Some Vista Advice

We've been working with Vista at work since mid-summer, since Dell really hates selling XP to businesses now. I have a couple of tips for those who are going to be trapped into an upgrade to Vista and Office 2007:

• Don't order the PC with anything less than 2GB of RAM. If they insist, refuse the upgrade and stay on whatever POS machine you're on now. Vista at less than 2GB is slower than anything I've ever seen. Grass growing is lightning quick in comparison.


• Make sure you turn OFF encryption between Outlook 2007 and the server. It's ungodly slow if you're on an office network. If you're on the road, I might reconsider this suggestion. I went from about 2 minutes to about 20 seconds for Outlook to start with this one change.


• We found a network setting to turn off dynamic speed negotiations with the network. Changing this setting helped the speed of network copies, and fixed some issues with TAPI drivers on Vista. To change the setting, right Click Command Prompt --> Choose Run As Administrator and then type the following:
  

  netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=disabled

I'll chime in wtih more as we find it.

Vista Makes Attempt on my Sanity

At work we've been cursed with Microsoft's Windows Vista. While I do like the visual appearance of Vista, there's times when the whole thing feels half done. Today is a great example.

When I fired up my PC this morning, the taskbar (which I always set to auto-hide) would flicker up and down randomly but regularly. I did some searching around, and it turns out that turning OFF the system network icon in the Notification Area causes the flicker. Turning it off. Damn that's stupid.

Is Microsoft Copying Linux?

I've been sitting here today working away on my new Vista desktop at work. While plodding through the new Windows Explorer, I noticed something: is Microsoft copying their visual look from XWindows/Linux?

I say this because from my (admittedly small) time with graphical Linux desktops, the icons are much more colorful, the windows have larger margins for stretching, etc etc.

With all the changes in the interface, I think the next M$ press release on cost of switching to Linux because of retraining and interface differences should be printed on steel plates and shoved right up the PR flacks hind end.

Switching to Vista

We've started the process of rolling out Windows Vista at work. The IT department is getting the first machines, so we can figure out what's going to work or not work when we deploy new computers to the rest of the company.

While I have enjoyed the visual appearance of Vista, there's some things that truly suck:

• Line in is crippled on the SoundMax audio card. Not sure why, but everyone seems to think it's supposed to be broken. Yeah, sure. Then why did you waste a buck putting it on the damn card? I really miss being able to listen to my iPod through the line in while I work. What sucks is I'm going to need to find a HARDWARE solution for this. What BS.
• Software compatibility is going to suck. I've got one app (Alertbear) that is written in .NET, and IT'S BROKEN under Vista. WTF?!? Most of our other apps work, but installing them can be an entertaining experience.
• Navigating folders and doing file copies is outrageously slow. This is due to the indexing utility being a total hog. At day three things are finally starting to get better. At least exploder doesn't lock up every time you change folders now.
• Vista is SLOW. This new PC should be at least 3 times faster than my old one running XP. It isn't. I wonder why.
• The new Office is weird. I like it, but it's so completely different from what came before that it's a fairly high learning curve. Microsoft should shut up about learning curves on Linux if this is the kind of crap they're going to do with their Office applications. They lost their rights to that line of argument.

Back to the migration. THUD! THUD! THUD!