Windows Vista Lounge

As a huge fan of the Seinfeld show I was delighted to see the mix between Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld. The idea of promoting the newest technology via getting in touch with the common people is clever when it’s these two sharing a room or buying shoes. The interesting part is they hardly touch on the product until the absolute end of each video and even then, it’s more of a tease…as if, something great is coming out soon.

I’m not sure about that part. I mean, when Abercrombie puts a mostly nude billboard up with just their name on it….they are selling image (definitely not clothing) but I digress. But in the Seinfeld/Gates scenario they are selling…hope?

I like the videos, they are fun and clever and anyone who can get Bill Gates to lighten up deserves applause. That said, it would be better if Microsoft were pushing something more tangible like a new service pack to make things faster or more reliable, or even one that makes the computer taste like chocolate cake

I think the Windows 7 previews have done little to make folks optimistic that this time it will truly be bigger, better, faster…or even sexier. Meanwhile all my geek buddies are switching to Macs! Ugh…the horror…and I admit, I have already fallen prey to the dark side. I have an Iphone, Apple TV, and use ITunes more than Media Player…am I being assimilated?

Anyway, for your viewing pleasure here are the videos!

I’ve been onboard with Vista as a beta tester, RC tester and early adopter, all the way back to Longhorn. I’ve heard all the jokes and certainly experienced my share of frustrations with the Vista OS, but I wanted to try it out. I literally have two computers side by side on my desk at work, one Vista and the other XP. I say all this to establish myself as a true user of Vista, rather than some hater who wants to sound intelligent by copying other’s insults.

What I like about Vista is it’s ease of start-up and standby, when a PC runs on Vista, you can pretty much leave it on for weeks at a time and it will run fine. With XP–that was impossible unless you want your computer running slower each day.

What I don’t like is the lag when certain programs seem to get lost in mid process, and of course the glitchy nature of Vista in specific applications that I use a LOT, like Outlook, Word, Powerpoint and multiple web browsers.

Using two systems side by side, I have to admit the one directly in front of me is XP, with Vista on the left side as a monitoring system–I get hundreds of emails a day and I need one dedicated computer to keep up, so it’s always in Outlook. This allows me to write and do other things in XP while I’m watching for important emails on the left. Ok enough on that.

My point is, I use XP way more than Vista, and when I get home I often have to shift to my laptop (XP) instead of the fancy Sony Vista system I bought recently. Why? Because graphic programs, especially those rendering things in Flash, hate Vista! They won’t load or will crash when you go to save them. It sucks. And it sucks in a way that forces me to huddle over my laptop just to get something finished.

So, I am asking myself, after truly giving Microsoft a fair chance at winning me over, is it time for a Vista-ectomy? As in cutting the cord from the OS and either reverting to XP or….(gulp)….buying a Mac. That is something I can’t believe I am saying after being with Microsoft since Windows 1.0….yep I’ve been in the IT world that long.

There are alternatives of course, Wait for Windows 7, Try Linux (um no thanks) and other schemes but at the end of the day, I just want the computer to work well, fast, reliably and intuitively…all things Vista was supposed to do! Oh and I want it to work with the programs I use often.

I’m wondering, with all the traffic this site gets and all the wonderful posts we have seen over the years…is anyone else getting to the point of no return? This question is not for the haters, who never really tried Vista,  just the ones who gave it an honest run.

Comments?

While I am positive about the overall Vista improvements made over XP (and in some ways missing the proven success XP had) I’ve noticed a marked difference in performance by turning off the automatic updates. By that I mean compeltely off, not just set to download later or whatever variant of the settings you choose. Here is why I prefer this. If I’m nto having probalems with Vista, do I really want to update something behind the scenes? Vista is till proving itself so any new update could throw off my efforts to tune it the way prefer it to run.

Now, you might be thinking, only an idiot doesn’t run updates. This is where I recommend you periodically go out and check for updates manually. There are some you might want and some (especially office 2007 ones) that you truly do not! By making this change, which I compared between a Vista workstation at my office and one at home, I saw a big improvement in bootup, and overal performance. Here is why….those frickin updates can really drag your system in the ground while they scan to see if they are needed, then they download uber big files, then run! All while you are simply trying to check mail or worse, do something intense in Photoshop or other resource needy programs.

