Posts filed under 'operating systems'
Microsoft recently released another public beta of Windows Vista so I downloaded it as soon as possible. I just got around to installing it. This isn’t the 64 bit version though like I got last time; I have read that was slow for a lot of people so maybe not releasing another public 64 bit beta yet of it was smart.
It does seem a good bit faster than the last build I tried. My system still rates a 1.0 on the Performance Score even though the average of the components is 3.22, but now there is an explanation why. The “Base Score” is “determined by lowest subscore.” That does make sense since a major bottle neck can slow down the system significantly. But in my case, all I loose is gaming graphics and Aero. For many users that would not be a big deal. Since the scoring system appears to start at 1, you would expect that system to totally suck. But Microsoft says, “a computer with a base score of 1 or 2 usually has sufficient performance to do most general computing tasks…” So how do users differentiate the really horrible systems from the not so bad ones?
I opened up IE (which again didn’t appear in the Quick Launch toolbar until first run) and clicked on an article on Homer Simpson on the opening MSN page. I was then presented with a Suspicious Website popup, saying the site might be a phishing website. Good to know their system works so well it tags their own site.
I have not seen the UAC dialog much, but that could be because I was setup with an Administrator account. I thought users were supposed to be Standard Users. Looks like MS wants there to be at least one admin on the system other than the built in account. That makes some sense, but is going to leave that one user more vulnerable that necessary.
I really miss the Up button in Explorer. I use that all the time. You can do basically the same thing using the URL bar, but not by simply hitting one button in a constant place. I often would traverse folders very fast using the Up button. I hardly ever use the back and forward buttons.
I really like the ability to type commands or program names into the Start Menu, it really makes finding programs easier and faster. That is a good thing because I hate the menu otherwise. It is not nearly as easy to use as the Classic Start Menu or even XP’s menu. I like that My was dropped from the System places, but now they are hard to find. I keep looking for My Computer or My Documents and they just aren’t there. Computer and Documents just don’t stand out.
I pressed the “shutdown” button in the start menu and of course, being Vista you aren’t supposed to actually power off your system. It attempted to go into suspend or hibernate (whatever the default is) and quickly popped out. I assumed it was because I wiggled the mouse as I let go, but when it came back my wireless mouse was no longer recognized so I doubt it. Using the keyboard I again hit the shutdown button. This time it seemed go half to sleep and would not wake back up. Good thing I wasn’t trying to put Windows to sleep.
September 3rd, 2006
I downloaded the public Windows Vista Beta 2 and gave it a try on my year old Athlon 64 desktop. I thought finally I would get to use my CPU to its full potential. It should be pretty fast. It was not. I am sure it is partly due to a lot of debugging code still in the beta, but I was surprised.
So far I was not able to try out the Areo Glass interface but the default theme was pretty anyway. My video card rates a 1 on Windows’ System Performance Rating even though it is a Nvida GeForce4 MX 4000 I bought last summer. It doesn’t support something that the Areo interface needs so gets a 1. For 2D graphics, they give the card a 2.0. The rest of my components are 3.3 or above yet my overall system gets a 1. That really adds up. It seems that the max number is a 5.9, but as faster hardware is released, the max number will go up.
I am not the only one unhappy about low overall scores. Computer manufacturers don’t like the idea of customers seeing how bad their brand new $400 system rate. Integrated graphics and slow components are not going to rate well. And guess what $400 systems are made of.
It seems like everything in Windows is moved just for the sake of moving it. Things might be more discoverable through menus and related topics, but things are not easier to reach. Getting to Classic Control Panel is not as easy as it used to be either. And the User Account Controls thing does come up way too often for the most stupid reasons.
Does anyone want to guess where the Undo file operation option went or how about Folder Options? Remember there is no menu bar anymore in Explorer. I gave up and went to Control Panel to get to Folder Options. Eventually I discovered both were under the Organize button along with Copy, Cut and Paste. Who do those options have to do with organizing?
There is no more Display option in even Classic Control Panel, it and a bunch of other stuff now make up Personalization. I would never have found it had it not been for the icon being very similar to XP’s Display. Even right clicking on the Desktop gives you this Personalization menu. Under it though, the first option is to the regular Display panel.
