Vista Review

So it looks as if Microsoft it battling bad Vista PR with the same resource it usually does in bad times – MONEY! They are throwing lots of money at the problem in hopes that they can fix the “Vista perception” in the public eye. Personally, I think that they should just spend that money to speed along the new version of Windows more quickly. Oh wait – it was reported this week that Microsoft is pulling Windows 7 ahead early – possibly up to June ’09!

Even though big company CIO’s are planning on skipping Vista altogether, Microsoft is working hard to get consumers to not want to downgrade to XP! The recent ads of the “Mojave” expirement are a joke – where MS shows consumers “Vista” but tells them it’s the new version of Windows called “Mojave” and they “love” it until they are told it’s Vista. You read new articles all the time like “Will Vista be the death of Microsoft that question whether or not a new operating system could become popular or not, and (in that article) the rumour is HP is working on one.

You still occasionally find the odd-person-out that says Windows Vista is not so bad. And there are still tips here and there available, like how to unlock Vista’s hidden boot screen. The ability to customize and remove certain features in Vista must be lacking, or at best difficult, give many companies have enabled groups of experts to help customers remove them.

Until next time – that’s what’s new in Vista in the News!

I’m wondering how many people out there (on average) have updated their Vista laptops and desktops to SP1 not that it’s been available quite awhile. I have to say – I haven’t updated my laptop yet at all, especially since I read that (despite the initial hype) machines aren’t running faster at all post-upgrade, they’re (mostly) in fact running slower!

This guy at TechIMO reports his system running squirrelly after the upgrade, so he backed it out with system restore.

Then again – it’s a double edged sword, since if I don’t upgrade in the near future my machine might be vulnerable to new exploits, the one recently announced that renders Windows Vista security useless.

It looks like I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t, and I may have to make a choice this year. Have you upgraded your Vista yet? What have you experienced?

Well, to everyone that was waiting for SP1 to come out – guess what, the “official release” that was initially posted on the web was full of errors that made machines reboot and reboot and reboot and reboot! And now they’re saying that it’s 40% slower than XP!

In other Vista news this week, turns out that almost no one is buying Vista Ultimate and 75% of all Vista shipments are Vista Home Premium. Redmond is sniffing out pirates in SP1, but for some reason only seems to be nagging them to death.

There is hope as Geekywood shows you how to speed up your Vista, and if that weren’t enough – I’ll cap it off with “How to install Vista in 2 minutes” (which is hilarious – lol)!

If you’re looking to remove optional components of Vista that you might not need, “the How-To geek” can tell you how to get that done. Actually, I was surprised by not only how easy it was, but by how many crazy unnecessary things were running all over the place.

Indexing Service, IIS, .NET framework, UNIX Subsystem, Windows Powershell, Windows Meeting Space – all garbage you may not need running (and much, much more on their list). It’s no wonder that you need 2GB to run Vista when all this garbage is running in the background!

The official release of Vista SP1 can’t be far off, because anyone can register and download the official SP1 release from Microsoft’s OEM site. There are so many improvements and to exising Vista features that I just can’t wait for this thing. I’m about to download that OEM version and install it and be done because it’s so damn slow when transfering files, even emptying the recycle bin is a pain. I have the display driver bug too, and anytime I login I have to wait 5 seconds for he screen to quit flickering before I can work. For the most part Windows Vista has been pretty “stable”, but as I’ve written before – for a system with 2GB of RAM you’d think it’d be a hell of a lot less sluggish than it is. I hope when I intstall SP1 it will be – you’ll be the first to read about my experiences with SP1 here.

ZDNet gives SP1 “7 out of 10″.

What are they highlighting in SP1?

- new windows Firewall
- improved Windows update
- preventive data loss when ejecting removable media
- improved sleep and wake-up times
- improved Readyboost
- smart card enhancements
- read/writing files is faster

Their advice? Wait until SP1 is offered through Windows “Automatic Updates” service. I think I might just do that.

It looks like Microsoft Vista Service Pack 1 isn’t much better at stopping pirates than the original release. Wired confirms that there are still several exploits available that bypass Vista activation that aren’t that complicated at all.

Windows Vista has many complaints of being slow for the amount of memory it requires. Can you speed it up? Sure you can…

One of the things that I’ve not done with Windows Vista is try to speed it up using the ReadyBoost technology that comes with it. What is ReadyBoost? Essentially you use a USB memory stick as a “cache”, which is of course faster than a disk cache (in access time), and unlike regular memory (which loses it’s contents when you shut the PC down), the contents of USB flash used as memory are immediately available when a PC boots up – making it more “ready” (and giving it a ‘boost’, doh!).

