Microsoft has announced something remarkable. A cloud OS called Azure with the ability to run your enterprise server software. This could very well be the next big thing for the enterprise. When you think about it, why do we build our own servers and instant fail-over solutions housed in air conditioned server rooms when Microsoft could do it for us and give us access to our own virtual servers?
It certainly makes a lot of sense to me, and shows Microsoft's incredible strength in the Enterprise. I think Microsoft have been concentrating so much on the consumer side of the market, that they have forgotten about what should be their key focus, the enterprise.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Informing the User
If Vista is going to grind to a halt while it installs updates, I don't mind...Really I don't! What I do mind is that it doesn't tell me what it is doing. The solution is easy, after a reboot is required to install updates a progress bar (one that works) should tell you that the system is busy, until it is ready. It should not allow you to log in as if nothing is happening, then suck 99% processor power while installing updates and telling the user nothing.
It's a little thing, I grant you... but it is these sort of user interface niceties that Microsoft always gets wrong, and Apple always gets right! Take for instance what happens when you wipe and rebuild a Mac, or a PC.
Contrast this with Apple.
There is no problem with what windows is doing.... the problem is how it does it. Windows needs to understand that there is a user sitting there trying to use it!
Rant mode [off]
It's a little thing, I grant you... but it is these sort of user interface niceties that Microsoft always gets wrong, and Apple always gets right! Take for instance what happens when you wipe and rebuild a Mac, or a PC.
- The PC reboots for its final time, then starts indexing the drive
- It sucks as much processor power as it can away from the user, making everything run at a crawl
- There are no messages to say this is happening, and the user is left to wonder what they did wrong
- When you try to use the instant search feature instead of telling you that it is not ready yet it tries its best and fails miserably, generating an error
- Then the computer slows down as it asks you to join the windows customer experience improvement program!
- It takes several minutes before you are able to restart the system, but since you don't know if the indexing process has finished you don't have a clue when you can turn the machine off.
Contrast this with Apple.
- The Mac reboots for its final time, then starts indexing the drive.
- It uses as much processor power as it can, but not so much as to affect the logged on user. Everything runs smoothly.
- When clicking on the spotlight search box, it gives you a message to say that it is indexing the drive, and how long it will take before being completed, in English.
- If you try to use spotlight, it will tell you that it is busy until it has finished indexing the drive.
- It takes several minutes to finish indexing, but you know exactly how long it has left until finished.
There is no problem with what windows is doing.... the problem is how it does it. Windows needs to understand that there is a user sitting there trying to use it!
Rant mode [off]
Comparing costs.....
Vista Home Basic £139
Vista Home Premium £169
Vista Business Edition £219
Vista Ultimate Edition £229
https://emea.microsoftstore.com/UK/DesktopDefault.aspx/tabid-16/?et_cid=17&et_lid=56
I'll be talking about performance later, but for now I'd just like to say that Ubuntu is a modern stable OS, it looks better than Vista, it is 2-5 times faster when running on the same hardware, it has a massive amount of software available for it, and it can be made to run windows applications.
Ubuntu £0
http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu
Apple supply arguably the most powerful and easy to use OS available, the latest versions run on modest hardware, it is the best looking and fastest OS available, it has the built in ability to dual boot with Windows.
OSX Leopard £85
OSX Leopard family pack (covers 5 computers) £129
OSX Leopard Server (unlimited number of clients) £629
There is a rumour, doing the rounds, that Apple's new OS called Snow-Leopard will be free or very low cost to existing Leopard users! Although I think it is very unlikely that this will come to pass ;( Snow-Leopard will be an optimised version of Leopard with minimal new features.
Apple and Canonical (the maker of Ubuntu) are responding to what the user wants. Lightweight, efficient, modern OS's that can run equally well on low powered mobile devices and top of the range hardware.
http://store.apple.com/uk/product/MB576Z/A?fnode=MTY1NDAzOA&mco=MTUzMzk5Nw
With that sort of competition what can Microsoft do?
Vista Home Premium £169
Vista Business Edition £219
Vista Ultimate Edition £229
https://emea.microsoftstore.com/UK/DesktopDefault.aspx/tabid-16/?et_cid=17&et_lid=56
I'll be talking about performance later, but for now I'd just like to say that Ubuntu is a modern stable OS, it looks better than Vista, it is 2-5 times faster when running on the same hardware, it has a massive amount of software available for it, and it can be made to run windows applications.
