marypcbuk | Entries tagged with vista

It's not only Windows 7 at the moment - there's a blast from the past as Microsoft finally makes Vista as good as XP, just in time for Windows 7 to come out (I know Mark Russinovich was only joking when he said Microsoft would 'throw Vista under the bus') - but it is mainly Windows 7 ;-)

BlackBerry chief: Apple did us a favour
http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobile-phones/blackberry-chief-apple-did-us-a-favour-597430
Facebook to fade away?
http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/teenagers-who-made-facebook-may-also-destroy-it-597174
Vista SP2
http://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/windows-vista-sp2-our-in-depth-hands-on-597297
Surface SP1
http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/surface-gets-simpler-adds-win-7-gestures-598488
Office 2010: first look
http://www.techradar.com/news/software/applications/first-look-microsoft-office-2010-598491
The real story about Windows 7 compatibility
http://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/the-real-story-behind-windows-7-compatibility-599222

I know it's a preview of a new version of search for Vista, but given that I like Vista and I like Search in Vista like the Tin man ('most of all'), having the announcement say 'fixes most of the reported bugs' is underwhelming me somewhat. When did that become the target to shoot for? I understand Microsoft underpromising and over-delivering - big improvement on the other way round - but this is "the second most popular desktop OS ever" (S Ballmer), the future of Windows, the ongoing rolling development model. This ATM pays out most of your money. This bag contains most of your shopping. Not quite doing it for me as a concept...

In other news: we had a lovely Easter with

tanais (hope you had fun too

epredota!), some DIY and some decoupage, meaning my wooden drawers look good rather than icky. And today was at least half made of awesome because the ever-impressive Ceri @SnarlHair did a fabulous job on my new braids, colours chosen by

sbisson - white, blonde, pale green, peachy-orange, 'petrol' green (pale green, mid-green, blue). They're sleek, shiny and stiff. They took nearly six hours this time because Ceri did them thin and long enough for my hair to grow in to - right down to the widest part of my hips, several inches beneath my waist. Getting to Muswell Hill wasn't as much fun as: I forgot my glasses (uncomfortabe 'what's wrong, where are my glasses' twitches all day, plus myopic peering at buses), I forgot my phone (with the directions and map tools on so I had to keep turning on the laptop and writing on my hand and couldn't text himself), the Picadilly line caught fire so I had to backtrack to Earls Court and a combination of 1+3 led to me rushing around looking for a tube map and tripping smack over the bag the charming gentleman had left sticking out across the width of the platform. I fell with a book in one hand, a banana in the other, a cardigan and jacket under my arm and the laptop in a bag on my back, flat on my face (ankle through the bag strap); I think I must have done a breakfall as I didn't even squash the banana and have no visible bruises but I have been lolling around asking to be cosseted ever since I got back.

I like my braids though!

My first thought about the mini-v was; the battery looks a bit big. My second was, ooh look a button marked Launcher and a button marked Shutter. When I started using it I thought, the calibration's off and I can't hit the Start button. Then I ran through the utilities, fixed the calibration* and noticed the battery life was well over five hours with Wi-Fi on. I tried typing and discovered that the bezelled keys let me touch type, unlike the Asus Eee PC. Then I stuck it in my bag and noticed it was light, pulled it out at the airport and enjoyed playing Spider Solitaire with a finger rather than a pen and decide that for £600-odd it's far more my kind of machine than the Eee. Check out the details of why I say it's more than just a sub-notebook on Tom's Hardware.

BT has the XP version with a Geode preocessor for £590, or bundled with a mouse and USB TV stick for £630,, though it's £800 for the 800MHz Vista version I tested . US pricing is better at $1199 with Vista/XP or $1099 for bring your own OS.

*I know the original Japanese model had a calibration issue and that the Linux drivers may not help you enough here. If I'm using a touchscreen I want Vista for the touch support.

