Posts with tag "Vista"

Vista Ultimate – don’t waste your money

Vista Ultimate - not worth the bucks So Vista’s been out for a while and Microsoft is proudly touting that fact that they have sold more Vista licenses than they did of XP in the same period of time. Well marketing numbers aside here’s a bit of advise for those of you looking to make the jump at some point.

Don’t bother with Vista Ultimate – at this point there is nothing on the table for the average user that justifies the excessive price that Microsoft wants for it especially when you see what little you are getting for the money.

At this point Windows Ultimate Extras; the marketing channel for Vista Ultimate goodies, has 3 items available – BitLocker; the encryption package, DreamScene and a Texas Hold ‘em card game to show off the WPF technology. Now in reality BitLocker is something that the average user will never use in my opinion due to its requirements so that really only leaves two reasons to consider wasting your money on the Ultimate version.

Now if you are being silly and considering getting Ultimate based on a card game give your head a shake and save a hundred bucks with a quick look through Google for much better alternatives because what comes as an Ultimate Extra isn’t that special.

But the real selling point of the Vista Ultimate package of course has been the DreamScene add-on that does nothing more that give you a video experience wallpaper for your desktop. I know that sounds cool but the reality is that this expensive feature add-on is nothing more than a resource hogging CPU overdrive piece of uselessness.

Granted the above is a personal opinion but when you stop and look at your work habits on a computer what is the point of enabling such a feature that for the majority of the time you won’t even see. Are you willing to trade off being able to have a moving desktop picture that will for the most part remain hidden behind a multitude of open application windows for a loss of memory and CPU time.

If you really want to be able to do this and really have a great wallpaper to watch here is a hint that will save you a few hundred buck. Go to VideoLAN.org – download the VLC media player (it’s free) – install it – fire up your favorite video and then set VLC to use it’s wallpaper setting. Voila – you know have a fun wallpaper that does more than display a repeating set of images; and without making your machine beg for more memory and faster CPU.

I don’t know what they have down the pipe for the Ultimate Extras but all I can say for now is that nothing there justifies the average user forking over the amount of money they want for it especially when the Home Professional version can be had for a third of the price.

It just ain’t worth it.

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What a waste of an adjective

  • Category: Technology
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  • Posted 2214 days ago

I might make your life difficult but damn I look tasty. This past week Microsoft caused quite a stir at the MIX’07 conference when they announced the the age of Silverlight and the tie in with a slimmed down cross-platform version of the .NET Framework. Surprisingly the response from around the tech world; even from those that are not Microsoft fans, has been positive even bordering on wow.

This version of wow followed closely on the heels of the Vista wow that turned out to be more of a ya so?… As much as the Vista release may have turned out to be a non-event I think that Silverlight does indeed hold out some serious future wow. That said though our current state of wow sucks big time.

I realize that Microsoft held out great hope and fantastic amount of advertising dollars for the Vista wow factor and even when I was running the RC releases of Vista I liked the OS but I definitely didn’t see anything that bowled me over and made me go running through the streets yelling “Vista is here .. Vista is here”.

So when I finally was able to install the full retail version of Vista I decided to give the big wow calling card for Vista – DreamScene – a try and once again I came away unimpressed. Unimpressed because it is useless and this is not counting the fact that explorer.exe suddenly jumped up by 60,000K and memory usage climbed well into my 2gig of RAM.

With all the hoopla around the Areo interface and things like DreamScene one would have thought that there would have been some serious wow reactions; but I think I know why there wasn’t.

Microsoft is looking for wow in the wrong places. They are looking in the candy store because that is the easiest place to look rather than trying to figure out how to promote the boring things that are done with every release and update to the Windows OS. The fact is that Vista does have a lot of wow in it but the problem is that it is all the boring stuff like networking stacks and IP thing-me-bobs. You know – the type of things that can make you fall asleep sitting at your desk.

Baldy Ballmer has always made a great fuss about being for developers and as a result Microsoft has made the programming part of a developers life fairly easy; dealing with the Windows API notwithstanding, but in doing so they and the developers MS courts with every release of VisualStudio have let the users down.

Life for a programmer may be easy; what with things like Isolated Storage and profile pathing etc, but with each release of Windows and other 3rd party software the user’s life gets more and more difficult. Sure the new eye candy and program skinning makes the user’s computer world prettier but things like DreamScene don’t make the user’s interaction with the OS more productive.

A good example of this is one of the simplest things that just about every computer user comes up against – the famous re-install and the time consuming and soul sucking update dance that always follows. Microsoft may have made things easier for developers when the registry became a universal junk drawer of setting. They may have thought it easier by having massive settings and data files like Outlook’s *.pst file or Windows Live Mail mishmash of *.dbx files. The fact is however that things like have made things incredibly more difficult for the end user.

For the end user nothing is easier anymore whether it being backing up and restoring programs, transferring programs between machines or having to drill down though dialog after dialog to change settings within Windows itself.

You want true wow then stop making what should be simple one point and click actions so damn difficult. Stop making backing up, restoring and moving programs something that nightmares are made of.

If you want some serious wow then start thinking of the users lives being truly made easier instead of giving them chocolates at every turn.

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I hate countdowns – especially software ones

Windows Vista I found myself for the last few days having to take a rather forced break from anything that meant any position other than lying flat on my back. It happens every once in awhile for varying lengths of time but makes trying to do any work kind of pointless.

Finally today I managed to hobble my way with coffee in hand to my office desk and the pile of email, unread blogs that awaited me.Not to mention the reworking of TwitBox that needs to be done given the feedback that was littered through my mail and post comments.