There is still no Internet Explorer icon on the desktop (as in XP with the new style Start Menu) and until I first ran IE, it wasn’t in the Quick Launch area either. Yet, we still have the Recycle Bin at the top of the desktop. Which do you use more, the internet or the recycle bin?
You can still get the Classic Start Menu which as in XP, puts more icons on your desktop. Using it, I now get Computer (renamed My Computer), Control Panel (why on the desktop?), my name (this is the root of my user folder rather than My Documents which does not get a desktop icon), Network (renamed My Network Places), and finally the Internet Explorer icon. Now I have 8 icons on my desktop, taking up 80% of my vertical desktop space which is set at a tiny 1280×1024 resolution.
It would be nice if they could combine the classic style Start Menu with some of the search features of the new Start Menu. But is it really a start menu anymore if it doesn’t say start? In the default theme, it is just a Windows logo. How are we supposed to tell people click on the start button? What do we call it now? Windows logo button? If we are helping people out that need help finding the start menu, it is hard to predict whether they will even recognize the Windows logo.
I also found that when you shutdown from the Start Menu (which is identified only by a power off symbol) you go into sleep mode rather than power off. When I turn something off I like it off. Of course, it gets worse, the machine appears to try to power down to sleep level, but once it gets there, it instantly wakes up. And how can it get worse? My wireless mouse is not recognized when it wakes up. A popup balloon says a USB device is not recognized. Of course, pulling out the wireless receiver and reinserting it makes the mouse work fine again.
I then went hunting for the way to make that button really shut down my computer. It was a long hunt. I don’t remember where I eventually found it, but it was under a deeply buried button named advanced something. Shortly after that I realized, by clicking the side arrow next to the Shutdown and Logout buttons, I could choose from all the usual options. But still is sleep a good default choice? Hopefully that is not the default on laptops. You need to conserve all the power you can on a laptop.
I was also impressed to discover that by default you are running 32 bit Internet Explorer. I had read that the 32 bit version was left for compatibility with older plugins and maybe embedding but didn’t remember it was the default. Why should I have to specifically go hunting for the 64 bit one? If you start IE from the Quick Launch or where it is listed at the top of the the new Start Menu, you get the 32 bit version. And there is no sign of IE 64 bit unless you look under All Programs. Only under the Classic Start Menu is it easily visible right next to the 32 bit version. But what normal person is going to understand the difference? They both look the same.
Notepad had a major upgrade, it now has an optional status bar showing Line and Column numbers. Wow. You can’t get better than that. Well, I guess you could, but it would require a tiny bit of effort and then you would put out of business all the notepad replacement programs. We know how MS doesn’t ever want to put other companies out of business.
They got rid of my favorite mouse cursors, the animated hourglass ones. I hope they will come back with the final release.
I wanted to see what some files looked like in Vista so I went to my XP Documents and Settings folder. I don’t remember what it said, but I wasn’t allowed in at first. It offered to do something and stupidly I said ok. I have no idea what it was doing, but now I can access my XP documents. I worried it was screwing up my file permissions and I wouldn’t be able to log into that account in XP anymore. Turns out whatever was happening didn’t cause a problem that I have found yet. My username and password for both XP and Vista are the same so maybe that had something to do with not screwing everything up.
It took me about an hour to install it which wasn’t bad for taking up most of an entire DVD. I have really wanted to give it a try for a long time now so it was worth the wait. I knew there were going to be things I didn’t like in Vista. There usually are in new versions of Windows. But I didn’t think it was going to be this much. I no longer think I will be an early adopter when it is finally released. Eventually I will give in of course (since I can’t stand using Linux as a desktop system). It was pretty and fun to try but that is about it. I am sure the speed will be greatly improved by the time it is released, but that was the least of what annoyed me.
June 11th, 2006
Don’t know exactly what happened, but when I checked on my linux box today hoping the KDE 3.5 compile was finally done, I saw bootup stuff on the screen. Something had caused it to reset (could have something to do with the 100% disk usage).
