The Electric Wand : Vista

Tips for optimizing Vista on new hardware

Ewan — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 21:42:50 GMT

Ed Bott over at ZDNet posted a really interesting article yesterday, detailing the journey he had of making his friend's brand new Sony Viao laptop work properly with Windows Vista Business. In short, his friend upgraded a trusty old XP Vaio to a new machine which came with Vista, but had a terrible experience of crashes, slow start up, bogging performance etc.

In a nutshell, the advice is pretty straightforward, at least for technically minded folk and backs up the experience of some of us who've been using Vista all through the beta program:

Start with Vista-capable hardware. It's almost a waste of money trying to upgrade old PCs to run Vista. New machines which (supposedly) have been designed to run Vista with modern architectures, devices which have a good chance of having decent Vista drivers and enough horsepower to do it justice, are so cheap now, it's hardly worth trying to tweak anything older than a couple of years old to get Vista working well on it.
Use the latest, best quality drivers you can. It still amazes me how many manufacturers ship machines pre-loaded with years-old device drivers, or (conversely), how many update drivers & BIOSes frequently but with poor attention to quality (the device driver certification program is there for a reason; if you have a piece of hardware that comes with a non-certified driver, you have to ask: if the manufacturer of the device cut corners in bothering to get it certified, where else did they trim savings?)

I got a new Lenovo Thinkpad tablet a few months ago, and it was (and still is) a brilliant piece of kit. Lenovo have done a class-leading job of making it easy to keep everything up to date - including the system BIOS - in a single application, the ThinkVantage System Update. Think of that as a single app which already knows exactly what hardware you have, and checks the Lenovo site to see if there's anything to update.

I've had so many PCs where the vendor's driver download page needs you to know everything about the internal bits of the hardware (Dell, stand up and be counted) - after choosing the machine type, why do I need to know which iteration of network controllers it has, or whether it's got the optional super-dee-dooper graphics card or bog standard one? Can't the manufacturer figure that out, especially if they ask for a serial number to help identify what the machine is?
Don't put any unnecessary crapware on it. This starts off as a fault of the OEM who supplied the machine (sorry Dell, I have to single you out again, but you're far from unique). It's worth making sure you don't install any old junk from the internet and leave it lying around on your machine. Ed Bott even suggests doing some basic installs (like Acrobat, Flash etc) then taking a full machine backup, so you can always revert to a nice starting point. Combine that with the Really Rather Good backup software in Vista (or even the Windows Easy Transfer software) which can make sure your data is safe, and it's not unthinkable that every six or twelve months a savvy user could easily blow away the machine and recover the starting image & last data backup to be in a good state again.

Most people accept that they need to service a car regularly to keep it running well - a modern PC is a good bit more complicated than a car (albeit with generally less terrible consequences if it all goes boom).

Part of Ed's summary neatly encapsulates his thinking...

Well, for starters, Vista doesn’t suck. And neither does Sony’s hardware. That four-pound machine with the carbon-fiber case is practically irresistible, as my wife continues to remind me.

But when you shovel Windows Vista and a mountain of poorly chosen drivers, utilities, and trial programs onto that beautiful hardware without thinking of the customer, the results can be downright ugly. That was certainly the case with the early-2007 vintage Vaio, and it’s still true today, with too much crapware and not enough attention to quality or the user experience.

Windows Media Center query-based recording

Ewan — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 21:32:58 GMT

Here's a tip for anyone running Windows Vista Home Premium or Ultimate editions (the ones with Media Center functionality), if you have a suitable tuner set up and configured. I mentioned this in passing to someone who uses Media Center as their primary TV tuner, and they didn't know it was possible - largely because it's a bit obscure and not exactly easy to find.

I don't use Media Center as my primary TV - we have a Sky HD box to do that, and although I'm generally happy with the functionality and reliability of the Sky box, its UI isn't anywhere near as flexible as MC's. The Guide is one example of that - Sky lets you browse the guide but the options to search it are a bit thin, so it's OK if you know there's something you want to record. MC allows you to query the schedules (including all the obscure channels you might never watch) to find specific named programs, or even ones where the metadata matches your search.

My PC in the study has a cheap Hauppauge USB Freeview tuner installed, and an XBox 360 in the living room allows us to watch stuff that gets recorded on the PC.

If you go to Recorded TV on the main MC menu, and select to Add a Recording, you get:

... meaning, you can record something based on searching the Guide. If you choose the "Create a custom recording" feature, however, you can have MC automatically record a programme that isn't scheduled yet, on the off-chance that it will be shown again at some point. Useful for catching up with old films that appear every few months.

