Gaining Transparency for FF3 on Vista
July 22, 2008

I know, its been awhile. I've been so busy lately that it isn't even funny. I've been learning Adobe Air, concentrating on graduating and just got done writing a little app to set my background from rss feeds (as well as an app to generate a wallpaper rss feed of my own). Nifty stuff.

That's not the point of this post though, thanks to Scott Hansellman's recent post on adding OpenSearch to your web-site, I discovered an awesome new addon for Mozilla FireFox. It's called Glasser and it does one spectacular thing; adds Vista transparency to the whole toolbar. Finally, FF3 is nicely integrated into Vista just like IE7 (and unlike Office 2007). It's listed as experimental, so watch out I guess - though I haven't had any issues with it.

Enjoy having FF3 blend in with Vista. :)

Vista Really Not Ready for Network Deployment
December 16, 2007

I've been fooling with domain support on my network recently and have ran into some serious issues with Windows Vista. The first is relatively minor, but fairly annoying. From time to time, when a roaming profile is enabled, Vista will totally forget custom sidebar gadgets. It's terribly infuriating to have to login and then logout and then login again just to get the correct gadgets on my sidebar.

The second issue that Vista has is a rather critical roaming profile issue. I recently had to dejoin my main machine from the domain and restructure it. Upon rejoining the domain, Vista refused to recognize my primary user's profile. Uh-oh!

I traced it down and it seems like Vista is storing user information somewhere on the system in a corrupt state. I have gone through all the recovery steps, disabled roaming profiles and even removing the local version of that profile all to no avail. At this point Vista is bitching about it's inability to load the profile (when it's been totally removed, and roaming profiles are completely disabled on the domain) and I'm done with it. The error is tied to the actual username and not the account itself. I've removed the account from the domain and all local references to the user data. If this were a client installation I can't even imagine how badly this would look.

If a box that was setup two days ago can demonstrate this problem, I really have to say that Windows Vista is not domain ready.

The Final Verdict on Windows Vista
September 07, 2007

I've been using Windows Vista for almost five months now and I'm ready to get it said. I like Vista. No, I love Vista. Now, this is a very rare occurrence for me to love a Microsoft Operating System so early in the game - but it has happened.

Many have argued that Vista lacks "anything new" and it "fiddles with an interface that already works" , and to them I say hogwash! Many have complained and pointed out that Vista is just pretty icing atop an already well baked cake - and they're right. We can debate the quality of baking here, but it is primarily delicious icing atop an already baked cake of usefulness.

Many will argue with you about how the aesthetics don't matter, but I believe that it really does matter. For me, what makes Vista so great isn't one or two big new things that add up to create a much better feeling experience. All of the icing, as it were, ends up making everything a little easier to use and in the end makes the whole system better.

Many directly complain about Aero just being there to "look pretty". My rebuttal is simply, "what's wrong with that?". If my interface simply looks better and I feel like it suits my tastes better, won't it make me happier in doing whatever I'm doing? Aero's new rendering engine makes everything render much more smoothly and appear much more attractively. This isn't even to begin touching on Vista's amazing new font-rendering engine which makes looking at XP's ClearType (which is worlds better than Windows 98's Font Smoothing which is...) painful.

Little features, too, help to make the difference. The customizable side-bar in Explorer is a change made that utterly revolutionizes the way I use Explorer and mscom save dialogs. I no longer need to hunt for any of my common folders, I just click and there I am. I am constantly reaching for it whenever I use an XP box. Even the progress bar representing hard disk usage has a noticeable impact on my daily use habits, since I no longer need to do the old "Right Click - Properties" shuffle.

Also, while it is available for XP, Windows Media Player 11 fits right in with Vista. I have to thank Andy for turning me on to this one, but it ends up being the best media player that I've ever worked with. The views are wonderfully thought-out with genre breakouts, album breakouts and artist breakouts. If you pull up a search that returns multiple albums, they are each seperated - so you never have the googlie eyed stare at 1,000 music results that you get with iTunes.

What's not to like? Gaming Performance. I've still got my XP partition around for gaming, and I don't think that's going to change anytime soon. I can observe noticeable differences in frame rates in Warhammer 40k, Battlefield 2 and just about everything else that I've tried under Vista Vs. XP. It seems like there's a lot going on under the hood, that we don't really have control over.

So, where do I stand now? I love Vista. It's not there for gaming, but as a day-to-day workstation - it makes a wonderful OS choice.

Note: I'm not even considering licensing issues. The OS market is so woefully messed up that there's no point in even discussing them.

