More Takes on Vista

April 17th, 2007

My wife recently purchased me a new laptop with Windows Vista Home Premium and I am starting to log some hours on it. I’ve a new list of pro and cons to share with anyone who may be making an OS decision in the near future. Elementally, I would say this… For the coding, file transferring, watch-a-little-tv-or-listen-to-a-little-music-while-I-work, kind of day, I need my Linux workstation. For most anything to do with multimedia, Windows Vista (Home Premium) is king. Elementally…

Vista Desktop

    In the gray area:

Mencode will encode video anyway I want it with no complaint. The Windows Movie Maker included in Vista works like a dream, whereas in Windows XP, it was terrible.

Email in Evolution (linux) is way more comfortable for me. Windows Mail, in Vista, gave me nothing but problems. Outlook 2003 does the best job filtering spam of any client I’ve tried so far.

Networking in windows is more flexible than it has been in the past, but still not as smooth as linux.

    Truths that live on:

Linux is the best fileserver hands down.

Windows is still the buttered side of the bread as far as software developers are concerned, although performance of some existing software is somewhat spotty.

If you want to turn your home videos into DVDs, and Vista is available to you, you’d be silly not to use it.

Ubuntu Linux still seems to know my new latop better than Windows Vista on a fresh install. Almost all of the hardware works out of the gate on Ubuntu whereas not much of anything gets figured out by Vista alone.

Without adding third party software to Vista, it’s pretty painful to try and code anything.

    New revelations:

Internet Explorer 7 is a pretty damn good browser. I think they’ve taken a number of lessons from Firefox and Opera. Browsers under linux could be better.

Ubuntu Fiesty Fawn is due to be released this month.

If I gave Beryl the resources I’m giving Windows, I could make my linux desktop at least as nice.

Edit: Annoyance– I’ve just tried to fax something from Vista. It turns out Vista home premium doesn’t include fax and scanner utilities. You have to pay up for Business or Ultimate edition for those privileges. Come on Microsoft…

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Vista Experience

March 21st, 2007

I finally bought a copy of Windows Vista Home Premium and installed it on my son’s machine last week. I’m saving the most exciting thing I learned for last, so stay with me. I have to say, it’s very easy on the eyes. It runs very smoothly with the Aero interface. Here are the original specifications of the machine from Dell:

1 C3823 PROCESSOR, 80547, PENTIUM 4 PRESCOTT DT, 520, SKT-T
1 F3105 BASE (ASSEMBLY OR GROUP), MICRO-MINI TOWER, PENTIUM 4 PRESCOTT DT, 520, 4700
1 N7965 MODULE, SOFTWARE, WXPHSP2, DIMENSION, ENGLAND/ENGLISH, NO DOCS/DISKETTES, DELL AMERICAS ORGANIZATION
1 R5017 MODULE, DUAL IN-LINE MEMORY MODULE, 512, 2X256, 400, 1R, 512
1 R0473 MODULE, FLOPPY DRIVE, NO-FD, 212, DIMENSION
1 U3976 MODULE, HARD DRIVE, 40G, I, Serial ATA, #1, WD-XL80SD
1 H3793 MODULE, MODEM, SONNY, INTERNAL, DATA FAX, DIMENSION, DELL AMERICAS ORGANIZATION
1 K2810 MODULE, DIGITAL VIDEO DISK DRIVE, 16X, IDE (INTEGRATED DRIVE ELECTRONICS), HALF HEIGHT, LITEON, DIMENSION, MIDNIGHT GRAY

The RAM has been upgraded to 2 Gig and the video to a Geforce PCI express card with 256M ram.

I have to say I really like this OS for my son’s machine. The Aero interface is nice but not that exciting if you’re used to using Beryl on linux. The clincher for me is the Media Center (not included in Vista Home Basic). Combined with the Hauppauge PVR-150 tv card already in the machine, tv watching/recording on this OS is by far the best I’ve seen. The media center essentially gives you TIVO. You really just have to experience it to appreciate it. Media center also gives you a section with alternative online content such as Turbonick and XM Radio (if you have a subscription), that is very comfortable.

