Vista is rubbish

Here is a comment made to me on the phone yesterday.

 

“Vista is rubbish. We’ve got this computer and it has got Vista on it. I put Office 2007 on it and I use that for my work but whenever I send Excel spreadsheets to the office, I can’t read them. It is also incredibly slow”

 

1.     Vista is an operating system, not an application.

2.     Your speed problem is a combination of children loading every application and trial they can find and the meagre 1GB of RAM.

3.     Office 2007 uses XML for its document type. This is new. Sending that file to a version of Excel that doesn’t know about XML will result in this issue.

 

Analogy…you speak English and have a friend who speaks English and French. Your new friend speaks English, French and German. New friend says something in German to you but you cannot understand.

 

Obviously your new friend has rubbish legs.

Wireless network cards

Deciding that the ISP in question was not going to be helpful, Mother has now decided to get on Tinterweb thingy using next door's wireless connection (with permission). Off to a store to buy a Belkin wireless PCI card and £25 later it gets installed into the computer.

Now of course I'm not there to install it but instructions are followed and still it does not work. Turns out it doesn't work under Vista. However, to the rescue comes a technical, credible and friendly lass from Belkin Tech Support. She watching Mother through the compatibility wizard in Vista and whilst she could not stay online all the way through the process (they presumably therefore have a call logger and need to hit targets), she was excellent help.

Way to go Belkin Tech Support.

Yikes, saying nice things about Tech Support. Quick, pass the wine.

Way to go Microsoft

My nice shiny Vista box has hit a snag. There is a link in the menu to download Messenger. It takes me to http://imagine-windowslive.com/Messenger/Launch/en-GB/Default.aspx which has a lovely bit of animation and a button to download.

Clicky clicky on the button and you get a new window of exactly the same page.

I got bored fairly rapidly as it just loops and does not go to the download page at all.

Shiny new Vista, no Messenger. Someone will hopefully resolve this fairly soon.

Vista, Office and graphics cards

Having bought a nice 128MB 4x AGP graphics card for Mother for her Athlon 2400, 1GB etc computer, she OUGHT to have been ready for Vista. Rather annoyingly, her Windows XP Pro won't upgrade to Vista Home Premium despite the software being an upgrade so a clean install was what was on offer.

Actually the upgrade is quite sweet as it removes the Documents and Settings folder, the Program Files folder and the Windows folder and drops the lot into Windows.old folder for future use. The install went its usual way, clicking Next a lot really.

Gremlins and gotchas - Windows driver signing. If the driver is signed, install it. It might not work, but install it. The video card driver installs beautifully but a code 43 error means Vista disables it. Hours online gave a handful of workarounds but only one managed to get a driver to install but when you do a Windows Experience Index (Vista speak for 'How fast is my PC?'), we see our first BSOD from the nVidia mini display driver. Argh...

Printer? Sure - Vista hyperlink available on the manuf's site. Page then blank.

Lots of other software was not compatible but the new versions were downloaded and installed. Modem software isn't compatible either.

Office went in easily enough though.

Then came Windows Live Messenger. You'd think this one was simple wouldn't you? New Microsoft app onto new Microsoft OS. Surely they'd speak the same lingo? Installed, configured, won't connect. Problem traced, of all things, to the firmware revision of the hardware firewall (Netgear DG834G v2). If you DOWNgrade the firmware by a couple of steps it works. Cynically, I made no changes whatsoever to anything but the firmware and sure enough it works. So what is it that stops Live Messenger from connecting through the Netgear? Some kind of broadcast that looks like a packet level attack? But there is no outbound blocking, everything is allowed out.

Eventually it was all done and by 'all' I mean time. Early adopters beware - Vista can really wipe out your weekend.

EVO community launch

Wednesday 24th January 2007 saw the community launch of EVO (Exchange, Vista, Office) at Thames Valley Park in Reading otherwise known as TVP or Microsoft Headquarters.

The event was set up by Nathan Winters (http://www.mmmug.co.uk/blogs/nweb/default.aspx is his blog). Nathan is not a Microsoft employee (at the time of writing :-) ) but a consultant specialising in Exchange Server who runs the Microsoft Messaging and Mobility User Group.