I don't really do unboxing posts and this is pretty much - take the little notebook out of the box. No sliding drawers or pop-up hands or anything. But without actually turning it on, typing on it or anything like that, the mini-v seems pretty sweet. I swivel the screen to tablet mode and think 'ah, this is what the Eee PC is trying to be'. Must check the price before making comparisons: £700-900 depending on spec. Not in the Eee PC ballpark but not out of the ballpark, especially once you consider how much the extras you need to beef up the Eee add up to as

autopope was just saying.

But the real reason for posting is to share the joy brought to me by the screen having two little buttons, side by side, labelled Launcher and Shutter.

(Yes, I know - shutter as in take a picture with the built-in Webcam, but it amuses me to think of an app launcher and an app shutter, for all those people who thought Start was the wrong place to look for the shutdown command).

I set up a new PC quite frequently with all the reviewing I do; for Vista I have this down to under two hours for all my apps and customisations, for a review machine I'll be using for only a few days it's far less. It depends where the PC comes from as to how many tweaks it needs. The very gorgeous HP 2710p I'm using today has a US keyboard and as I've just realized, US date formats. I've already set the keyboard to UK, and the timezone, and the location. How about if when I changed any of those apart from the timezone Windows said to me 'there are these x other settings that relate to location and nationality; tick the ones you'd like to set to UK as well'. There's a nice hierarchical arrangement when I want to go digging through the control panel (well, better than earlier versions of Windows, some settings I still look in three places for first) but why not have a logical connection and pull out the relevant options in a dynamic view?

3% Vista users, 4% Mac users - and just 3.4% Linux users? I was quite surprised by the statistics on the W3schools site for the OS of visitors. I know it's not going to be full representative, but I'm hoping it will make for an argumentative weekend over at our IT Pro blog. Please - go check my sums...
http://www.itpro.co.uk/blogs/editorial-blogs/simon-bisson-and-mary-branscombe/942151/is-vista-growing-faster-than-linux.thtml

In no particular order, and as the Vista reviews I've linked to are from before there were many ReadyBoost USB sticks about, these are a few of the things I personally value about Vista

graphics drivers out of kernel; if the graphics driver crashes, the PC doesn't
performance monitor; I can see how badly the Sonic application I can't get rid of is making things
ReadyBoost; I can upgrade any laptop and get extra battery life very cheaply
RSS in the platform - any RSS app can see the same list of feeds, so I finally have a list of blogs I actually read
GPMSC - the management console for Group Policy; I'll like it better in SP1 when I can keyword search it but now it's the official tool it's a better way to keep on top of the 3,000 things I can control by policy
search from the Start menu; I don't browse directories or program group flyouts any more, I type three letters or two words and get the file or the Google results I want
photo tagging in PhotoGallery; I use the Sidebar photo widget to have photos flipping and when I see a nice one I tag it - the auto fix is also the easiest I've used and gives surprisingly good results to the point that I've used it for work images
Way better wireless networking

That's not any kind of definitive list - I'm not back up to speed by any means. And there are things that bug me; there is an oddity about network authentication and offline files on this machine that I can't track down. But being able to recover previous versions of a file from the server without bugging Simon to open the backup is very neat. I am waiting for a decent tablet PC so I can make full use of flicks and the improved handwriting recognition. But I like Vista to the point that when I finally got my hands on a UMPC after eagerly awaiting it for months, my first thought was that I didn't actually want to use it without Vista on. And I wish there was more hardware that supported the niftier Vista features like Sideshow, that we could crack open the Lumina to put in more memory and take it to Vista and that my little Tosh didn't have some deep-seated incipient hardware failure so I could upgrade it. But Ultimate should still be cheaper.