If you thinking that you could use any old memory stick you had lying around – that’s not the case. You have to have 256MB or more free space, so those old 128MB flash drives you got for free at the technology fair or with a spindle or CDRom’s aren’t going to cut it. Also (like regular memory and hard drives) believe it or not different USB sticks have different speeds. You need a memory stick that has at least 1.75MB per second read time and 512KB write time. What – you didn’t save the original blister pack from your USB stick with the specs? You might be able to get that information online at the manufacturer’s web site, or maybe online from the place you bought it. If not (or if you’re buying a new memory stick for this purpose), just be sure to get one that says “<b>Enhanced for Readyboost</b>”, and you’ll know it’s got the specs you need.

Believe it or not, you could use just about anything (you can plug in USB) for this technique, including SD Cards and things you plug in a card reader, like MMC Cards, MS Cards, Sony Memory Sticks, etc – as long as they meet the read/write requirements. So how does Readyboost work? When you plugin a new usb stick (or card reader), you’ll get a dialog box asking you what you want to do (open folder, run, Autoplay, etc.), and you want to choose “Speed up my System with Readyboost”.

Windows Vista isn’t just going to let you use memory that is insufficient or incompatible, it’s going to do a benchmark first. If the memory meets requirements after the benchmark, Readyboost will create a file on your drive or card called “ReadyBoost.sfcache”. That’s it! Your Windows Vista system should be running faster now! Think about how much easier this is than buying more memory for your notebook or PC. You can get a 1 or 2GB flash stick for under $20 online, and that could dramatically increase the speed of your computer!

Windows Vista Service Pack 1 or SP1 is now available to the general public (Release Candidate 1 or RC1), and Microsoft has prepared a 17 page document describing the changes that Vista SP1 will include. Looks like one of the biggest bug fixed we can look forward to is support for “exFAT” which will greatly speed up file transfers to flash drives (much needed!). These tidbits were courtesy Internet News. Meanwhile, many people may decide to remain on Windows XP – because Service Pack 3 or SP3 for XP is coming…and the exo-blog posted benchmark results that show Windows XP3 update gaining 10% performance gain over Windows Vista and Vista SP1.

I’ve been very surprised that the “performance improvements” listed in that 17 page MS RC1 document don’t seem to be posted in any of the articles I read announcing Vista SP1 RC1 at all. Is it Microsoft propaganda – or are these numbers real? I can only hope that one of you installing RC1 will comment back and let us all know. Here are the ones that intrigued me:

• Improves the speed of adding and extracting files to and from a compressed (zipped) folder
• Significantly improves the speed of moving a directory with many files underneath
• 25% faster when copying files locally on the same disk on the same machine
• 45% faster when copying files from a remote non-Windows Vista system to a SP1 system
• 50% faster when copying files from a remote SP1 system to a local SP1 system
• Improves the time to read large images by approximately 50%
• Removes the delay that sometimes occurs when a user unlocks their PC
• Improves overall media performance by reducing many glitches

Ready to download and install Windows Vista Release Candidate 1? Here’s you go…

Vista SP1 RC1 links you need

Offical MS Doc: Notable changes in Vista SP1 RC1
Instructions to install Vista SP1
Microsoft Official download link to Vista SP1

Oh, and for your “Vista Sucks” fix of the day, just read The Vista is not so Grand. My favorite quote from that article is:

As innovative as Apple is and as free as open source is, Microsoft still commands about 90 percent plus of the desktop computer market. The question that analysts, commentators and our own software pioneer Mark Shuttleworth keep asking is: for how long?

If you just love Windows Vista so far – I guess you should go and read Windows Vista: Official Magazine.

Well, according to this PC World article, once you get Windows Vista Service Pack 1 or SP1 – your PC will be just as slow as the original version of Vista. That kinda sucks, like I wrote in other posts here on Vista Review – this OS was touted as being “snappy, responsive, and fast”, and it’s been slow, buggy, and sluggish. I think we were all expecting to get some kind of performance boost with SP1 – but it doesn’t really look like that’s going to happen.

This is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve heard of in a very long time. The Register is reporting that an entire shipment of Windows Vista laptops was possibly infected with the ‘Stoned’ bootsector virus from 1994. These notebooks were shipped with both Vista and Bullguard Antivirus. I CANNOT BELIEVE that neither of these picked up on the virus at all. It truly seems unconscionable for this to happen. But then again – in the update at the bottom of the article, it does point out that over time very, very old virus definitions and signatures are removed, and the software did detect the virus, but had no way to remove it. Even thought you can never truly completely get rid of a virus – this is a really big embarrassment to both Microsoft and Bulldog.

Windows Vista is getting to be the strangest version of Windows I have ever used.  I’ve had my Toshiba Satellite laptop for about 11 months now, and as you know it came installed with Vista on it from the factory.  The weird thing is I can’t remember ever telling it to automatically download and install updates from Windows Update, and yet it has been faithfully for 11 months now. It has told me once or twice that I had two “optional” driver updates, but I never approved anything else.  Today out of the blue I saw a little bubble appear above the tray “updates available” so I clicked on it and 9 updates were displayed.  7 were moderate to critical, and 2 were optional drivers – one for the wireless and the other for ‘Intel Mobile processor’.  I told it to install all 9, and then it minized to the tray – and it said it would continue to download and install updates in the background and I could go about my work.  So I did.

