La vida con Vista (part 2)

Life with Vista (part 2)

OK… One of the things I have learned in this whole process with Vista is that Microsoft obviously names their products based on price points, not functionality. Vista Home is priced for the person who won’t pay more than $99 for any OS. Home premium is for the guy who will pay an extra $30 to play movies on his PC. Vista Business is obviously priced for the business OS market that is used to paying $200 for any network capable operating system and Ultimate is clearly priced for the geek who will pay anything for “all the toys”. Unfortunately they all have the same defective thinking behind the framework.

In my opinion, “Home” should be packaged with a recipe book, encyclopedia, and an on-line guide explaining what to pay the baby sitter. Now wouldn’t that be more useful? Home Premium should also include not only the ability to play movies, but an integrated PVR. A guide to fine wines and a voice activated HDTV tuner would top that one off for me. Vista Business should include Office Pro by default and should be stripped of security assuming it will be installed in a network out of the box. The Ultimate version should have all that and an on-line personal coach too.

I really think if Microsoft won’t make the above changes, they should at least release one more version and call it “Vista Guru”. This would be completely stripped of any security (and those annoying “are you sure” messages) assuming that it will be installed in a properly managed network. It would include remote management by default and all the games, movies, music, and anything else non-business would be non-existent. It would be tuned for speed, not beauty right out of the box and it would only be sold to someone who could produce an MCSE certificate. I’d buy that.

It would seem that Microsoft has created 4 versions of the same product with little regard for the fact that it completely alienates the business market that has been feeding it for years. While “Ultimate” is a really nice product for “Home” use, “Business” is a far cry from business-friendly. Every installation of Vista Business I have seen includes removing or disabling all the annoying, redundant “security”, games, media, etc that seem to be the hallmarks of this OS. This sounds like a really bad move when Red Hat, Novel, and Apple are aggressively going after that business market with trimmed-down, efficient, fast desktop operating systems.

I’ll keep running the Vista Ultimate system that I finally have connected to all the servers and network shares I need, but I don’t know for how long. I keep switching back to my Red Hat server to do anything productive… that’s not good news for the Vista box.

I’ll let you know how it goes….

La vida con Vista

(Life with Vista)
My PC is an 8 year old box that I put together myself (because that is what I am good at) containing a P4 – 1.7Mhz processor, 640Mb of RAM, 60Gb Hard Drive and a 32Mb Video Card. This probably seems archaic to some, but it was well built and has served me so far. It originally had Windows 98 installed, then I reluctantly upgraded to Windows XP (Pro) and recently I tried MS Vista. Big mistake.

The Vista experiment on this PC lasted all of about 2 hours before I wiped it and went back to XP; it was so slow it was non-functional. Even though Microsoft says this PC falls within the usable parameters, it was far from it.

So I acquired a new PC to put Vista Business on – an HP with an Athlon 64 X2 processor, 2Gb of RAM, 400Gb Hard Drive and a 256Mb Video card. Should be a speed demon right? No. Loaded with Vista Business, it was no faster then my 8 year old box running XP.

I love a good puzzle, so instead of just wiping it and installing “Red Hat Enterprise 5”, I started to look for all the speed tweaks. Ya. Ok. Not. While MS Vista looks really cool, it is functionally retarded (and I mean that in the nicest way possible). Everything takes twice as long to get into, has extra security hoops and more check boxes than ever before.

So I started with the security and turned OFF that annoying “are you really, really sure you want to do that thing that you just clicked with the intention of actually doing something” message. This is also knows as “User Account control”. Turning this off seemed to make most of the system much faster right away. However, there are still the periodic delays when I open, well, anything. Many times when I open a folder, the mouse pointer turns into a green spiral that turns like a clock, obviously timing the opening of an event like the Hourglass used to do. I have to assume this has something to do with indexing files, but it often just stays there, for hours.

Don’t even get me started on the networking issues – I have a Red Hat server and a mixed bag of clients that are Win 98, Win XP, Linux and now Vista. Guess which one I have the most connection problems with. Once I made it through all the hoops to make the connection to the SMB share on my Linux server I thought it would be OK, but even though it is mapped and the credentials are saved, Vista still makes me log in to view files where it was automatic with ‘XP and transparent in ’98. Most of my old remote access tools don’t work and Remote Desktop is a complete write-off.

So now what? XP is dead and Vista is the current standard OS from Microsoft, and any new software I build needs to support it, so I HAVE to make this puppy work… somehow…. I’ll dig in deeper and let you know how it turns out….

Moving on....

Hello ......

For any one out there who has been waiting patiently for me to return to the blog-o-sphere... I'm BACK!

Ya - I know - It's been 4 years! The last post to my old-style "blog" was July 2004 [ http://mairs.ca/tom/writing.php ] - it seems like yesterday. Well, enough of this working for a living stuff... I'm moving on to more important things like writing and playing in the sand.

I'm in the process of rebuilding all the associated web sites, moving to this "new" blog format, and adding Cell Access, RSS, and other goodies.

Watch this space for more soon.

Ciao!