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Vista review – Day 2 – The Bad

January 15, 2007 admin Comments 0 Comment

Continuing from last time, here’s part 2 – The Bad – of 3 on the Vista review. Tomorrow is Part 3: The Ugly. However, I did forget one extra ‘The Good’ about Vista from last time:
System Restore Points and Automated recovery
Most of the time I’m never impressed by these tools. They only partially work on most systems and often only succeed in taking up lots of disk space, slowing down the system, and delivering random results. Going back to a restore point is often just as big a gamble of it working as is just uninstalling stuff back to that point by hand. But Vista’s restore point system works. Yes, it has in fact saved me from re-installing the OS twice now. It makes transparent restore points after every software install, and restores system files. I installed a beta graphics driver that just went all wrong for some reason. The system wouldn’t even boot up anymore (well, booted up to a black screen and I couldn’t see anything). I tried the uninstaller in safe mode at which time I found that beta drivers uninstall features are often more buggy than the driver itself. I booted from the Vista install CD and it started an automatic error detection. It detected the error as a faulty video driver and backed up to the previous restore point made automatically before the driver was installed. Took about 30-45 minutes total – but it worked flawlessly and the system was solid as a rock afterwards. I wasn’t able to get all the burrowed tidbits of the faulty driver out in safe mode which meant I normally I would have had to re-install the OS. But the automated recovery worked, and worked really well. The only sad part is that you need this feature at all. If things actually worked properly – this would be unnecessary. But this is a great feature that’s already paid for itself twice for me. OK, now for today’s review installation:

Day 2: Il Brutto (the Bad)

Driver support and Protected Content Playback
Ah, the most important topic for those of you who just got new hardware for Christmas. You’re not going to like what I have to say now that you have that new $100 sound card or possibly that new flat panel display. Driver support is WOEFUL behind – less than one month from ship and there isn’t more than one or two major vendors who have anything but beta drivers available. And nobody has full video card drivers ready. These aren’t strange, out of the ordinary hardware manufacturers either. This is ATI, nVidia, Creative Labs, Intel, etc. Vista comes with a good collection of drivers built in but most of them only control the most basic features of your hardware. To get the full functionality of your $100 sound card’s features, you need the vendor’s drivers; and those vendors, at best, have only partially functioning beta drivers out. Most of there drivers are pretty good and totally usable to get the basic hardware functionality (you get video, you get sound), but if you have anything made by any non-leading 3rd party hardware maker or want all your bells and whistles, I’m going to bet money you’re in deep trouble for now.

My advice: don’t buy any new hardware until after Vista comes out. I only invested in a few hard drives to set up a raid, a new processor, motherboard, and memory with my Intel employee discount. But don’t buy a new video card, flat-panel, sound-card or other media device until well after Vista comes out and the driver picture becomes clear. Why? It is just not worth it to commodity parts makers to go back to spend a lot of money on software development to make Vista drivers for their old hardware that they sold for a $2 margin in the first place. Creative Labs has already stated they aren’t going to back-port many old sound card drivers. If you have commodity 3rd party hardware it is extremely doubtful you will find Vista drivers for your hardware. The business model will probably be to just sell them new card with the new drivers. How this pans out has yet to be seen, but that will be my bet based on the fact very few companies even have the word Vista mentioned on their main pages, let alone on their driver download pages.

The other serious problem is protected content playback. These are new paths that both graphics and sound hardware along with their software stacks and drivers must support. If the hardware was designed without protected playback capabilities, you’re probably going to have to buy new hardware or go without features. Microsoft seems to be favoring functionality over strict adherence more and more as we get closer to ship (thankfully), but many companies are just about flat-out saying that they will not go back and make Vista drivers for their old hardware – often for hardware selling right now. So don’t get all excited about all those hardware price drops you see advertised – they might be coming with planned insolence. They seem to think it’s better to dump them now for a big discount than get $0 for them in a month.

For some hardware, backwards compatibility isn’t so difficult a hurdle. Many XP drivers install just fine on Vista. Drivers also have a compatibility mode just like programs, so a lot of old drivers will work. I have a cheap Airlink network card that the XP drivers worked just fine (almost better in fact) on Vista. But for video and sound, your life is going to get very difficult. Just expect to have to buy new hardware if you want all the bells and whistles back. Go to most Vista forums and just look at all the fighting people are doing to just get sound cards working in stereo, let alone surround sound. The only companies that I can find that has 5.1 surround sound working on Vista is some Creative sound cards via their beta drivers and some of Intel’s motherboards made in the last 6-8 months. Both, however, indicate digital out won’t be supported anytime soon. Alas, you can also forget about EAX, sound expansion, balancing independent speakers, or any other nicer features. Nobody has anything even close to working.