I'm Disabling Automatic Updates
August 30, 2007

Well, I'm finally disabling Windows Automatic Updates on my PC. Nothing major here, it's just that MS loves to make my machine reboot in the middle of the night. Since I've been back on Tuesday I've come in and found my machine rebooted TWICE. No offense guys, but twice in one week is a bad amount of "automatic reboots".

How do you do this, you ask? Go to Control Panel - Windows Updates - Change Settings - "Download updates but let me choose them". It's not the simplest process, but it's not very complicated either. This will cause Windows to at least notify you of updates being present.

Make Vista's Fonts Sing
July 19, 2007

Some of you might remember Chris Pirillo from his days back on ZDTV. Scratch that. Some of you might remember ZDTV. It was a cable TV network dedicated to computing that actually didn't suck. ZDTV begat TechTV which kind of sucked, but it had its own host of good television shows. Among them was Call for Help, originally hosted by Leo Laporte who gave way to one Chris Pirillo, owner of Locker Gnome - a technology oriented website which I used to frequent in my youth.

Sadly, TechTV did not last long before it was consumed by G4 in order to create "a network for gamers by gamers". By gamers, they mean twenty-something-males with a permanent hard-on and a penchant for beer. I believe that they are down to but one gaming related show, and even that's questionable.

You are all wondering, I'm sure, what brings me to mention this relic of a computing era gone by. Well, I was searching the great intarwebs awhile back for ways to tweak Vista's font rendering engine for a more attractive look. I was having absolutely no luck. That is, until I happened upon Chris Pirillo's page on fixing Vista's fonts. He provides a simple registry fix that remaps the most common fonts to the far superior new Segoe UI font that our benefactors have so graciously provided us.

You may be asking yourself, "does it work?". The answer is most certainly yes. The difference is utterly palpable and makes everything (especially the web) look infinitely better. You may also ask, "is this dangerous?". Well, anything involving the registry is dangerous. I can say that the keys modified appear innocuous and that I have tried this on two machines without error.

You may also notice (if you are astute) that the link you see is to my own local mirror. I've began hosting my own Windows Addons collection again. I like having all of my needs in one place, and that page is there to satisfy me. You may even find some of the FireFox extensions listed there to be... well, awesome. Enjoy!

My Favorite Vista Tweak for Gaming
June 25, 2007

With my recent purchase of Halo 2 I've been forced to use Vista for a bit of gaming and have ran into a bit of a performance deficit. Throughout my gaming sessions, I noticed that there would be huge amounts of slow-down correlating to a high amount of disk IO. I thinks to myself, wtf? So I do a little digging...

I discovered a process called LocalServiceNetworkRestricted that was continually waking up and eating huge amounts of disk IO causing my system to drag painfully during any gaming. I did a little more digging and discovered that this service may or may not be related to SuperFetch.

Well, I really don't care if my applications start up 1 or 2 nanoseconds faster if it nukes my gaming performance so I decided to disable the SuperFetch service. You can find it under the Services control panel applet ( Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Services ). Simply right click on it and select "stop". To my joy, it stopped the random disk IO load. If this helps you, you can make it permanent by right clicking on it and then going to "properties" and selecting "disabled" from the "Startup type:" option.

My scientific-in-the-way-that-Brainiac-is-scientific conclusion is that SuperFetch was causing an undue IO load on my system. Looking to improve your gaming performance? Give disabling SuperFetch a shot.

Another Vista Update
May 30, 2007

One more thing that I like about Vista - how it handles frozen programs. It used to be that when a program totally froze, itss contents were typically totally wiped. Even if the program was just not responding to GUI events - its contents were generally wiped out. Well, Vista caches the rendered window when it leaves the main buffer so that if the program stops responding, you can still see what the hell was on the screen.

One thing I don't like? How complicated they made scheduled tasks. It used to be a single click or so and then you'd have a nice new scheduled task. No more. There's something like four clicks and navigating a nested tree before you get down to being able to create a "basic" task.

An Update on the Vista DHCP Bug
April 26, 2007

I had started a thread awhile back to discuss Vista, and one of the things I've mentioned here has been a bug concerning Vista "randomly" dropping off the network with a large amount of work needed to get it back on. Well, I discovered the cause. It might be my specific machine - but activation triggers Vista to lose it's network address and be unable to re-attain one until "ipconfig" has been ran.

Also, if you are activating a different machine with the same key be aware that it doesn't work the first time around. You have to try to activate, and then "input a different number" except input your original number anyway. It worked for me. The joys of activation and changing hardware.

Vista Update
April 05, 2007

OK, here it goes. Wait for it. Wait for it...

I like Vista. No, seriously I do. The latest round of updates since RTM have made a /huge/ difference on performance and made it a pleasure to use. Sure, UAC is annoying. Sure, I'll keep XP around for gaming. For day to day use though, Vista is the Bee's Knees. The font smoothing is so much better than XP that it makes me no longer long for a Mac. Aero's interface really is lovely and I love how it always matches me wallpaper (being see through and all).