Back when Vista was first released, sbisson and I reviewed it for PC Plus. By the magic of syndication, you can read it most easily on the TechWeb site. Here's what we think of the four versions anyone can go out and buy; click through for all the details.
Windows Vista Home Basic
The cheapest version of Vista is limited in scope
Windows Vista Business
Full networking capabilities, but no entertainment
Windows Vista Home Premium
The best value version of Vista includes Media Center
Windows Vista Ultimate
The most comprehensive version of Windows will cost you...

I will go back and do that list of 'things I use in Vista every day that make a big difference to me' but for personal reasons (I've been ill, my mum is ill, we've been travelling, there's a lot of work to do and other irregular verbs) I haven't got to it yet. But if you want the deep technical differences, the first two articles by Mark Russinovich on the Vista kernel are online at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issues/2007/02/VistaKernel/default.aspx. That includes things like not switching to a new thread if the current thread hasn't had a full execution cycle (which is like taking away my plate when you clear the rest of the table even if I only just sat down and everyone else has had half an hour to eat, just because you clear the table every half hour) or giving different priorities to different memory allocations (so indexing has to back away from the memory and put its hands in the air when you want memory for running an application). Every time you Boot Vista it takes a look at what was slow and makes notes for how to try to be faster next time.

The second article also explains:
where your memory is going and why you don't need to worry that it's not showing up as 'free'
why you don't have BOOT.INI any more
how to see startup process connection in Process Explorer so you know whose program is whose

This isn't tweaking information unless you're a developer, but you can see the extra levers and knobs Vista gives developers to twiddle. Plus, understanding some of these changes might give you the confidence to sit back and let Vista manage memory and schedule cpu priorities without trying any of those idiotic tweaking utilities that mess around in the registry ;-)

My beloved Toshiba Portege R100 is dying: the cse cracked in

tanais's hand so I can't plug in headphone or microphone connectors or turn the wireless on and off any more, and now it keeps crashing with either hard drive failures or NTFS.SYS STOP errors (where the hard drive driver fails to cope with the hard drive failing). Losing the integrity of the case may be part of the problem; the duct tape isn't enough! Until I can buy the delightful new R400 I'm using an HP as my main laptop so I've been tweaking the Vista installation. Out of the box, Microsoft doesn't let Vista search network drives - but then Windows Desktop Search for XP doesn't do it out of the box either. The add-on for both is here - along with an add-on to search Internet Explorer history files.

Microsft's official stance has been that searching remote drives slows things down too much; they have to fix that when Windows Home Server comes out. There's still no option to snooze or restart indexing in Vista the way you can in XP: a little too nanny-knows-best alas.

Nice, pricey for the full versions and going to be popular.

You want more detail? Simon and I have reviewed them quite thoroughly for IT Pro from a business and IT admin perspective but it's also a general overview...
Office 2007
Windows Vista

Just what I’ve been looking for – a way to run Vista with XP versions as virtual machines in case it all goes Horribly Wrong. My desktop has been creaking along recently; it doesn't hibernate any more and it crashes from time to time. I was planning to drop in the big new hard drive and install a fresh version of XP Professional to see if it was a hardware or software problem (and run Home as a virtual machine for the Home testing I still need to do) but we went to New Zealand instead. Now I might do the same, but with Vista. I don't want Vista in a VM, though Parallels will do that too. I thought I'd have to wait for Virtual PC/Server to be Vista ready, which I'm sure it will be when Vista actually ships.

I hate to spoil a good joke, especially as Paul Thurrott has such a nice screenshot of the dialog, but the pseudo-english text showing up in the latest Vista build is less of a mystery if you read the release notes for this build. I'd rather MS got a new build out than held it over to fix something at this level - although it's also a shame to see Vista turning itself into the butt of a few more jokes at this stage of the game.

From the release notes, and indeed the email with the download link...
Things you should know before installing
Pseudo Localized Text Present
Parts of the OS contain Pseudo-localized text, or non-english characters placed together to approximate English words. (Text that looks similar to the following: "?i?d??§ ?èðì? Þläÿ??") This is used internally, is known and being addressed in future builds.