I had to go out and pick up a $29 Creative Audigy 24 card just to get any sound out of my system. I did find it’s 5.1 surround sound support is very nice for movies and works in Half-life 2 (I do like Vista’s new surround speaker control/testing control panel unit). The beta driver for the Intel motherboard audio card initially spit out crackly, screechy noises that coincide with when music or system sounds. They just a week or so ago released new drivers that do give 5.1, but it’s still very beta feeling with no independent speaker controls or sound expansion/digital out support. Vista’s built-in driver for that card only gives you stereo out. The card is some strange re-brand by some company in Korea and I found myself comparing chipset numbers on their overseas website to the numbers on the motherboard chip to figure out what was onboard. Then I ran driver installs in compatibility mode after downloading the latest XP drivers from Korean ftp servers with the hope they might work. Who the heck wants that hassle (especially since it didn’t work anyway)? On the bright side, Intel’s website seems to have new Vista drivers for it’s motherboard components coming out every week and everything but my integrated sound has a Vista driver. Long story short: Video and Sound are going to be very problematic on Vista for the near term and you absolutely should wait before buying new hardware for those components.
As for video, another sore point is that I can’t use the HDMI plugs on my ATI x1900GT video card – too bad my video card only has HDMI outputs. I plug into a really nice older Trinitron 22″ CRT (it has VGA inputs only) via a HDMI to VGA cable. Near as I can tell, the HDMI plug tells the driver to signal the monitor to return protected playback support, and obviously doesn’t get it from this pre-HDMI monitor. The result? After the Vista loader bar appears during bootup – you get a blank screen. The OS runs fine and you can reboot by remember the right key combinations; but no video. Instead, I have to use the 5 cent HDMI to SVGA plug adapter so it doesn’t try to key off the protected content signal line and the first boot or two after installing the video driver I need to turn the monitor off while it booted. Why? I’m guessing that since my monitor doesn’t support digital protected playback signaling, I need the video card to switch to ‘analog output’ mode. In order to switch to analog mode it needs the monitor off so it isn’t signaling the card it’s got HDMI plugged in (since I don’t have a separate VGA out). So, I can use the 5 cent adapter and turn off my monitor on the first few boots until it remembers to boot in analog mode or buy a new monitor.

I don’t blame Microsoft per-se. DRM got pushed on them too; but this just sucks. I feel very bad for anyone getting a cheap flat-panel with only HDMI inputs this Christmas – I’m guessing they are flipping a coin if you’re going to have to get a different flatpanel since a lot of cheap panels probably don’t signal protected playback correctly or Vista doesn’t have a protected playback feed for it. In analog mode, I can play back my DVD’s just fine – but when HD-DVD playback comes, it might get interesting (yet again).

All my networking devices ran with their XP drivers flawlessly. The Intel RAID controller software/drivers for Vista are *very* good. The SATA driver informed me of non-data corrupting SMART errors being generated by one of the SATA drives in my RAID. I didn’t notice any wired behavior at all. It told me which drive (serial number) was throwing the errors and it’s severity. SMART reporting is a newer feature of SATA drives. I pulled the drive to find it twice as hot as the other drives, sent it in for repair (thank you 5 year Seagate warranty). When the replacement arrived, I plugged it in. After I added the drive back to the logical raid set, the easy to use volume manager automatically started rebuilding the volume redundancy (I am running RAID 5). Meanwhile – the system was completely usable! I was watching a movie at the same time, and 2 and a half hours later it was done without a single hiccup, reboot, or visible performance degradation. Wow. Flawless operation. I give super-high marks for Intel’s raid controllers and the drivers that come with them – and that’s not just because I work for them.

Device software – get ready to buy new versions
Wonder why right now you can actually pick up McAfee, most virus scanners, and Zonelabs excellent firewalls for free after rebates right now? Because they are dumping them. Unfortunately all the firewalls, and (outside of AVG) all virus scanners don’t even INSTALL on Vista. Personally, I hate the performance hits and instability of integrated virus scanners, but they are a necessary evil. For laptops where you don’t want to drag around a hardware firewall, Zonelabs makes a great software firewall which works great in free wi-fi computing environments like coffee houses.

