Data centres to off-centre opinion

A few colleagues just shared a utility they use to automatically change thewir desktop background image at preset intervals, its called John’s Background Switcher (JBS). I’ve seen literally dozens of these type of utilities over the years and have not been impressed with any of them. Eitehr because their user interface was terrible or I didn’t trust the software not to by spyware. What I like about JBS is the number of sources you can configure for photos – it supports your photos in the the Piuctures folder of your computer plus a load of internet photo sharing sites, including Flickr. What more, you can tell it to use tags, so I’ve set it up on my laptop to display photos tagged with “mountains” it finds on Flickr.

Lets see if I keep this running on my laptop for long, or get annoyed with the number of average photos it finds…

I picked up my replacement laptop on Wednesday and yesterday used Windows Easy Transfer to move my settings and data across from the temporary Windows XP laptop. The process was really simple and I was impressed with how quickly it moved my 5.25Gb of data and settings (less than 45 minutes).

The only things which failed were a 2Gb Outlook PST file which seemed to get corrupted during the transfer (I just used a USB memory stick to copy this over again) and network printers (which I needed to delete and re-install). End to end, it took me about an hour to move off my old laptop onto the new one – complete with all my IE favourites, email, address book, documents and files, desktop settings etc etc etc. I used an Easy Transfer cable which connects the two computers via USB, but you could just as easily use the network or CD/DVD/External HD/USB memory stick.

So, next time you buy a new PC don’t go and waste money paying PC World to transfer files, and don’t fall for the salesman selling you some additional software – just use Windows Easy Transfer which is part of Vista and a free download for XP.

I’ve been using a spare Laptop running Windows XP since my main laptop was stolen last Friday, and its been a revelation to me. There are quite a few Vista features I miss and some are not that obvious before you’ve lost them. In no particula order;

• Search built into the Start Menu – I realise now that I use it to find programs more than documents.
• Variable sized thumbnails – I have load of photos at home and viewing them in XP is painful.
• Side Bar – this surprised me, but I use the Side Bar far more than I thought. I miss my clocks showing the different Timezones of team I work in, the C89.5 radio gadget, my weather station gadget and the calendar gadget. Without these I’m definietly less productive (ok, the weather station and radio gadgets dont affect productivity).
• Suspend/Hibernate – now this may be driver/hardware based but the suspend and resume process on the temporary laptop isn’t as reliable/consistent as on the old Vista laptop. I’ve gone back to the “flaming rucksack” days (where the laptop wakes up in the rucksack then overheats).
• UAC/RunAs – Even under XP I never used to use an admin account day-to-day, and I’m now reminded how much better Vista handles elevated access compared to XP (networking, timezone etc).

As I said, some of these aren’t that obvious until you’ve lose ‘em. To be fair, I should also list the stuff I don’t miss;

• Folder view in Explorer – the lack of a simple folder view in Explorer windows annoys me: I prefer the XP one
• Startup time – the XP machine doesn’t bog down as much on first startup

I just spent the evening with Matthew Boettcher a Microsoft colleague, playing pool in Bayswater and my rucksack got stolen with the laptop in it. For years I’ve known that it is a matter of time before something goes missing, and tonight was it. Thank god for my Homeserver which automatically backs-up my laptop every few days. I only have three days of data at risk. Let’s see how easy it is to recover my data tomorrow… Watch for the update on how easy (or not) it is to recover my data onto a different box.

I stumbled upon an article at TweakGuides.com which lists solutions to some of Vistas annoyances. Well worth a read if some things in Vista annoy you (as there may be a solution) or you want to read what appears to be an objective fact-based review of Vista. The article can be found here. My top annoyances: fixed are

• Changing Folder Views
• Constant Hard Drive Activity, and specifically the changes to indexing

After having Edison on my laptop for a week, I’m uninstalling it. The reason is I actively manage my power settings during the day and always hibernate my laptop at night – so in effect I’m better at power management than Edison.

However, Edison is doing great on my machines at home, especially as these are often left on all the time: this is where Edison comes into its own; allowing you to set a schedule for different power plans.

I don’t know about you, but when I work for a company who gets bad press about its products it can be difficult not to take it personally.

I still hear and read comments from people who have had a bad experience with Windows Vista. Admittedly, far fewer in the last 6 months or so, but there is still a groundswell of bad opinion. Some of this is absolutely deserved: I have personally had both a very good and very bad experiences with Vista. Others are simply bigotry from those who often haven’t even tried Vista or at best tried it 1 year ago and haven’t since.

So why write this post? Simple: to share my experiences. Is this objective? Reasonably see the first line of this post

Extremely bad:

When I first started with the Vista beta builds (mid ’06) my work laptop was a Toshiba Tecra M4. To be frank, I nearly threw this on the floor any number of times. It was extremely slow, I got bluescreens several times a month, it would not stay hibernated resulting in the “flaming rucksack” phenomenon. It wouldn’t reliably connect to an external monitor and after the second motherboard replacement it simply froze at least once a day needing power and battery to be removed to reset. Most (not all) of the problems were down to drivers and poor hardware. Apparently Tosh modify the nVidia graphics chipset which means the standard nVidia drivers don’t work – and the Tosh drivers were terrible. I also heard that there was a fault with many of the M4 motherboards which caused the hibernation and freezing problems (relatved to overheating). Vista was a complete dog on this box: too slow to be useable. But most of the problems were driver related.

How did this get resolved? I got a new HP laptop and put XP back on the Tosh.

Pretty good:

Both my HP nc8430 and Dell D830 laptops run Vista flawlessly. Admitedly, the first thing I did was blow away the Vista build installed by HP and Dell respectively. I installed my own copy of Vista and they’ve both been reliable. No bluescreens, no lockups, no more application failures than normal (application failures are not often caused by the OS). My Alienware box at home also runs Vista as reliably as the laptops (once I replcaed the Soundblaster card with a SoundMax card: Soundblaster drivers were late and crap). As does Carols Dell XPS1710 (which she plays WoW on – so its definitely being pushed) and Stephanies Sony Vaio laptop.

Why not Extremely good?

I think this is the crux: the way Vista does some things I simply don’t like. The new explorer interface is less clear than the old XP interface IMO. Its slower than XP on the same hardware. I don’t like the new Network Management user interface. Normally I like change; IE7 is a great improvement (and there is room for more), I like the Sidebar (but some sidebar gadgets are unreliable ) and I really like the improvements in elevated permissions compared to XP; being prompted for admin username/password (or Cancel/Allow if you’re logged on as admin) is much better than simply “access is denied” under XP.

Our Media Centre machine seems to corrupt recordings.xml a few times a year resulting in the box bogging down. About once per year something else causes it to slow to a halt but I’ve not worked out what yet. A rebuild fixes the latter issue and re-creating recordings.xml fixed the former.

So, is Vista extremely good or extremely bad? Well that depends on how good the drivers are and how well the hardware vendor (HP, Dell etc) have setup Vista on your machine. My recommendation: always install Vista yourself, use Microsoft drivers if you can (they will have undergone a ton of testing) and only install vendor-supplied drivers if the Microsoft ones don’t work or are missing a feature you need (e.g. colour management in the nVidia drivers).