April 2007 Archives

A review I did of Ubuntu 7.04 vs. Windows Vista is now online at InformationWeek.  There's a lot to like in both, and there's a lot that drives me crazy in both.  (Vista's backup tool was one of them.)  The era of desktop Linux for the masses is a bit closer, but I can still see people struggling with things in Ubuntu (and Vista, too) they really shouldn't have to.

Here's a very technical, in-depth but extremely absorbing look at the lessons Microsoft learned from the animated-cursor exploit.

One of the things I have come to believe about Microsoft is that while they may start from behind in any particular field, they learn how to catch up -- and when they do, they often do more than just catch up.

I'm constantly stunned at the amount of junk that can be shoehorned into a PC even before the user gets to take it out of the box.  What's even worse is the amount of junk that gets crammed in there under just about any pretext at all -- or, worse, under the pretext that if you don't have it installed, you're going to be horribly underinformed or suffer major losses of functionality.  I'm referring specifically to annoying applications that sit in the system tray and bug you about things whether or not you ever asked to be informed about them.

Not long ago I installed a new printer from a major manufacturer.  It proceeded to install a tray monitoring application which was not required for the printer to function, but did in fact bug me about every little thing that the printer did (even when it was manifestly obvious, like when the printer was out of paper).  I had to do a little startup config to get rid of it.  Ditto the stupid QuickTime icon, which has a habit of coming back no matter what I do (usually after an upgrade to QT's software).

Multiply my problem by a factor of five, and then multiply it again by all the people out there who don't clean up their PCs and don't see why they should motivate themselves to do so, and you have a good part of what can go wrong with software even when it's at its best.  Nobody wants to become a computer expert just to make sure that a bunch of stupid little programs aren't all trying to load at once whenever they log in, thereby creating a delay of a minute or more on a particularly crowded system.  I once watched with horror as someone's login process ballooned to over five minutes because they had so much of this stuff all trying to load itself.

Here is the problem: When I install a program, I do not want anything that does not absolutely have to be there.  I don't need a tray monitoring (cr)applet for every single thing in my computer, and I don't want to have to do any jiggery-hackery to get rid of it.  I want the option to not have such stuff installed as a standard option in the installer, like the installation directory or the "place an icon in the desktop" checkbox.  Is that so much to ask?

Ed Bott has an extremely detailed review of Microsoft Home Server at ZDNet.  I admit that I was one of the people who wondered what the market for this product was, until its capacities were spelled out in detail -- one of them being seamless no-hassle household-wide backup.  Yeah, I'd go for that.

The best part is that it's not being sold as a software product -- it's a standalone device like Apple's AppleTV, with everything needed available right out of the box.  I would love to get one of these into my own household and get it running, just to see what's possible ... although right now I have a lot of other things competing for my attention, sadly.

A collection of tidbits from around the block, to tide everyone over during a busy bump in my schedule.

• The best darn image viewer ever, IRFANVIEW (although the Windows Photo Gallery in Vista is pretty good in its own right) has just been upgraded to version 4.0.  Better Vista compatibility and a whole slew of other features have been rolled into the new edition.
• Windows Vista's beta copies are set to expire as of May 31, 2007.  (If you're still running a beta edition of Vista at this late a date, I do have to wonder about you.)
• Windows Vista Media Center users can now pick up a cumulative update with a bunch of little and big fixes.  Incidentally, if you're using MCE Live TV and are fed up with the limitations of the buffer built into the program, check out this application which lets you set an arbitrary buffer size, up to two hours.

A piece in the New York Times is reporting that Microsoft is preparing to offer a three-dollar version of a bundle of common products -- Windows and Office, mainly -- in stripped-down editions.  That probably means the Starter Edition of Windows and Office Home.  Naturally people are skeptical -- $3 is still a lot of money in developing countries, and $3 vs. the $0 (potentially) of Linux and OpenOffice.org is stiff competition.  On the other hand, the $3 might be rolled into the cost of projects undertaken generally to bring computing to people in such areas, so they might not have to pay for it out of pocket.  That said, from all I've heard, Windows Starter Edition has been a dud -- $3 is about what I'd pay for something like that.  (On the bright side, maybe we can see a kind of charity sponsorship for classrooms in other countries: pay $10 to give this many students that much more software.  Such things already exist, I suspect, but this might help steer those normally inclined to pirate Windows away from doing so...)

A small follow-up on my previous note about the Outlook patch.  One of the problems I did have consistently with Outlook 2007 before applying it was that sometimes mail queued to go out would stall interminably in the outbox before it would finally send.  After the update, this has not happened.

Not long ago I wrote an article for TechTarget (link forthcoming) about whether or not you need ECC memory in a desktop machine.  The short answer is "it depends" -- if you're simply running a web browser and checking email once a day, ECC will be wasted on you.  If you're a programmer, a graphic designer, or someone who needs a system that's a cut above the usual desktop beige-box, then yes.  (I've insisted on ECC memory for my last two computers and will probably continue to do so, but I'm paranoid about my PC.  Not everyone needs to be.)

