderings). The Fix The fix (at least for me): 1) Go into Control Panel, and choose "Internet Options". 2) Under the "Advanced" tab, press the "RESET" button at the lower right: Don't ask me why this happens, or why the fix works. That's a BUG, D00D - I don't care how you slice it!
Read more

FIREFOX / IE Word-Wrap, Word-Break, TABLES FIX

By
One of the most annoying things a developer (who would normally delight in writing code, not futzing with markup) can have is getting rendering issues between different browsers. The two biggest players are of course Internet Exploder and Firefart (as I lovingly like to refer to each). In most cases that's going to take care of 98 percent of your total site traffic. IE has had a proprietary "word-break" style attribute for a long time, and this made it into the CSS 3.0 spec. But that doesn't necessarily help you with Firefox right now. Firefox literally - (and I consider this completely idiotic, since it's been in their bug database for FIVE YEARS) does not have a reliable CSS style element to force table cell content to break in the middle of a word in order to stop the content from expanding your table / div off the page or over other content on the page. Here's a partial fix, which will work for most tables and browsers. The style declaration (I call it m...
Read more

System.Web.Caching.Cache, HttpRuntime.Cache, and IIS Recycles

By
Recently I chimed in on a newsgroup thread to an OP (Original Poster) who was questioning why he was losing Cache items. This individual would load a dataset from the Cache object into a local object to use to perform processing. He had been using httpcontext.current.cache and noticed that sometimes he was not able to get the dataset out of the cache. He tried switching to HttpRuntime.Cache and it seemed to help. The OP claimed that the application is under heavy hits, and once or twice every month he would see this error. He wanted to know why does the HttpContext.Current.Cache call work sometimes, while some other times does not. A couple of posters replied, one of whom is a respected MVP who usually makes very astute, high-quality posts. He posted," The cache is only valid during the life of the request. how is you[sic] code using the cache?" Somebody else (also pretty astute, usually) responded, "Cache is valid during lifetime of application not request.....". W...
Read more

FIX: Requested Registry Access is not allowed (Visual Studio 2008)

By
Symptom: in Visual Studio 2008, you attempt to add a new WebContentForm and associate it with a MasterPage. You receive an error dialog "Requested Reqistry Access is not allowed". Don't ask me what caused this; I'm guessing that the registry keys involved had their access denied due to removal of a previous version of Visual Studio, leaving the new guy (Visual Studio 2008) in the lurch. Here's the fix: Download "subinacl" here . This is a command-line tool that enables administrators to obtain security information about files, registry keys, and services, and transfer this information from user to user, from local or global group to group, and from domain to domain. After installing subinacl.exe (it will be in the C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools folder.), drop to a command prompt and run the following batch file, which you have saved in the same folder with the filename "FIX.bat": subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudi...
Read more