In this example, maybe I want to record Ghostbusters. Select Keyword from the custom list:

Now, selecting any of the first 4 options will search against the current guide, and if there's nothing scheduled, you won't be able to select it. If you pick Generic keyword, however, and you get a slightly different UI:

Media Center will allow you to save your query, and will record anything that shows up in the guide at some future date, which features the word you just entered..

If you want to check what custom recordings you have scheduled, start again from "Recorded TV", and select "View scheduled" - you'll see a list of anything that's set to record, but only if it exists already in the guide.

To see what you have set to record on schedule, choose the "Series" option on the left, and anything that shows up as "ANY CH" means it will record whenever the guide can match your query.

As I said, not exactly obvious... but very cool!

Dell's "anti-crapware" initiative doesn't go far enough

Ewan — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 11:15:10 GMT

My wife's small business has recently had a requirement to upgrade a couple of PCs, after 5 or 6 years. Since I am ultimately responsible for all their IT (and I am not proud of what they have - I cut all sorts of corners to make my life easy, but they don't know how lean it is), I've always bought Dell kit for them since it's been good quality, relatively cheap, it's quick and easy.

Looking around on their site, I figured the new Dell Vostro desktop range might be worth a look - and since the machines were shipped with "Just the Software you need - no Trialware installed" then it would save me time in rebuilding the systems when they arrived (as I'd generally do).

There's a great discussion over on Steve Clayton's blog, about tweaking Vista, and on Computerworld on how to take the garbage off your new system. I'd hoped to avoid any of this by just going with a well-tested, modern, high-volume desktop, so that everything just works with software that's been available for the best part of a year, on Vista Business (no downgrade to Windows XP for us - even if Dell is now offering it as a "feature").

OOBE

The Out-Of-Box-Experience was typical of a decent PC - lots of boxes, lots of packaging, printed manuals in about a dozen languages (which all go straight in the bin). It's pretty straightforward plugging everything together now, and in no time we're up and running.

I bet if this was a new Mac, it would have a lot less spurious cables and bits of paper.

No Trial-ware but plenty of crap-ware

ZDnet has talked about the problems of "crapware" (including relative to Dell) cluttering up new PCs, slowing things down, frustrating end users and annoying power users by giving them hours of work to clean things up.

On starting up the PC, we had Google Desktop indexing everrything, even though Vista was doing that already. We had a Dell/Google Browser Helper Object just waiting to redirect every bad URL or search, to a site that showed Dell adverts (called Dell's Browser Address Redirector). Welcome to the world of "choice" - I'm almost surprised they didn't install Firefox, Opera and Safari, just in case the end user felt like installing a different browser without bothering to download it. Pity the users who don't want all this guff and have to take it off.

There are 3 separate ISP sign-up applications which are irrelevant to this small business, as well as a bunch of other bits & pieces which come from neither Dell nor Microsoft. Each of them has a program group in the start menu, and an entry in Control Panel's Remove Programs section.

There are obviously some useful 3rd party addons (though I was going to rip out the - trial version - McAfee anti-virus, spyware and firewall, and replace with OneCare), such as DVD decoder, or CD burner. But even they don't always work smoothly - there's some Roxio software which as well as writing CD/DVDs, also seems to monitor folders on disk for some sharing function.

These machines are sold for small business use - why would I want to have 3rd party software cluttering up the system tray and occupying memory & CPU, monitoring folders for sharing media, on the LAN? In looking to switch off the monitoring, I right-clicked on the system tray icon and (not seeing any other option), choose an option to do with Managing the folder sharing, on the basis that it might give me an option of switching it off.

Boom. Visual C++ 6.0 runtime error. Every time. On both machines.

I don't want to beat up on Dell specifically, but this is an example of a poor customer experience that is 100% down to the PC OEM to fix. Don't install all this software on a PC unless it's essential - or at least make it easy for users to revert to some kind of vanilla OS.

How many customers would assume this C++ runtime error was a Windows problem? Or would blame a slow machine on spurious Vista performance issues, when it's every bit as likely to be caused by unnecessary and unwanted software running on the background, because the ISV has paid the OEM to include it on new machine builds..?

Maybe Microsoft should get into building PC hardware, and at least will have soup-to-nuts control over the hardware and software experience.

