6 posts tagged “windows vista”

Well here I am sitting at my lunch break, with nought better to do than tell you about my latest geek toy: a HP s3120n slimline PC running Vista Home Premium, a relative bargain purchased from Fry's, which for the Aussies is yet another example of the American penchant for warehouse-style retail. Think Harvey Norman superstore on steroids.

I have been amazingly satisfied with it so far. It replaces the home theatre PC I had previously sitting under my TV, a Shuttle PC that I put together myself a couple of years ago and which used to be my desktop PC until I bought the MacBook. As a media PC, it was adequate -- I could play pretty much anything on it, but the user experience was just not there. The UI presumed I was using a keyboard and mouse set, which is not the best assumption when operating from the comfort of my couch. Also, it suffered from one of my pet peeves: it was noisy. In spite of Shuttle's engineering wizardry that managed to pack a bunch of full-size PC components into a shell not much bigger than a shoebox, it did mean that the fan required to push out the hot air had to spin fairly fast, hence producing an annoying constant whine.

I'm happy to say the new HP solves all of these problems. It is super-quiet while still somehow fitting into a case that on the whole is, I think, even smaller than the Shuttle's. It comes with a remote control so that I can operate the media functions sans keyboard. It has a digital/analog TV tuner, DVD drive, a gigantic hard disk, media card readers and digital audio output -- all the ingredients you need for a decent home theatre PC setup. It even comes with a wireless LAN card, although for my purposes it's moot since my router is so close I just hook it up over 100Mbps Ethernet.

On the software side, I have to say I'm very impressed with Vista Home Premium and Windows Media Center -- it's certainly come a long way since I first used it in the 2005 edition, in terms of both stability and usability. A few highlights:

• The Live TV with time-shifting and scheduled recordings has made my TV watching so  much more convenient -- no more worrying about missing my favourite shows. The last thing I like to do of a weeknight is watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report; now if I defer this by half an hour or so and watch the episode I've instructed Media Center to record on a regular basis, I can skip the ads via the fast forward button.
• The Electronic Program Guide is fantastic; not revolutionary but certainly a big advance to someone used to having to go to the Comcast website to look up what's on tonight...
• The Media Center Extender integration works extremely well; it automatically detected my Xbox 360 and allowed it to connect to the media stored on my PC. So now, I can experience that media through the Xbox, including live TV with time-shifting!
• There are some interesting extras in Media Center too that I wasn't aware of or expecting -- e.g. there's now a feature called "Internet TV" (beta), i.e. IPTV. Last night I watched part of a John Mayer concert in NYC, as well as Crowded House playing live in Chicago, all streaming on-demand via the Internet. There are also TV shows, movie trailers, that kind of thing. The selection isn't exhaustive, but impressive nevertheless.

So how does it compare to Apple FrontRow? Well, I have to admit that Media Center for my money wins out -- it's rock-solid, usable and functional, and the out-of-the-box experience was pretty much flawless. FrontRow has a great UI, but the feature set is lacking, and I doubt the one-button Apple Remote will scale up. AppleTV, meanwhile, also suffers from a paucity of features and dollar-for-dollar is a pretty hard sell. While Vista has copped its share of flack (and admittedly I'm not using Vista in a desktop-like scenario here), the Media Center component is a definite silver lining.

Oh man, bad bad usability decision in Vista -- the Alt keyboard shortcut identifiers are hidden by default in Vista (as with XP). I always thought this was a vital usability mistake; maybe I'm in the wrong demographic but keyboard shortcuts are a major productivity boost imo, especially for touch-typists. And now that setting has been buried under accessibility; I spent a good five minutes search for how to turn this feature back on, not to mention discovering along the way how the display settings have been bastardised into "Personalize" (right-click on the desktop), but with half the traditional settings scattered to different places in the UI. I guess there's a fine balance between supporting your legacy users who are familiar with a certain way of doing things, and ensuring that new users have the best experience possible who have no preconceived notions of how the UI ought to function.

It's surprising how little things can aggravate one's everyday user experience, but they do add up. Some grievances:

• The expose-ish feature I mentioned previously is next to useless; every window is sized identically (i.e. postage-stamp-esque) such that it makes them indistinguishable from each other.
• Firefox's IETab extension (which is invaluable when I need to use IE to view intranet sites that require it for either rendering and/or user validation) can't seem to remember which sites I want to always use IE for; I suspect it's because of some security thing that IETab can't persist my settings to disk but I haven't pursued it further to find out.
• Middle-click in Firefox can't open a new tab (my preferred behaviour) because the mouse driver wants to use it for the Instant Viewer functionality (the official name for the expose-ish thing). You can enable application-specific button settings, but that doesn't seem to work. I think I will disable Instant Viewer entirely since I don't find it useful to begin with.
• Desktop search can't remember your preferred selection if you've searched for something previously. I use Remote Desktop a lot to connect to test machines, so instinctively I hit Win-key then type "rem" and hit Enter. Because I recently installed Virtual Server Remote Client, this is now the top hit. It means one extra keypress to scroll down to Remote Desktop Connection as the 2nd search result -- small but annoying.
  Update: I was wrong, it took awhile but Desktop search finally grokked that no, I really do want Remote Desktop Connection 99% of the time...
  