/var/log/emerge.log says I got up to 106 of 277 of the kde-meta package (which was kde-base/kopete) and then the file ends with a *** terminating. message. It took 28 hours to get less than 40% through the meta packages so I am now going to give up and just get 3.4 base. All I really want is an up to date Konqueror. Its times like these that I wonder why I am still using Gentoo.
March 17th, 2006
In my earlier post I talked about all kinds of Operating System stuff. One of those being my Gentoo upgrade. On one hand, upgrading Gentoo is really simple. You just emerge -U world. But then you get the notice at the end that there are some config files that need updating. That is where it becomes annoying. Handling actual changes I am fine with. I would kind of rather do it myself than have an automated upgrade go bad. But when the only difference between the files is the Gentoo file info header comments, why do I need to get involved? I had about 150 ._cfg0000_* files to go through. Many of those were only different in their header comments. And most of the other files I had never modified either. Is there a simple way to deal with this I just don’t know about?
Update: Well, turns out there is a simple way to do it. Sam just told me about etc-update and dispatch-conf. I am still compiling KDE 3.5 so will give them a shot when that finishes sometime soon I hope. It would be nice if the emerge message that tells you about updating the files gave you some hint these tools existed.
March 16th, 2006
I don’t use Linux much (I used to use it more than Windows at the labs at school) but rather than just install a pre-setup desktop distro, I decided to go with Gentoo for my own box. I have learned a lot about Linux this way. There is no better way to learn about it than to setup things mostly manually. Sometimes it is a major pain though.
I don’t use the Gentoo box directly often, but I have Samba and SSH setup and store some files on the machine so I can access them from anywhere. Amazingly (coming from Windows) I have had the machine running for 175 days without reboot. Windows XP I can sometimes keep going for around 30 days before it gets really unstable.
A while back I upgraded KDE and it stopped working. But since I mostly used command line I didn’t care much. So recently I decided to upgrade stuff again and see if I could get the new KDE 3.5 to work. Well, it turns out that the reason I couldn’t solve the problem was I had no mouse plugged in so now I actually have 3.2 working. I needed the mouse on a different computer for a bit and never reconnected it though it was sitting there. I am not sure if that was the original problem. I hope not, that seems too dumb not to figure out when it says something like mouse not found.
Then I found that KDE 3.5 is not ready on Gentoo yet, it is masked. Not being satisfied with not having the latest version, I went in search of how to force it to install. So after some package.keywords magic and cleaning up some other problems I got the compile started. Well, somewhere along the way the compile failed. So I gave in started emerging KDE 3.4. This was not a fast machine back in 2003 when it was new, its an Via EPIA M9000 Mini-ITX, so compiling takes a while. I didn’t write down the 3.5 error, but this one died too with something that looks a bit familiar. It seems to be a gcc upgrade issue. Hopefully it is fixed now. I am going to give 3.5 another shot.
Long ago I had Windows XP on this box. I didn’t want XP on my main machine because I was being stuborn and sticking with Windows 2000. It ran XP ok, but I hardly ever used it since all my stuff was on my 2000 machine.
I like to play with Linux and I like a lot of the utilities (UnixUtils for Windows), but I am too addicted to Windows to actually switch yet. Speaking of switching, I am pretty interested in the new Intel Macs. They sound great from reviews and those that use Macs. But the couple times I have tried a Mac I get rather confused. The UI is so different from what I am used to with Windows. I would like to have one to try out though. The only problem is they aren’t free and I can’t really justify buying something that expensive if I likely won’t use it any more than my Linux machine. Anyway, I think I will wait till the second generation of Intel Macs to decide. Either they will work out some bugs or maybe I can find one of the first gen ones a bit cheaper.
My other problem with deciding to getting a Mac would be do I want a Mac mini, an iMac, or a MacBook Pro? There are major price differences between them. If I turn out to like it and use it a lot, the laptops would be great. But if not, that is a lot of wasted money. Though, I guess Ebay would be a solution.
With Windows Vista coming, maybe it is time to move on from Windows as my main OS. I will certainly give Vista a try, it looks so pretty. But I think they are hurting usability all over the place and it certainly is going to take a powerful machine
March 15th, 2006