Aside from this tweak I also recommend, regardless of your Windows OS, to delete the files in your temp directory and defrag once a week. This one effort can have enormous benefit.

I know there is nothing ground breaking in this idea but if you find yourself creeping along in Vista, try setting things as described here and you will see a difference!

No this is not some crazy tweak where you point compressed air, upside down, at your CPU or RAM chips to get better performance–although the latter is a great hack for cracking passwords…but I digress! Back to the point, speed up vista! Yes I like it and sometimes feel like it might never get to be the OS that XP turned out to be (stable, reliable, well established, blah blah). Microsoft is releasing  SP1, (cheer) and lowering prices to boost acceptance, and of course all new PC’s come with it in one flavor or another. Meanwhile there seems to be one inherent issue, it simply gets pokey when opening apps or doing anything resource intensive.

I tried something just to see if it would help, and it did (more than I expected it would). I turned off the Aero effects and simply chose the Vista theme instead. I like the menu’s better actually, those giant buttons were a bit much for me. Anyway, it made a notable difference for very little effort!

If you’re new to Vista and want to make the change or try other settings, here is a quick “How-to”

1. Right mouse click on your background

2. Select [Personalize]

3.  Select [Windows Color and Appearance]

4. Chose [Windows Vista Basic]

5. Click OK.

It may go into that windows trance where it everything goes black and white for a few secs. But afterwards it will flip back to normal, the menus will tighten up and overall things will be a bit more perky.

If this isn’t enough for your performance needs, please just go add as much RAM as you can afford and you will be fine

Anyone else got a tweak or tune up idea? Please post!

Finally, the service pack we all waited for, the one that would fix everything we struggled with in Vista! But wait, there is a catch!…This is not a full blown service pack. It’s an “RC” meaning release candidate and that is where things get interesting.

For those of us who went through the RC Versions of Vista in the beta program, we remember how this played out. Download it, install and go through all the tribulations but when the actual version is released, you have to UNINSTALL the RC service pack first! It may not be a big deal but then again, it could mean a lot of repeat work for you if you make config changes after the RC is on your machine.

As much as I like to be on the edge of the latest software, I recommend serious caution before slapping the RC Candidate on your Vista OS. Or at least wait until a few trial stories come out to see if your system or favorite software has a potential issue.

Now if only I could get that Office 2007 SP1 to stop reinstalling itself everytime I open Outlook…sigh.

The Vista OS has a great set of language packs that are free for those who want the system to oeprate int heir native language. In this case the choice was for Russian, but the version of Vista was Home Premium. I’ve installed the Russian (Cyrillic) language pack on the ultimate version and it worked very well, every menu choice was in Russian! But it looks like you can’t have that feature unless you upgrade?

 Seems like Microsoft would let people buy the language pack rather than have to upgrade everything. But if you’re trying to get a Russian version of the OS to work, make sure it’s Vista Ultimate, or you wont be able to download the packs through the update service.

Has anyone found a work around for this? Please don’t say “buy a Mac” that is so last year.

Here is a simple trick that took me a bit of time to figure out. In XP you could set “single click” options fairly easy through control panel. Unfortunately on this particular installation of Vista (Tablet PC) there was no such option. However in a place not so obvious…there was a cure. I went to “Computer” off the start flag or button whichever you want to call it and edited the folder options to allow single click ability. Poof, a single click of anything on the desktop was the same as a double click!

Hope this helps those looking to resolve this handy feature.

At Last! A working version of Vista and Paperport! I tried a LOT of combinations, patches, fixed and all of them failed. BUT, an expert in the software showed me how it could work, and it works really well. We used a Visioneer Strobe 220 and Paperport 11, (clean install, no upgrades or previous versions left on the machine).

There is a little bit of awkward clicking when you try to set the scan mode to something different but once you understand what it is asking you to click…it is fine. Setup and calibration went fine and poof, a working document manager and scanner that takes up very little space.

This was the longest part of my beta testing with Vista, by far! Glad to see the folks at Visioneer/Nuance producing beta and final Vista drivers, long over due and very appreciated!

Now I need to scan about 5 billion pages that have been sitting on my desk waiting for this solution….