• The Vista-equivalent of the genie effect is disconcerting; imagine a brick wall falling backwards onto the ground, that's the kind of effect the window has when minimising to the taskbar.

Wait was there a honeymoon period? No there wasn't -- I didn't go ga-ga over it, but nor did I outright want to kick it to the kerb. Yes, it seems to have some usability improvements over XP, but honestly it's a bit pokey on my workstation where XP never felt slow. Intensive network I/O seems to kill it, and occasionally clicking on apps will cause it to display the "(not responding)" tag in the titlebar but give it time and it comes back to life. It kind of reminds me of my MacBook when I only had 1G of RAM -- it's sufficient but not really enough. What I really want to know is, how can Mac OS X deliver all the eye-candy (genie effect, transparency, live windows in the Dock) on an integrated graphics chipset when Vista needs a grunty DX9 card and even then seems rather chuggy?

Overall, I would say the Vista experience is only let down by perf issues. SP1 (don't ask me when) will reportedly fix those, and come that time I think the OS will be a great thing to use day-to-day. Until then I'm getting used to seeing the animated blue ring that is Vista's busy cursor...

A somewhat frustrating day. Visual Studio 2005 needs an update to SP1 to work properly with Vista. Unfortunately, when I run the update, it doesn't seem to recognise the fact that VS is, in fact, installed. I continue anyway, to be greeted with the Program Compatibility Assistant, which politely informs me that their are known issues with this program, and do I want to search for updates? I click Yes and am lead back to the update I just tried to unsuccessfully install!

Other issues/annoyances:

• Two freezes which required a hard reboot -- no blue screen, no ctrl+alt+delete style recovery, nada.
• Aesthetically improved file copy progress dialogs no longer display the filename of the file currently being copied.
• Slight performance degradation compared to XP with lots of tasks running.
• UAC-related incompatibilities, solved seemingly by running apps explicitly as Administrator, or by loosening permissions on directories or files that may need to be accessed by the app (I guess this "inclusive" method of setting permissions is better than the old "exclusive" method, where pretty much everything wasn't locked down).
• How do you create junctions, soft links and symbolic links? Do we still need to use third-party tools? (Or should I say in-house ones since Mark Russinovich of SysInternals now works for us.)
• How much disk space does an OS and a relatively small set of apps need? I partitioned the drive into an OS + apps area of 100G, and 60G of it is already gone!
  

Pleasant flipsides:

• There's an expose-ish feature where if you click the scroll wheel (at least with my mouse setup), you get tiled miniature live views of all open windows. Not as smooth as the Mac OS X implementation, but close. Much more practical than Flip 3D.
• Hitting the Win key to bring up the Desktop Search is addictive. It's effective and fast -- as fast if not faster than Spotlight.
• Documents and Settings is now just Users, Mac OS X-style. Hooray. Anything with embedded spaces in the folder name at root level is just extra needless typing. And for backwards compatibility Vista uses the new soft link capability so the old location for e.g. My Documents is still valid, but points to the new \Users\Alec Siu\Documents directory.
  

I knew this day had to come sooner or later: I installed Windows Vista today on my work desktop. The fact that my enlistment (Microsoft-speak for source code checkout) stubbornly and inexplicably refused to build without DEP errors tipped me over the edge and I decided on a clean install.

So far so good -- at Microsoft we can just do a network boot from which we can download and install an image of Vista Enterprise together with Office 2007, and this took about 30 minutes to complete with minimal intervention on my part. I think I only had to set the timezone and language and the installer took care of the rest. Compared to XP installation was a breeze!

The only issues I've encountered so far were fairly minor. My ATI graphics card (a FireGL) had an old driver that needed updating (otherwise my LCD could only display 1600 x 1024 which makes no sense to me at all, and for awhile it didn't recognise my dual monitor setup). Some other weird things: Aero glass wasn't enabled by default, and the icon for Internet Explorer in the Quick Launch area seems to be broken.

Tomorrow I think I'll be spending some time installing all my work-related apps, which includes a fair few Microsoft internal only tools, as well as stuff like Visual Studio, the .NET SDK and all the rest of it.

The only surprise so far is how ugly the clock gadget is, and how few satisfactory replacements there seems to be -- I just want a digital clock with timezone capability so I can tell the time of day for where my friends are around the world.

Nice points? I like the new Windows Explorer, especially the way you can click to jump anywhere within the path, and the built-in desktop search is cool although I need to resist the temptation to hit spacebar to emulate what I'd do with Launchy or Spotlight on the Mac. Performance-wise nothing to report yet, except that it seems as speedy as XP was, no better but so far no worse.

Annoyances: UAC! I haven't seen this phenomenon on my colleagues' machines who have Vista installed, but I experience a rather jarring flicker when the UAC dialog pops up in the foreground with the remainder of the desktop faded out. I also find the click-to-continue thing overly cautious but when it comes to security Microsoft has been burnt in the past by erring on the side of convenience -- you can't have your cake and eat it I suppose.