There were half a dozen other people co-hosting the event but it would be unfair to pick some of them out and not others and the keynote was done by some guy called Jon Honeyball. Apparently he dabbles with computers. Kudos to Nathan for getting Jon to keynote it.

The event was laid on by Microsoft to the extent of the room and the advertising and the excellent services of the in house events team providing food, drink, registration and so on.

The amount of work that had gone into preparing it was immense and the slides are all being made available. Nathan's Exchange ones are at: http://www.mmmug.co.uk/files/14/evo_launch_meeting_24th_jan_07/default.aspx which does not sound much, but the 250 attendees can show the slides to their colleagues and bosses without having to guess anything.

There were demonstrations of Office desktop and Office server products and at 5pm when you'd expect only the hard core to remain, well over half of the people were still seated. That alone means the event was a success even if the feedback scores are low.

Would I attend the event again? Absolutely. Nice one guys - an excellent start to 2007.

RTM, Vista, 2007 and Sony function buttons

The email finally arrived in my Inbox - Vista has RTM'd. Dutifully, I downloaded the RTM, some 2.49GB for the x86 English build. Obviously, so did every other MSDN subscriber as the speed was painful when you could get it to work at all but we got there in the end.

It took a while so I also downloaded the RTM of Office 2007 Professional as well. Since my shiny Sony Vaio was running Vista 5744 and Office 2007 TR they both needed sorting. Office came in at 410MB which isn't bad considering prior versions.

Eventually they arrived on my laptop. Vista upgrade from Vista 5744? Well, it LETS you, but I got an advisory about my bluetooth stack / software not being compatible with Vista. Hmm. Uninstall, run the Vista installer again...boy does that ever take a while. "May take a few hours". "You are not kidding". So Vista was there but with a generic video driver on a Vista capable (badged) and brand new Vaio.

Pointed the relevant bit of Vista at the drivers folder on the hard disk and the nVidia installed fine.

Install Office 2007 RTM. As Mark has already noticed, you can't install it over the Beta so I have to uninstall it. Fine. Eventually I got it happy enough and about 20% into the installer I had my first Vista BSOD which dutifully dumped everything to the hard disk. Rinse and repeat viewers - it happened again.

Note - the nVidia driver that ships with the Sony Vaio is fine with XP but causes BSODs with Vista. So I changed that to the Microsoft badged one and it has been fine ever since.

Then came my SIPGate client, Skype, Live Messenger, AVG anti virus, Acrobat Reader and Virtual Server 2005. Hmm, VS2005 doesn't work under Vista but apparently VS2007 Beta does. Great.

Then run the Aero check (Windows Experience Index). I was on 1.0 as it had not been done but now I'm at 4.2 which is held back by the disk transfer rate - my own fault for going for the 4200rpm disk instead of the 5400 version but I wanted 2GB of RAM, ah well.

By now I was getting a trifle bored but I fancied playing with the extra toys including playing a DVD on the lappy and outputting it to my projector over the VGA connector as an additional screen. You think that Fn F7 will send the image to the external screen? I think not Sir. You need the pigging software which isn't on the pigging CD because they don't ship one any more. Can I download it? Yup - after jumping through hoops it comes down at 12kb/sec and is 80MB. After the 5th go at downloading it, it all came down and was corrupt.

So I STILL don't have a way to go to external screen, I still can't adjust the brightness and if Fozzy says I should have bought an Acer Ferrari, I'll take his MVP rucksack and stick it somewhere fairly memorable. Actually, in the sober light of day, I may delegate that duty to someone else and now I'm feeling quite faint.

If you got this far please note you need to get out more.

Vista

Call it what you will and wait for it until you are old and grey, but it continues to look more impressive. There are some very neat little touches and the longer it takes to get to the channel, the more computers there will be that can run the thing.

All the old friends are there like the old Windows 3.11 Alt Tab but now thanks to the funky graphics people, it looks even cooler to change apps. Previews of other apps, animation, voice activation and loads of other stuff you might even need.

Just don't try to voice control your MP3 collection. In fact turn off the voice control all together otherwise you may find yourself chatting to your mother on the phone and accidentally sending an email of resignation to your Boss. But only if you train the app first :-)