I love the new Explorer the most though. It is finally a well thought out filesystem interface. Configurable shortcuts abound. The location bar (with clickable folder paths which bring you to that folder) is a godsent improvement tha tmakes my life so much easier. Even thumbnails have improved with configurable sizes and sane filename display.

Oh, and the new file transfer dialogs are amazing. Gone is the "1 year remaining" style dialog box, and in is the "1 hour @ 100Kbp/s" transfer box that I always wished Explorer had.

So there, I said it. I like Vista. It's got my seal of approval. I'll post more as I find new little things.

Vista Randomly Dropping Off the Network
March 27, 2007

AAACK! It's following me! We had a very similar issue with a co-located box of ours (PE 1850 + Gentoo + 2.6.12 don't work btw)... and now it's followed me home! My completely unrelated machine with a brand new Vista install is randomly detecting media-disconnection and dropping off the network when absolutely nothing has happened. Disable the interface, re-enable it and all is hunky dorey. Wow, weird.

Yes, I am sure that this issue is completely unrelated. Two totally different machines, totally different operating systems and totally different software. No worries, it's definitely Vista.

What sort of horror stories have you heard from customers Jesse?

Giving Vista Another Go
March 25, 2007

Ok, I'm giving Vista another go. I've re-arranged my hard disks such that I have a sizable chunk of available space in my main workstation - so I've decided to do a dual boot situation. Vista for "work" and XP for games.

So... how's it going so far? Interesting. I had to re-install Vista already because I made the OS partition too small. Eight gigabytes is not enough to hold Windows Vista. Jesus Christ, XP only takes 2.61G - and don't get me started on 98.

Additionally, Vista consumes 25% more memory than XP. Wow. No wonder I couldn't game with it.

If anyone has had issues, please let me know in this thread! I work in IT and want to know every last morsel of failure that comes with Vista.

What's Wrong With Windows Vista
January 16, 2007

So, Microsoft's official release of Windows Vista is just a few short days away. I've been testing the RTM version for software compatibility (you know, being a Windows Developer and all that) and have ran into a number of things that are just plain utterly annoying with Windows Vista. Yes, it is pretty. Yes, Windows Explorer works wonderfully and allows you to customize its default sidebar (easily). Yes, the font rendering is on-par with or better than OSX (finally). But...

Microsoft has been touting Vista as a gaming powerhouse and I really don't know why.

• Game performance will sharply decline upon installation of Vista. It is a huge resource hog, much like any MS operating system. If 1Gb satiated your games in XP, then you're going to need 2Gb in Vista. Vista will easily eat up well over 512Mb of your RAM with all of its junk - even after you've turned off the non-essential items (Windows Defender anyone?).
• CPU usage increases dramatically and task switching will become a pain.
• Can we talk about how many /fewer/ games you'll be able to install? While I complained about XP's 1Gb footprint, Vista is an amazing improvement in space gobbling. A fresh installation will weigh in at over SEVEN GIGABYTES. Most of that appears to be .NET assemblies.
• User Access Controls anyone? It's not directly relevant to gaming's interests, but it is one of the most annoying aspects of Vista. When these little dialogs come popping up, your machine hicccups and the display abruptly darkens to highlight this "Would you like to continue?" which is promptly followed by a "Hey, you said you'd like to continue just now - but would you like to continue?" message. Brilliant. Double confirmation will really make me pay attention. Especially when the littlest actions pick these guys up - like running the performance monitor or running WinRar.

Windows Vista Home Premium Doesn't Include Aero
November 21, 2006

As a member of the Microsoft Developer's Network - I'm privy to new releases of Vista before everyone else. I just installed it on a nice little Dell box that I've got sitting around here at the office to test our software and reached a dismaying conclusion... Windows Vista Home Premium won't support Aero. Yes, that's right. Unless you buy the Business version you won't be seeing anything better than Windows XP with some Theme Packs. Seriously... why buy Windows Vista?

Update: It's because I'm not running an nVida based machine. There aren't any decent drivers released for any IBM chipsets yet. If you've got a Dell with onboard video (read; whatever you've got in your office) don't upgrade. You'll gain nothing. I think that it's a shame that Microsoft doesn't even tell you that it won't support Aero on your machine when you run their upgrade advisor in this situation (or even after, leading me to believe that Home Basic Premium 2006 XP++ Corporate Edition Deep Fried Collaboration Synergizing Version Product doesn't support it).

Update: I've got it running on my nVidia based box quite smoothly. MMUUUUUCH nicer than RC2. Almost unimaginably nicer. Quite good. Bravo!