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I’m sick and tired of people bashing Vista. What’s wrong with you people?!

I use Vista for over a year now. I am a proffesional .Net Developer and I do all my work on Vista.

Problems? Where?

Slowness? Where? When?

Incompatibilities? For god’s sake … where? The only incompatibility I have is with my tv-tuner and that only in Media Center which does not yet support my Leadtek.

Gaming issues? Nope … and I played over 15 titles last year.

And let me point out another thing. Recently at work I had to work with XP (until the new licences come) and you cannot imagine the horror … It’s slow, buggy, unreliable and after 6 hours of work I have to restart it in order to make sure I can work further (and the machine it’s a beast in terms of raw performance). I can’t wait to put a Vista on that machine …

I confess, I always update my machine and I started using SP since the first beta came out and that makes a difference, but the OS is good and more reliable that XP was even after SP2.

The only anoying things with Vista are the new file dialogs and UAC, but UAC can be turned off and the file dialogs have a tendency to learn how you use them so after two days of working everything is ok.

Don’t forget that the new SP (which is now available on MSDN) also brings the kernel of Windows Server 2008 which makes it more stable and faster. Take your time and install it, you won’t regret it.

Ding, dong …

I have Vista installed for … 6 months now. Normally around this period XP would have been a rotten corpse because of the heavy usage and frequent software installs/uninstalls. I cannot say that Vista was braver. I encountered until now two situations that were so hairy that I was at a feet from reinstalling the beast. Still I remembered on NICE feature of Vista: System Restore.

How it works?

Everytime you install a piece of software or unninstall one, or important changes are made to the system, Vista makes a backup of important system files (notable here are registry and other important files). This backup is stored and given a time stamp and relevant information about the reason for it’s creation. Unfortunately this consumes space (about 300mb per backup) but if you are carefull, you can select only relevant ones and delete the ones not deemed worthy. And of course one can create a restore point at any given time nomatter the status or reason.

Ok, ok, how does this help me?! Obviously, you will find yourself in the devious situation where the OS is behaving like a madman. What do you do? If you are a masterfull sorcerror and knowleadge-able in the inner workings of Windows you can repair it, using the dark arts and a lot of googling

Or, you can restore the system to a previous state, which you know it works. Yes, you might lose some stuff, but only information from the system state, all your data is still there.

There it is, now you can rest a little bit more easy, Vista gives you the tools needed for its survival and for keeping your hair from going gray…

Cheers

Yesterday I managed to get hold of a copy of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and although it is a beta, I could not stop myself installing it.

After an hour or so of installing and repeated restarts (about 6 restarts) I managed to get to the login screen and boy I was in for a surprise. I was actually pleased, although it was already too late to thoroughly test it.

The first impression was of … quietness. Yes, it was quiet, my hard-drive was not spinning maddly as before and the OS seemed to be in a meditation state. The application started smoothly and the responsiveness of the start menu surprised me.

What didn’t work at first was the IIS websites but this was because the “World Wide Web Publishing Service” was stopped by the SP1 install.

I cannot contain myself and tell something: the error messages from Vista are actually helping you. I have to get used to read the errror messages because so far they were thorough and accurate and they offer sollutions as well (I cannot say this about XP).

I will dig a little deeper today into the SP1 and come back with some thoughts. Till then …

Cheers.

Some users which embraced the new OS by Microsoft have encountered a new issue. It seems that whenever multimedia is played, the network performance is slightly decreased.

The scenario: play some mp3′s in your favorite player and in meantime download something from a computer in the local network or if you have a high bandwith connection, download something from the internet. If one watches the download speed, one would notice that the download speed increases by about 10% if the player is stopped (not paused). This suggests that somewhere there is a connection betwen network and sound. Strange isn’t it?!

Well Microsoft has responed to this issue and apparently both network and sound drivers are running with very high priviledges within Vista. The sound driver still gets a higher priority in order to avoid sound jutter and thus the network driver has less processor time thus decreasing it’s total processing power.

I totally agree with the design but my question is: how in the nine hells can you encounter this scenario? I mean in order for the drivers to lose processing time is for the processor to have high occupancy, i.e. having it at around 80% and in this case I fully expect some of the subsystems to have degraded performance. And yeah, losing 10% of network speed isn’t that much of an issue, only maybe when you are acting as a server for some network enabled application, but in this case why would you play mp3′s on that computer?! it’s a server!

You can see a more detailed explanation from Microsoft here.

Ohh, and don’t forget in September Windows Vista SP1 beta gets released. Hopefully this will improve the performance and compatibility of the OS.

Cheers!

Update: A friend of mine sent me this link where Mark Russinovich is dissecting this “by design issue”

While browsing through TomsHardware site I stumbled upon a mindnumbing computer case. You would ask what about a case? Sure there are alot of custom cases and mods that make them special … but this is actually a BIIIIIIIG cooler.

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We all heard of the new technology from Microsoft called Silverlight. What Silverlight is? Well you could say it’s a king of flash like technology only that it is based on AJAX and .NET technology. It’s public version 1.1 was recently released and promises alot although personally I find the tooling a little bit crude.

Well not guys from Mono thought why not make it available also for linux platforms. They started a build-a-thon and managed to get a version up and working, in 21 (twenty one) days!!!

The project is called Moonlight (nice touch) and it is not dependant on Mono, which means you do not have to have mono installed.

Well, if they manage to port also Visual Studio …

About Microsoft’s clashes in courts with other companies and goverments can be a book written and still we may add another chapter.

A Californian court ruled out that Microsoft’s Instant Search functionality embedded in Windows Vista is to be removed. Why? Well because it was not part of any previous versions of Microsoft’s OS’es and gives no choice to the consumer for another 3rd party similar tool, that’s “Google Desktop Search”.

Microsoft complied and it said it will remove this with the service pack due at the end of the year.

My opinion is that this is bullshit and most users know how and when to install additional tools if Microsoft’s offering is not to their liking. The strenght of Microsoft is not quite the “excelence” of their tools but the way they work with eachother. I don’t rule out the strenghts of Google Desktop Search but still it won’t be as seamleasly integrated in the OS and thus in the end won’t add that much benefit.

Just my two cents.

It’s been six months since the release of Windows Vista and there are still suprises. A blogger discovered something interesting when looking closer to the images printed on the Windows Vista Business DVD. It’s a picture, 1 square mm in dimension with three guys grinning

At first Microsoft stated it did not know where this easteregg is coming from and started making inquiries among it’s employees on how this came onto the dvd photo layer. Later they stated it’s a anti-piracy feature supposedly to make replication of dvd’s harder.

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Hello World!

Sounds silly isn’t it. Well it is not. This is my way of telling the world I’m here and I want to give back to community some of my knowledge. I will be posting mainly about .NET, Microsoft technogies and, well anything about IT.

See you soon …