August 2007 Archives

We know Windows Vista SP1 was going to come down the turnpike at some point.  Now we have the first strong hint as to when that will happen: 2008.

Over at the official Vista Blog, there's a post that talks about what SP1 is and what it's designed to address.  I went over it and spied a few things that I found worth noting:

• "Windows Vista SP1 will deliver improvements and enhancements to existing features that significantly impact customers, but it does not deliver substantial new operating system features."  In short, don't expect a new shell or anything visually different, just better under-the-hood performance.
• "Organizations do not need to wait for SP1 to deploy Windows Vista; they are encouraged to begin their Windows Vista evaluation and deployment now."  Well, you can say that until you're blue in the face, but the simple truth is that people are hesitant to make a leap that big.  And rightfully so.  Me, I made the leap early and haven't looked back, but I'm one guy with only a few computers in his house -- I'm not a corporation with 2,000 desktops.  Just because the "tools and guidance" exist doesn't mean they can be implemented effectively by just snapping fingers.
• "Microsoft uses Windows Vista instrumentation to learn what issues affect customers most and then address the issues."  This is actually one of the things I have genuinely liked about Windows: if something goes wrong, I can generate an error dump and send it along to MS in the hopes that they can use the information to figure out whether the problem might be one of theirs.  It's not an instant-gratification kind of thing, but it's apparently helped MS identify a good many issues that otherwise might have slipped past them.  (I'm fairly sure the two recent pre-SP1 reliability and performance updates were helped along by this kind of feedback.)
• "...[SP1] enhances BitLocker Drive Encryption (BDE) to offer an additional multifactor authentication method that combines a key protected by the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) with a Startup key stored on a USB storage device and a user-generated personal identification number (PIN)."  This was not the biggest complaint I've heard about BitLocker, to be honest.  The biggest two I've heard so far is a) how come I can't use the BitLocker GUI to encrypt non-system drives (actually, see below for more on that), and b) what kind of disaster-recovery options do I have if I can't get a BitLocker-encrypted drive to boot?  (The latter is really thorny; the only way I can think of offhand to stave off disaster in that department is to back up to an offline drive that's also encrypted.)
• "BitLocker Drive Encryption encrypts extra local volumes. For example, instead of encrypting only drive C, customers can also encrypt drive D, E, and so on."  THANK YOU.
• "Improves the logon experience by removing the occasional 10-second delay between pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL and the password prompt displaying."  THANK YOU.  (Yes, I did have this problem - I think it's a cousin to the issue of the consistently long delay I get whenever I log on.)
• Many notes about network and disk-to-disk performance issues (although nothing explicitly about the network issue that appears when playing media files on some systems; maybe it's just too early for them to say anything about that yet).  A lot of people have been grousing about this, myself included; the recent performance updates to Vista did help out a great deal, though, but any more they can do in this department is welcome. 
• The defragmenter is still being kept in its stripped-down (read: brain-dead) mode.  The only word I saw so far about the defragmenter is "Administrators can control the volumes on which to run Disk Defragmenter", but this isn't the same as having more interactive control.  Ah, well -- there's always the command line, or JKDefrag.

Now, as far as SP1 being a 2008 item, that puts it in line to be released alongside with the long-in-limbo XP SP3.  I had the feeling Microsoft would take many of the things they would learn during the Vista SP1 process and roll them into SP3 as well, and while I have no evidence they're doing exactly that, it would make sense for them to want to learn as much as they can from Vista.

Ed Bott's post at ZDNet about the counterproductivity of whining about Vista (and its follow-up) got me thinking about something I've been asked about a number of times.  If I'm concerned with getting the best possible PC for my money, why don't I build one myself instead of relying on a manufacturer?

This whole topic got sparked off when I mentioned to a friend that I had bought an Alienware machine (which I have been very happy with overall) instead of going the white-box route.  Out came the justifications for going the DIY route: Oh, but you could save a lot of money; it's better if you build it yourself; you know exactly what you're getting that way; etc.

Well, I've gone the DIY route myself before, and it proved to be no better than going the pre-built route.  In fact, it was a good deal worse for a variety of reasons.