This brought to mind a number of other questions: When something goes wrong in Windows, how can we tell whether it's really Windows's fault or something else?  I've kept this question in front of me for some time now, and a chance discovery of an entry in the Old New Thing blog gave me a great deal to chew on:

[...] Moral of the story: There's a lot of overclocking out there, and it makes Windows look bad.

I wonder if it'd be possible to detect overclocking from software and put up a warning in the crash dialog, "It appears that your computer is overclocked. This may cause random crashes. Try running the CPU at its rated speed to improve stability." But it takes only one false positive to get people saying, "Oh, there goes Microsoft blaming other people for its buggy software again."

This is, sadly, from what I can tell, a pretty endemic problem with Windows.  Try to tighten things up and people yell at you -- e.g., Symantec snarking out Microsoft for trying to make Vista secure, thereby forcing them to write a slightly more useful security product.  Let other people do their thing and people yell at you again.  If I had the time, I'd seriously consider writing a book entitled Why Microsoft Can't Win.

As far as overclocking goes, it's one of those things that I have never been able to fathom except as a kind of extreme fetishism that can never really be wholly satisfied.  I've had parallel experiences with Windows in general, where I would try every single one of those Registry-hack / turn-services-off / defrag-with-clever-file-placement-strategy tweaks to get that boost of speed that always seemed to be around the corner.  And in the end, I always wound up falling back on a stock Windows configuration that has, with each successive release of Windows, become that much more self-tuning.

This isn't to say there are no strategies that you can use to make Windows run faster.  It's just that what they consist of tend to be very unsexy and unremarkable, and often involve dealing with hardware bottlenecks (more memory, bigger hard drive) by spending money.  That and the more I rely on my computer as a work device, the less I care about some theoretical 5-10% speedup (which is scarcely measurable anyway), and the more I care about having a system that is reliable.  The biggest reliability problem I had with Vista was the buggy ATI video driver, since replaced, which made dealing with RC1 and RC2 so problematic; since then I haven't had a single system-level issue that caused me to lose work.

Many of the speedups that I see come from Microsoft figuring out how to optimize the way Windows handles certain resources.  The patch for Outlook that I talked about the other day, for instance, seems to be in that vein.  But if you're still looking for the magic Registry tweak that will make everything run twice as fast, take the time you're spending doing all that tweaking and put it back into something productive.  That probably goes for overclocking as well -- although I'm guessing those who are determined to overclock their systems will do so regardless of what anyone else tells them.  (But the idea that a PC would come overclocked out of the box without me knowing about it gives me the willies for sure.)

Outlook 2007 is a staple application on my desktop; it's always running, and I probably get more use out of it than Word on most days.  But it's also suffered periodically from a kind of stodginess that seems to be totally unrelated to machine speed, fragmentation or anything else of the kind.  Many people reported similar problems, and after gathering a good deal of user data Microsoft finally released a patch (validation needed) designed to address these problems, which they claim were due to contention issues in .PST access.

Thinking I could do no worse than I already was, I downloaded it and tried it out.  The change was dramatic: Outlook now starts up markedly faster, and all operations with messages -- opening, moving, deleting, previewing -- are far speedier than they used to be.  If you're running O2K7, go get it.

There's some interesting discussion and commentary going on over at Ed Bott's blog about the way a feature has been implemented in different editions of Vista but not exposed to the user consistently in every edition.  That feature is the Previous Versions feature, which is tied to the Shadow Copy and System Restore functions.  In Vista Home Basic, the user interface for restoring shadow copies of a given file is not available.  There's a few ways to get around that, like moving your data to another drive (what if you don't have one, though?), but there's another solution that seems likely: have some enterprising third-party programmer write an application, or even a script, that gives you access to shadow copies of files in Vista Home.

I'm with Ed on the notion that backup in Vista needs to be something everyone can use effectively, not just the folks who shelled out for the top-end edition of the program.  And even those of us who did have to deal with some terribly ornery restrictions, which makes me that much more grateful that the classic (what a word) NTBACKUP tool is still available.

One common gripe I hear about Windows (XP mostly; I am not sure if this happens to Vista as much) is how sometimes a USB device will no longer be recognized by the system when you plug it in.  This is generally due to a problem with the hardware manifest or the "device tree" in Windows, and there's a fairly simple solution.

1. Unplug all the USB devices that don't absolutely have to be there (i.e., your mouse and keyboard can stay).
2. Boot Windows in Safe Mode.
3. Open the Device Manager and look for everything in the USB Devices or Universal Serial Bus Controllers category.
4. Delete everything in that category.
5. Shut down and reboot the system normally.  Windows will then re-install the USB controllers.
6. Re-add your USB devices.  They should be recognized properly, although you may need to provide drivers for them if Windows can't find them in its own driver repository.

There are other methods which I'll go into separately after I do some more research, but this one tends to be pretty foolproof.