Most likely you’ve read the fights and threatened lawsuits McAfee is having with Microsoft. Personally, I don’t buy McAfee’s argument they have any ‘right’ to source and integration with Microsoft’s kernel. I’m sorry, but you don’t and you’re starting to sound like the kid on the playground demanding ‘a right’ to be picked first for the team when he isn’t better than anyone else. Anybody remember when virus scanners were just that – scanning programs you ran when you wanted? Now they try to be the operating system and (as Jessie Ventura would say) burrow in like an Alabama tick. I’ve personally had to reinstall the OS on a number of my friends’ machines because Norton AVG or the like has completely foo-bared a machine to where even safe mode won’t work. But I also do not buy Microsoft’s argument that their scanner and firewall is any more effective than a screen door. In the spirit of that analogy, it might be good at keeping flies out – but is useless against things as subtle as a sand or a less subtle brick. For now, only AVG works but it does work well.

Also chocked up on your upgrade list will be Nero. You need at least Nero 7 for Vista. Nero 6 does not work. Slysoft’s suite (AnyDVD, CloneDVD, etc) seem to work great as well. But in the end, add another $25-100 for the upgrades to Nero and a virus scanner to the price of updating to Vista. Peergaurdian and other lower-level device helper apps don’t seem to work either.

While I’m at it, here is a quick/top of my head list of which programs work/don’t work under vista:
Works:
MS Office 2005 suite, Firefox, WinAmp, Winzip, WinRAR, Realplayer, Rhapsody, iTunes, Quicktime, VLC player, WinDVD 7, Python SDK, MSDev Studio 2005, Java VM, foxIT (PDF reader), FileZilla, Media Player Classic + k-lite codec pack, Google Earth, Tera Term, Quake 3, Steam/Half-life 2/Counter-Strike Source (online is perfect), Password Depot, Photoshop 5.0 and CS2, (lots more, will add later)

Partially works:
Shockwave/Flash – don’t work in Firefox, do work in IE

Doesn’t work (even in compatibility mode)
Nero 6
Quake 4
PeerGaurdian
ZoneAlarm (lots of errors/instability during reboots + doesn’t work)
McAfee (won’t boot after install)
Kaperski antivirus

Too long – Vista review part 1 – The good

January 12, 2007 admin Comments 0 Comment

Yes, yes, yes.
It has been far too long since an update. I’ve been fiddling with getting a WordPress replacement for my homebrewed blogging tool; but it’s time to admit I need to just keep doing this until I get the new one up. At any rate, I’ve been making updates in text files with the hope of putting them on the new blog framework, so I’ll just slowly start releasing them here.

First up – VISTA! I’ve been using Vista for a month or so and thought I’d chime in on my impressions as other have. Since all things are mixes of good and bad, I divided my review up after the spirit of one of Clint Eastwoods classics: “Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo” (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly). One coming each day this week.

Day 1. Il Buono (The good)

Memory requirements/system requirements:
Remember the horrified forum doomsayers that said you need at least 2 gigs (if not 4) of memory just to get Vista up and a latest shader-based DX10 compliant video card? I’m here to say that’s completely not true. I was running Vista with 1 gig on a core solo laptop with an ATI 200m and on another system with an Intel integrated graphics card. After a week, I can attest the performance was just as zippy (if not more so) than when it was on XP. That’s with Aeroglass running too. Even if your graphics card doesn’t have vista drivers, the non-aeroglass interface is perfectly fine. More memory does help, but 1 gig was more than enough to get full performance and full functionality. 512meg will get you swapping though…

Aeroglass and new interfaces:
If you’re like me, you are NOT impressed by WindowsBlinds and the myriad of other unbelievably sub-standard attempts to snazzy-up windows interfaces. Don’t get me wrong, the ability to customize your interfaces is a good idea in itself. The problem is these ‘customizations’ or themes are usually done by a teenager who had a 3-day online course on Photoshop and now thinks he is Leonardo Divinci. With no knowledge or concern of color theory, he slaps together some near-pornographic images of hot girls he stole off the internet after a 5 day drinking bender.

Up until now, users were given the ability to control sizes and colors for all the UI items independently. Unfortunately, it makes it terribly difficult to maintain uniform look and feel between the UI elements. Raw magenta, cyan, yellow, pure reds/blues/greens were NEVER meant to appear on screen together. Yet that’s what is on the default windows color picker palette aren’t they? Why in the world would you want to change the title bar size and not the text size with it so that it adheres to rules of proportionality? It’s completely wrong to give users control knobs of an interface’s look/feel all independent of each other when basic design principles dictate they should be linked/proportioned together.