BBC iPlayer kicks up a stink

Ewan — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 19:00:53 GMT

It's been interesting reading various news articles about the fact that the soon-to-be-released BBC iPlayer application will initially be available only to Internet Explorer and Windows XP users. The Register reports that a group called the Open Source Consortium is due to meet with the BBC Trust since the service will not be available at all to users (for example) of Firefox or Linux OS.

The Guardian's coverage points out that the same issues behind the iPlayer are shared with the commercial broadcasters' services (ie Channel 4 and Sky). Channel 4 says:

Will I be able to access 4oD on my Mac?

Unfortunately not at the launch of 4oD.
This is an industry-wide issue caused because the accepted Digital Rights Management (DRM) system used to protect online video content, which is required by our content owners, is not compatible with Apple Mac hardware and software. The closed DRM system used by Apple is not currently available for licence by third parties and there is no other Mac-compatible DRM solution which meets the protection requirements of content owners. Unfortunately, we are therefore unable to offer 4oD content to Mac users at this stage.

The fact is, all of these services are being required to use DRM since they don't own much of the content they're "broadcasting", and the content owners are saying that they'll only allow it to be broadcast if it can be protected. And nobody has (yet) built a DRM system that is up to the job of securing the content, for the other platforms in question (with the exception of FairPlay, which Apple won't license).

Someone from the BBC comments about the fact that the Windows DRM may be a target for hackers...

"We expect it to get broken. When it gets broken, Microsoft releases a new version [of DRM] and the application gets updated. It's an imperfect solution. But it's the least imperfect solution of them all."

So, it's interesting that the Open Source Consortium is threatening to take this whole thing to the European Union under an anti-trust banner. What's better - provide an innovative service to 70-85% of the market, or have no service to anyone because the content providers won't allow it? Sure, the latter example is "fairer" since it doesn't favour one platform vs another, but is it really in the best interests of the end users...?

Finally, a sidebar gadget worth having

Ewan — Mon, 07 May 2007 20:39:22 GMT

Oooh, that's a bit flippant. The whole Vista sidebar thing has kind of passed me by, though it really does make sense on widescreen monitors.

I set about looking for a particular gadget today, though - one of my cats managed to knock my home PC over last night (it's a desktop which I have standing vertically under the desk, propped up on a couple of old plastic floppy disk boxes to allow airflow under).

Following Arnie's destructive rampage, the PC refused to boot. So I had to drag it out from under the desk, and start pulling it apart to figure out what was wrong. After a process of elimination, I figured that the CPU must be the problem and sure enough, the CPU cooler had come loose. On closer inspection, the CPU itself had been yanked out of position (by the weight of the huge heatsink/fan combo) and managed to mangle numerous of the 478 pins...

... which is never going to be a good thing.

Anyway, I eventually gave up trying to straighten the pins (that's one way to make you go cross-eyed) and decided to sacrifice the CPU from another PC that happens to be elsewhere in the house. By the time I'd taken *that* one to bits, put the CPU in my main machine, reassembled both and reinstalled the system unit under the desk, I was pretty happy.

Until about 5 minutes in to using the thing, when it abruptly shut itself down and emitted a selection of beeps on restarting... uh oh, sounds like a thermal shutdown where the system throws itself on its own sword rather than bursting into flames.

It turns out the CPU fan cable had got wrapped around the fan itself so the cooling forces were less than optimal (ie none, apart from the heatsink). After fixing that and reassembling/reinstalling the machine, I went looking for SpeedFan, a great little bit of diagnostic software that displays all the temperatures, fan speeds, voltages etc from the numerous internal sensors within the case (if your system supports it).

There's even a beta SpeedFan gadget, which will report any of the info that Speedfan can grab, right there on the sidebar. Excellent!

More information here.

PS - another tip for Sidebar usage... Windows Key + Space bring it to the fore.

Windows Live Mail Desktop - replaces Outlook Express for Hotmail use

Ewan — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 20:31:24 GMT

I've been running the "dogfood" version of Windows Live Mail Desktop (WLMD) for a while now, and found it to be really stable and usable. It's basically a superset of the built-in Windows Mail application from Windows Vista, which supercedes Outlook Express.

WLMD is now available for beta testing (on Windows XP as well as Vista) from http://ideas.live.com and it works against MSN/Hotmail (including the mail from Office Live, so if you sign up for your own free domain name you can pick up the mail without being in a browser), POP/IMAP accounts and other providers' mail services, such as Yahoo!, AOL and GMail. It seems it's been available for some time, in fact :)

I was prompted about this when Steve Clayton was being interviewed today on TalkSport Radio, and a caller had asked why Vista no longer gave him access to Hotmail... I guess he was meaning that since Outlook Express isn't the box any more, he was trying to use the supplied Windows Mail program, which doesn't offer the ability to connect to Hotmail... so the solution is to either stay with browser-based mail or to use WLMD.