I was about halfway through my reading and working on my second cup of coffee when I noticed the first of many posts about the pending expiration of the pre-release versions of Vista. I knew this was coming and had hoped that by that time that I would be able to afford even the Home Professional version; but at over a hundred bucks that isn’t going to happen for me before the dreaded May 31st deadline.

So it looks like I’ll be spending some of my time in May prepping for a return to the world of XP Pro. This means taking care of fun things like backing up all my data (x2 just incase :) ) and getting new versions of my usual line up of programs. I gotta say though, that even with some of the problems I’ve had with Vista I’ve liked it as an operating system and I will miss it.

For know though it’s time to haul myself back to the couch, rest up for a bit longer and get ready to start my goodbye to Vista countdown.

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Desktop icons are stupid

Desktop icons are stupid Really when you think about all those desktop icons residing on your desktop are pretty stupid. Other than being graphical commandline’s for launching a program or a related file type they do diddly squat. Even the Recycle Bin with it’s empty or full icons is wasted desktop real estate. Sure it tells you if the Recycle Bin has stuff in it or when clicked launches Explorer displaying the contents. It doesn’t show you however the percentage of full it is; or how many folders and files are in it.

A lot is being made of widgets or gadgets as the next generation of information providers on your desktop; which really makes desktop icons even more useless. This begs the question then of why desktop icons have remained dumb all these years. Ever since Windows 3.1 they have been an integral part of our desktop but have never provided any usefulness beyond opening files or programs.

One would think that given the prime screen real estate that desktop icons occupy that at some point some-one would have realized that they could do much more than just sit there waiting to be clicked. After all given that these icons can be displayed at sizes up to 128 pixels by 128 pixels that is really a lot of room to display graphical information. This is not to mention the uselessness of the context menus for desktop menus.

Now we see that Apple is seeking a patent (via CrunchGear) for multi-size icons

Accordingly, in order to present a more informative and personalized user interface, a manner of describing to a user relative importance of an icon in relation to other icons in a system is desirable.

Whoop – dee – doo .. so we can have different sized icons on out desktop all at the same time. Can we say YAWN? … if this is the best we can come up with for desktop icons then they will remain the stupidest use of valuable screen real estate.

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On the learning curve again…

  • Category: Odds & Ends
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  • Posted 2253 days ago

Late night learning curves For many years I was pre-occupied with developing. I loved it and invested many years until I believe I got to be pretty darn good at it. Things change though and for various reason my health among them I hung up my IDE and really began concentrating on this blogging thing.

Even though I had basically quit programming I was still intrigued by widgets; of gadgets, even back when it was Konfobulator (now Yahoo widgets) and DesktopX from Stardock. Every once in awhile I’d grab the newest release of whichever one grabbed my fancy at the time and check out the progress.

While they never seemed to progress past the point of clocks, system info, weather info and now single RSS feed consumers I always felt that they held some serious potential. I still feel that way even though they still have really progress much regardless of the number of widget engines out there.

So I decided in the last couple of days to start delving into the gadgets for Vista Sidebar and seeing what I could come up with. The problem is though that while I may be proficient with VB.NET my skills beyond that are a little on the limited side to say the least. This kinda creates a problem since Vista gadgets are primarily javascript and HTML.

What this means then is that I am on the low end of a javascript learning curve and as much as I would love these books on the subject by O’Reilly; who in my opinion write some of the best programming books, that isn’t in the finances for now so I’ll have to buckle down and start hunting up some good free PDF’s and online resources. The other thing I’d really like to find is a really good IDE for javascript and HTML preferably with a little bit of IntelliSense thrown in to help out an old man’s memory :) .

I’ve already hacked my way through some samples in the last day or two and actually got them working so I’m feeling a little buoyed at the moment and looking really forward to this new learning experience. Who know’s I might even come up with something good enough to share as I have an old project that I really think would suit the widget/gadget world.

Let the fun begin.

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Vista Power Toy Wishlist

  • Category: Technology
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  • Posted 2259 days ago

Windows Vista stuff Ever the optimist Ed Bott; my favorite Windows blogger, has started compiling a list of the programs he would like to see included in a future Power Toys pack for Vista. In it he suggest a stripped down search interface, a tool for saving specific program settings, the ability for a way to move the Public folders around without having to hack the registry and finally a UI for the RoboCopy utility.

He has also left the comments open for his readers to suggest additions to the list and while there are Vista copies of existing Power Toys apps there are some really good additions. So if you feel like adding your voice and idea to the list head on over to his post and add away.

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When hype trumps the facts

Windows VistaToday the growing meme of the day is the Vista Without Activation that is showing up with headlines like Microsoft Provides Windows Vista Activation Workaround (Chris Pirillo) and No Vista Key? No Problem! Run Vista Up To A Year Without Activation (CrunchGear) which in turn point to a post by the Windows expert himself Brian Livingston. In the post though he points out that the rule of caveat emptor still applies

The feature that I’ve revealing today shows that Microsoft has built into Vista a function that allows anyone to extend the operating system’s activation deadline not just three times, but many times. The same one-line command that postpones Vista’s activation deadline to 120 days can be used an indefinite number of times by first changing a Registry key from 0 to 1.

[...]

In my testing of Microsoft’s back-door loophole, I’ve found that the technique can be used to postpone the activation deadline one year or longer. It may or may not, however, work forever, as I describe below.

All that remains now is to see how long this hole remains open.

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