Unfortunatley, this means we are now awash in Geiger/Aliens-esk interfaces with win95 hot-dog stand color schemes on top of semi-nude model wallpapers and button shapes/sizes/icons that rivals the utter ugliness of the original X-windows Motif interface elements. Microsoft’s ‘give them all the knobs and let them figure it out’ approach is why 50 year old teachers and car salesmen’s computers have window sizes/colors that look like a paint factory exploded on randomly sized pieces of lumber. For heaven’s sake, the default windows color chooser still had you enter 0-255 RGB values instead of something as basic as a color wheel that shows you the current selection’s complementary color pairings and triads so you automatically get harmonic colors. It’s like telling a musician to compose by entering the frequencies to make a chord. So instead of saying “play a C chord here with feeling” which encapsulates the knowledge of what is harmonic and pleasing, they’d be forced to enter: play 16.35hz (C), 20.60hz(E) and 24.50hz (G) with vibrato of .5hz/sec. Argh!

Even with the good enhancements and expansion to the user interface experience that came in XP, I’m even happier with Vista’s Aeroglass. Yes, Aeroglass is pretty much a rip-off/re-interpretation of Mac interfaces – but that’s ok. Microsoft learned a lesson that interfaces are important, and that wow-factor and flow is key to the experience of using (and selling) the operating system. Apple has this in spades. Why do you think they can charge 2x for equipment that’s about 1/2 as technologically capable than other things out there?

That’s just one thing Linux zealots don’t yet get. Yes you’re technically, and arguably, morally superior. But it isn’t sexy, and in case you didn’t learn this in high-school – you are a lot more popular with sexiness than actually being morally, intellectually, or technically superior (though Apple does get these departments mostly right too – they’re just not bleeding edge). Sexiness also sell more software. Microsoft gets my seal of approval for not going the WindowsBlinds route that just polishes the turd one more time. Instead, they made the conceptual leap in 100% the right direction by rendering windows contents to textures then manipulating the underlying 3D geometry it’s pasted to in order to achieve cool blending, fading, and bending effects. This allows them to utilize the power of modern graphics hardware and finally opening our desktops to the amazing voodoo that shaders do so well.

For desktop themes, you get to pick a little colored, shinny, square gems with harmonic colors already baked in. Too bad that flowing feel of working with the windowing system gets a brick thrown through its aeroglass each time you get one of the unending security warnings (more on that later). Still, I’ve been using the windows interface and media center app for a month and I’m very impressed with its look and feel. After a few days, I knew I wouldn’t re-install XP. Microsoft’s Media Player, on the other hand, is still the stupidest and most UN-intuitive way to manage and find your music and videos but at least it has gotten a face-lift. It’s technically solid, but I’m always left saying: Geez, kill that thing or build something that actually has a decent, usable interface where I can actually find the songs I want fast and play them easily.

Program compatibility knowledge:
You will get dialogs about ‘known issues’ when running some older programs. This was a good idea – to notify you when things might go wrong and give you a link to an online knowledge base to help resolve them. I haven’t played with it much, but it seems as if the articles are getting updated all the time. Every week I find some new info on a compatibility page. Now, if they could hook it up to a real user-modifiable forum style knowledge-base, that would be excellent. People can post what they’ve tried, what works, partially works, etc. Then Microsoft could come along and certify the ‘best’ answer if it comes along. Hmmm, listening yet Microsoft? Anyway, they do have compatibility running modes that support running things as old as 95. If stuff didn’t just work anyway (which most stuff did), you could set the compatibility mode and I got all my apps to run. The only one I couldn’t get running was Quake 4 (not that that’s any big loss); but I did just hear a new patch that came out will work. Overall, I found compatibility to not be any issue and a touch better than the previous compatibility mode execution.

Sleep/Hibernate/etc:
A real bane to existence is waking up computers from sleep and hibernation modes. Simple a concept as it is, Windows-based PC’s do not reliably sleep/hibernate. Everybody I know at some time has had some issue with waking from a sleep/hibernate mode – especially with notebooks. Sometimes it never comes back from sleeping, sometimes devices acted weird/don’t function afterwards, etc. I’m happy to say this has vastly improved. I ran my desktop computer for 2 weeks waking and sleeping at least once or twice a day without reboot and had no stability issues. I also did it on a vista compatible laptop I was evaluating and it felt a lot more stable than XP in the one week I tried it.