1. Warranties.  When I buy a computer, I'd like to have at least some guarantee that the machine I get will last me for the next few years.  If I buy a pre-build, I have some degree of assurance for that in the form of a warranty.  If I cobble my own machine together, it's that much harder to deal with things if any one piece fails, because then I'm at the mercy of many different hardware makers, not just one.
2. Integration.  It took four tries before I finally got memory that worked properly with my original DIY machine.  And this was after matching specs repeatedly; I wasn't just buying memory blindly.  I spent two weeks playing Musical DIMMs when I should have been working.  With a pre-integrated PC, what comes out of the box has a far better chance of working out of the box than something you put together yourself, and it's almost always possible to swap things out after the fact, anyway.
3. Hassle.  I'm no longer enamored of the romance of building and tweaking a system on my own.  And as Ed suggested in his articles above, tweaking is something of a 99th percentile-of-performance sort of thing: the gains you get from doing so are incremental and not overwhelming.  (The single biggest performance gain I got out of my PC was by changing video cards, which I doubt counts as a "tweak" per se.)  It is simply not worth the trouble, and if you need to be constantly tweaking to make your system run well, then either there's something fundamentally wrong with the system or there's something wrong with your expectations.

Hm... By all rights, I should be a Mac user.  And at some point, I probably will add a Mac to my hardware arsenal, if only for the sake of familiarity.

Still, when it comes to the PC, I'd rather spend a little extra money to get something that I know will work tolerably well out of the box now.  I don't buy PCs to impress my friends; I buy them to get work done.

Over at David Moisan's blog (courtesy of Ed Bott), there's a fine, detailed post about how to sniff out one of the more insidious things that can go wrong with a computer, Vista or otherwise: a failing data cable for a hard drive.  His troubleshooting techniques are right on the money, too -- take out everything that absolutely does not have to be there, and see if the problems persist.  And the way he discovers the tip-off -- via a timestamp that Windows writes to the Registry every five seconds -- hinted that whatever was going wrong was causing Windows to get "mugged" (to use Ed's inimical expression).

On my previous computer, when I had a hard drive go bad on me (it was well within warranty), changing data cables was the first thing I tried.  When that yielded nothing, it was RMA time.

Said article also has some news about a set of USB rollup fixes for Vista, which are right now only available on request.  I'll probably have more to say about that in a bit; I've put in a request for said rollup.

Remember those Vista hotfixes that were circulating in beta form?  They're now officially available: the Windows Vista Performance Update and the Windows Vista Reliability Update.

I strongly recommend reading the accompanying articles (especially the sections where the fixed issues are described) so you can get an idea if you need this right now.  If you'd rather wait, I suspect it'll be offered via Windows / Microsoft Update before long.

I've stuck my neck out and added them to my production system.  Everything seems to be hunky-dory, but I'll yelp if anything breaks. 

[Note: An earlier version of this tip had some inaccuracies which were brought to my attention.  Thanks to Ed Bott for his keen eye!]

[Note #2: Ed's published a blog entry about this issue, and some additional notes that are well worth reading -- including a super-useful link to a tip on how to customize the way the Disk Cleanup tool runs.]

This is actually not an indictment of Vista alone, but something I've seen in Windows for quite some time now: the user profile \TEMP directory.  It fills up with the most amazing amount of trash imaginable, and over time it can cause programs to malfunction left and right in ways that defy analysis.

Vista does have a way to deal with it: the Disk Cleanup tool. which purges the \TEMP directory on demand.  However, as a safety measure, it doesn't delete anything newer than one week -- for instance, temporary files created as part of a program's installation process.

If you want to manually purge the \TEMP directory without the date cutoff restriction -- just blast everything in there -- here's one way to do it.  Copy the following into a text file with a .BAT extension:

rd /s /q "%localappdata%\temp" && md "%localappdata%\temp"

(That's all one line, by the way.)

When run, it'll erase the entire contents of the TEMP directory and then recreate it anew.

Two caveats:

1. If there are any files that are in use in the directory, they will not be deleted.
2. As hinted above, do not run this command when you're in the process of installing software, such as before a reboot to finalize a program installation.  It may delete components of the installer that are needed after the reboot.  (Note that if you attempted to install a program and the installer failed and left garbage in the \TEMP directory, it might not be a bad idea to purge all of that before attempting to re-run the installation.  Just make sure the installer is not actually running before attempting this!)