Ok, so I really like Vista on my son’s PC… Here’s something I learned yesterday:

I already own Windows XP, and I bought the retail upgrade for Windows Vista Home Premium. I wanted to do a clean install instead of running the upgrade from within XP. So I booted from the Vista DVD, formatted the hard drive, and installed same as always. Soon I realized that it had not asked me to put in my old XP disk or product ID. Uh oh… Sure enough it installs (approx 40 min.) and I can’t activate my new OS. I get an error that says something about “you bought an upgrade license, you can’t do a fresh install.” Oh well, it says I have 30 days, I’ll call Microsoft and sort it out later… Yesterday I decided to call and get it sorted out. In the meanwhile, my son had settled into Vista, personalized it, installed games, blah blah blah… I explained to the support guy (who was very good, by the way) what I did and that I couldn’t activate Vista. His first words were something pleasant that I don’t remember exactly but that summarized into me being screwed and needing to start all over with installing XP first and then upgrading from XP to Vista. I had pretty much accepted that I had to start over but the support guy told me he would find out if there was any possible way to activate the software without starting completely over. After conferring with his people, he came back on the line and said possibly we could put the Vista disk in and try the Ugrade option. To make a long story short, (40 minutes later) it worked! All my son’s settings were saved and I was then able to activate Vista. The tech guy stayed on the line the whole time to see how it came out! My first thought was that this would be handy in the future because I wipe a lot of machines. It saves me having to run down an XP disk everytime. My second thought came shortly thereafter and I asked the tech guy “You realize I never put in my XP disk or XP product ID in right?” He didn’t seem to want to discuss it much so I thanked him and we parted ways.

So do they even sell a retail full edition? What besides the honor system requires you to buy anything but the upgrade?

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Windows Vista

February 22nd, 2007

Should I upgrade to Windows Vista? I’m asked this question at least twice a day. My answer? Probably not…
Should you plan on using Windows Vista? Probably…

Simply put, I recommend:

If you can refrain from upgrading to Vista for a few months, wait. Wait to see what happens with DRM, better hardware support, and better hardware prices.

If you upgrade now, be sure your hardware can handle it.

If you’re buying a new machine, test drive it. Expect to pay more for a machine that will run Vista the way you need it to.

Let me explain. Like any new operating system, Windows Vista has teething troubles. Hardware support is limited and some software applications will need patched. We went through it with XP, and we survived it. And in my opinion, Windows XP was/is a decent operating system. However, the biggest issue when making the move to Vista is hardware. When XP launched, most hardware was running Windows 98 and 2000 like a rocket. A high percentage of machines running Windows 2000 (or 98) could be upgraded to XP with at most an upgrade to 256 Meg of RAM. Not so with Vista.

If you’ve recently purchased a new machine upgrading to Vista may be your only practical choice. Minimum RAM requirement for Vista is 1 Gig. If your not living in a dream world, the requirement is more like 2 Gig. And remember, you’ll likely be buying a pair of chips and replacing (rather than adding to) the RAM you currently have. If your processor was sold in the last year or so, it’s going to be ok. If your planning on using the fancy Aero interface (and why wouldn’t you if you just dropped $200-400 for an OS), you’ll need a high end video card with at least 256M of video RAM. If you plan on using BitLocker (with Vista Enterprise or Ultimate) you’ll need a board that has a TPM 1.2 chip.

If your in the market for a new machine, you’re in a bit better position. Where mid-grade machines were in the $400-600 range for XP for the past 6 months, mid-grade machines for running Vista are somewhere in the $800-1000 range right now. My recommendation is simply to go into Best Buy, Circuit City, etc. and test drive Vista machines. When you find the one that runs the way you want it to, select a machine that’s one step up from that one. Remember, when you load the base Windows XP operating system on a machine, it runs fast. When you start adding in SP2 and all the security patches it slows way down. I wouldn’t expect Vista to be any different.
If you prefer to buy your machines online, I still recommend test driving machines at the retailers. Just write down the system specifications from the one you like and use them for reference when buying online.

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