Boy was that a mistake.  I had Firefox open and Thunderbird Email.  I was surfing the web, a few tabs open, and in one of the tabs I was watching a YouTube video.  Then it happenned.  First my screen went black, which I might add happens frequently on this laptop, but it always flickers and comes right back.  I read recently in another article that problem should be fixed when Vista Service Pack 1 is released in 2008 (among other bug fixes).  So, I’m waiting for the screen to come back, and waiting, and then it starts to come back, but in a small box 1/4 the size of my screen (but the full display).  Then it flickers again and goes to some 640×480 resolution with absolutely HUGE icons, and then back to normal.  All the time my youtube video is choppily playing somehow in the background.  So I start to watch it again, and then the screen and mouse locks, and then everything comes back, and this whole process happens again and again like 3-5 times.  Eventually the screen goes to some kind of crazy huge pixelated number display, kind of like the Matrix, and then it goes black.  I tried to turn it off, and it wouldn’t.  I kept watching the hard drive light, and it just kep flickering, so I let it go.

I went to make dinner, and came back 25 minutes later and it was still flickering with a black screen.  After I ate it still was, so I watched a show on tv, and then out of the blue it stopped and my power light was red (indicating standby).  So I pressed power, and it came alive again as if nothing had happenned.  It said “updates completed – would you like to reboot” so I did.  Everything has been fine since then.  But why, Microsoft – did Windows Vista cripple my laptop and made it completely unusable for 48 minutes and make my display black??  Why didn’t it tell me first to close my programs??  Why do I own a piece of modern hardware with supposedly the best version of Windows ever created – and have Vista treat me worse than Windows 95 ever did?!  I just don’t get it.

Has this ever happenned to you?  Comment now and let us all know what you’re experiences have been.  I do with this laptop had shipped with Windows XP.

Thank you Chris Pirillo for coming to the rescue again and showing us how to make Windows Vista automatically login (and not prompt you every damned time):

To open this in the UAC (or User Account Control) in Vista, go to the start/search area of Vista, and type in NETPLWIZ. Once you get there:

* UNcheck the box next to “Users should enter a username and password to use this computer”, and then press OK.
* Type the username and password for the user you want to automatically logon to Windows Vista when it boots up and press OK
* Reboot the computer

It’s that simple. Vista will remember the username and password, and you won’t have to log in every time you boot the computer.

Chris | Live Tech Support | Video Help | Add to iTunes

If you are wondering what some of the real-world problems with Microsoft Windows Vista are, you should read Chris Pirillo’s post (and video) about Vista vs. XP.

Chris says that the real problems are when you try to customize and push the system beyond what the normal defaults are.  Audio problems, video problems, driver problems, and more.  There appears to be so many problems that in this post he talks about the fact that ATI and nVIDIA have quietly not providing Vista ready ATI mobility and nVIDIA go drivers.  What seems to happenning is that people are being forced to buy new laptops with new hardware, and once again hardware that was purchased  as “Vista ready” is not.

Comment on your experiences now below!

So it turns out that one of the most popular software programs on the planet “iTunes” is having multiple conflicts with Microsoft Windows Vista.? For the last month Apple had a warning against upgrading to Vista on it’s web site, but this week it changed to an update stating that “itunes is recommended for use with most versions of Windows Vista”.

This, despite the fact that there are still all kinds of problems with iPod synching with iTunes intstalled on Windows Vista.? Like possible corruption of an iPod on ejection from a PC!? That’s like one of those drug commercials that advertise a pill to completely clear your sinus, but fine print that says “may cause heart attack, stroke, or outright death…”.

Who knows how long it will be until iTunes is completely Vista ready and compatible.? Apple also says that the text and graphics may not display properly and that iTunes is still completely unsupported on 64-bit versions of both Windows XP and Windows Vista.

So I bought a brand new Toshiba P105 laptop with Windows Vista installed.? It has a Dual Core Intel 1.6Ghz processor, 120GB hard drive, and 1GB of ram.? One would think that this would be a pretty powerful notebook.? When I first broke the seal on the case and fired this thing up – of course I had to go through the ubiquitous first time Windows (Vista) setup.? I know it couldn’t have been my hardware, but it took some 30 minutes+ for Vista to setup and run for the first time.? It was crazy.? I know that the hard drive had a main partition, and a very small recovery partition – and it was almost like it was loading and installing the main part from the recovery part for fresh install or something.? I was glad once it finally installed and prompted me to create a username and password, but I couldn’t believe how long it took for a system with 2 gigabytes of RAM….I was expecting more speeeed!!