Gaming:
I can play all my favorite games on Vista without a single hitch – mainly Half-Life 2/Counter-strike source. Performance and frame rates were at least the same, if not a touch better, on Vista. Surround sound in Half-life 2 works flawlessly. It certainly seemed a bit more stable by subtle responses I got. I think gaming will be very compelling, if you don’t have one of the above compatibility problems.

That’s it for THE GOOD so far. Tomorrow: The BAD

Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateapokaiwhenuakitanatahu

May 19, 2006 admin Comments 0 Comment

Yes, that’s the name of a real place!

After Wellington, I arrived the the university town of Palmerston North. It is a smaller, but very university-like town. Think a rural Kansas town gets a big university dropped in it. The city square was covered with little shops that nostalgically reminded me of Ben Franklin’s and other dime stores you run into in mid-century rural America. Yet the city was clearly trying to embrace a nouveau bourgeois bohemian style of the local university. An old 50’s theater had been turned into a art play house. It was an interesting blend. Overall a nice place, but nothing of tremendous note – other than it had the biggest town square I’d ever seen. Almost 2x-4x the size of a normal city block. I stopped in the university library and picked up a few computer science journals to see what the Kiwi’s were up to. Ahhhh, analysis of different dynamic memory allocation strategies – fun.

In the morning, I started my drive early to get out to a place I’d longed to go – the location of the worlds longest place name: Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateapokaiwhenuakitanatahu. Yes, it’s a real place name, and yes, it beats Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyll-llantysiliogogogoch in North Wales. It was about a 3 hour drive east all the way to the coast. There was little along the way and the road turned quite windy and narrow for at least an hour. Surprisingly, it is well marked and easy to find. The place is a hill named by the indigenous Maori people. The name means:“The place where Tamatea, the man with the big knees, who slid, climbed and swallowed mountains, known as ‘landeater,’ played his flute to his beloved one.” It refers to Tamatea, a famous Maori explorer, had to fight his way past a hostile tribe in his journeys. At the battle, his brother died, and Tamatea climbed the mountain each morning and played his flute for his lost brother each morning. I got a couple pictures in front of the monstrous sign and the hill, and then headed back north. I stopped and talked with some other farmers on the way, as the directions in my guide book pointed out there was another sign somewhere else. I found a farmer who said the old sign had been torn down and the one I saw erected instead since the old sign was on private land (and I’m guessing the farmer got tired of everyone trespassing).

On my way back to Palmerston North, I passed through a range of very high hills. At the top was a wind farm. I stopped by and watched two workers working on one of the 50-75 foot towers. While I was watching and enjoying the spectacular view, two really cranky old farmers came by. They were super friendly; but just think of the two guys on the movie Grumpy Old Men. They were real cordial, but cussed like sailors. I helped them move their cows, which was fun, and by that time the two wind farm guys climbed down and came over to chat. They were really friendly and they talked about the control shack just down the road. I drove a few kilometers to the wind farm control shack and there was an even friendlier guy there. It seemed these guys didn’t get too many visitors (it took 20 minutes up a really treacherous road to get there) and were happy to talk with you – or anyone. He took me into the tiny control room and he showed me the whole operation. How fast the mills were running, how much power each mill generated (one I watched was putting out a steady 400-500kW [instantaneous output] (500kW = the max) ), how the computer was controlling the pitch of each fans blades to maximize output, etc. I was amazed he took this total stranger from another country right into the primary control room, all alone, with the one little rack-mount machine that ran it all. I was wondering how completely unlikely that was to ever happened in the states considering how gun-shy we’ve gotten. I was kind of laughing to myself at one point that one or two well-placed kicks might just take down 5% of the New Zealand power grid. It was cool that New Zealand, being an island, really is an isolated power grid. They generate 5% of the countries total power from that one station of about 40 mills. It was one of the best wind farms in the world, and the wind was so good and so constant that they were slated to install mills 3 times the size of the ones they had starting next year.

It was getting late and my host bid me safe travels. I thanked him for the tour, excellent info, and the sights. I also got a good appreciation of how small New Zealand really was. I was standing on a 500m peak or so, but could almost see both east and west coasts. Mind boggling.

Onward north I drove until I hit the town of Ohakune late at night. I wandered into town and noticed a pub full of locals. I strolled in and they were watching a big national rivalry rugby tournament. It was cool because it was a bar but there were a number of 10-15 year old boys there watching with there dads and grandfathers. I just loved the homey feel and the fact the society could be so safe as to do that and not worry about drunken stupidity. It was a great game to watch, even though I didn’t understand all the rules. Still, a good game is a good game – and good people are wonderful to chat with anywhere.