Calibri: a font like no other...

Ewan — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 14:55:43 GMT

Someone asked me a semi-bizarre question today: the new fonts which are in Office 2007 and Windows Vista, especially Calibri (which, I must say, I think looks great)...

Can they be installed on older versions of Windows or Office?

I had never really appreciated all the work that goes into generating a decent font, including getting cross-industry support for stuff like building it into printer ROMs etc. It turns out there's a whole Typography research group within Microsoft - if you're interested in finding out anything more about fonts, I'm sure you'll get it there...

Anyway, the answer to the question is two-fold...

The Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel and Powerpoint 2007 File Formats is freely available for Office XP and Office 2003, and includes not only the ability to read and edit Office 2007 format documents, but also the following fonts...

Calibri
Cambria
Candara
Consolas
Constantia
Corbel

Otherwise, it seems the fonts can be licensed from Ascender Corporation if they're designed to be used somewhere else (eg on a different platform, different application suite etc).

Virtual PC 2007 now available

Ewan — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 13:07:28 GMT

The Virtual PC team released the latest version to the web the other day, and it's available for free, downloadable from here. Headline changes over previous versions are the ability to be run on Windows Vista, and to have Vista as a guest OS within VPC as well as miriad performance improvements.

I've been using VPC 2007 in beta for a while and it's been rock solid, and performs snappier than I recall VPC 2004 doing (though since VPC 2004 wasn't happy running on Vista, it's been a while).

More technical information on Virtual PC 2007 is available here.

Vista Aero Glass - performance hit (or not)

Ewan — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 22:40:06 GMT

Just read an interesting analysis at http://firingsquad.com/hardware/windows_vista_aero_glass_performance/ where they tested a couple of different systems running Windows Vista with Aero Glass switched on and off. (Windows Aero - if you're not aware of it by name - is the new user interface functionality, with transparent windows and the swish new effects present all through Vista)

The cynic in most techies would assume that flashy graphics mean hammering the system performance; I've known plenty of people who even switched off all the fancy UI features, on the basis that the machine would be a few % more responsive... remember the old advice on Windows 3.1 or 95 to not use a graphical desktop backdrop since that put an overhead on system performance?

Anyway, the FiringSquad results are predictably games-focused, but draw an interesting conclusion - graphical performance is, in some cases, marginally better with Aero switched on, and even in the cases where it isn't, it's only fractionally less so.

"Quite frankly, we were shocked by these results."

So, the moral of the story is... switch on all the bells and whistles if you can :)

Sideshow Media Center remote - want one!

Ewan — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 15:03:51 GMT

I've been a long-time user of the Philips Pronto programmable remote - it's an LCD touch screen based affair, which can be programmed to the 9th degree to create your own UI of macros which correspond to lots of different activities on different remotes...(read more)

Some more useful Windows & Outlook shortcuts

Ewan — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 13:49:00 GMT

As I mentioned the other day , I've a penchant for using shortcuts in Windows: most (if not all) are documented in help files and the likes, but it is amazing how many people don't know about them or just don't use them. Continuing the list of shortcut...(read more)

Some Handy Windows shortcut keys...

Ewan — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 20:29:35 GMT

I like the Windows GUI, and particularly since I'm use to it, the Vista UI. I don't think I follow a particularly usual pattern, though, because I tend to make use of lots of keyboard shortcuts which many people may not know, or may know about somewhere...(read more)

Using HTC devices as a modem over USB in Vista RTM

Ewan — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 18:47:59 GMT

One of the neat things with HTC Windows Mobile 5 devices on Windows Vista is when you activate the Wireless Modem over Bluetooth, Vista will just see the device and automatically detect it as a modem. When you plug the device in to a Vista PC using USB...(read more)

Zooming in for demos

Ewan — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 23:30:00 GMT

I remember seeing Mark Russinovich present at TechEd a while back, and was impressed when he used a zooming utility to show one quarter of the screen zoomed in enough that it was easy to read the screen, even from the back of the room. Presenting to even...(read more)

Windows Mobile Device Center in Vista

Ewan — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 23:12:40 GMT

I've been a user of Windows CE/Windows Mobile devices ever since the early days of "Windows CE Services", which later morphed into ActiveSync (currently at version 4.2, but v4.5 should be with us soon). The software has certainly evolved over the years...(read more)