Ubuntu £0
http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu
Apple supply arguably the most powerful and easy to use OS available, the latest versions run on modest hardware, it is the best looking and fastest OS available, it has the built in ability to dual boot with Windows.
OSX Leopard £85
OSX Leopard family pack (covers 5 computers) £129
OSX Leopard Server (unlimited number of clients) £629
There is a rumour, doing the rounds, that Apple's new OS called Snow-Leopard will be free or very low cost to existing Leopard users! Although I think it is very unlikely that this will come to pass ;( Snow-Leopard will be an optimised version of Leopard with minimal new features.
Apple and Canonical (the maker of Ubuntu) are responding to what the user wants. Lightweight, efficient, modern OS's that can run equally well on low powered mobile devices and top of the range hardware.
http://store.apple.com/uk/product/MB576Z/A?fnode=MTY1NDAzOA&mco=MTUzMzk5Nw
With that sort of competition what can Microsoft do?
- Make Windows 7 free for all registered users of Vista.
- Produce a simple set of products: At most this should be Windows 7 Home, Windows 7 Business and Windows 7 Server.
- Microsoft need to be brave and licence the mpeg2 codec so that Windows can play and create DVDs out of the box. It should not matter that it will kill the market for 3rd party players, as this market should arguably not exist in the first place.
- On a multiboot system Windows needs to detect other OS's and play nice, not do as it does now placing files everywhere and destroying bootloaders.
- Windows needs to improve interoperability, adoption of world standards, and become more open.
Setting up Vista
So, how much space do you think you would be left with after installing Vista enterprise edition? The files take up around 2Gb of space on a DVD. Allowing for them to expand from their compressed form and adding about one and a half times the size of memory for the swapfile, I make that about 4.5Gb of used hard disk space on my laptop that has 1Gb of Ram. Add another 500Mb for luck and OS updates calling the final figure around the 5Gb mark.
Wrong! I was quite shocked that almost 10 Gb of hard disk space had been used up. All I had done was to install the OS into the 16Gb partition I had reserved for Vista, thinking that would be more than enough. Then I installed drivers, and downloaded OS updates. Where on earth had all my hard disk space gone?
At this point it may be interesting to point out the experience of installing an OS on other platforms. Firstly lets look at OSX, a base install of which comes in at around 3Gb after OS updates have been installed. Once the admittedly rather large iLife suite (a digital lifestyle suite of 5 powerful applications) is installed this reaches a quite large 9Gb. The Mac is supporting both 64 bit and 32 bit apps, but is also supporting two processor lines having the ability to seamlessly run software made for the PowerPC or Intel processors.
With Linux, the installation process and efficiency is most impressive. Linux comes in many guises or "distributions", Ubuntu Linux installs from a 700Mb CD ROM, it expands very quickly to just over 2Gb. This not only includes a state of the art OS, but also many large applications including a full office suite!
The Disk Usage Utility that comes with Ubuntu 8.10
Why am I insisting on installing Vista on a 16Gb partition on a 3 year old laptop? The first reason is that I want a level playing field to test Vista against Ubuntu because you really start to see the relative efficiencies of an operating system when it is running on the same hardware. As I write this using Vista my laptop fan is blowing twice as hard as it does in Ubuntu when doing the same task, seeming to suggest that the computer is having to work harder to run Vista. I am using Firefox 3 and Google docs in both OS's so there is no difference between them.
So what can be done about Vista's heavy demand for storage space? Not a lot, it turns out. Whatever you do, don't delete what might appear to be duplicates from within the 'winsxs' folder. These are not duplicate files, but duplicate references to files. A colleague of mine found the perfect link describing what on earth the oft misunderstood 'winsxs' folder actually is, many thanks for that Neil.
http://blogs.technet.com/askcore/archive/2008/09/17/what-is-the-winsxs-directory-in-windows-2008-and-windows-vista-and-why-is-it-so-large.aspx
To try to slim things down the first thing I did was to turn off system restore, this means that your system will not be able to turn the clock back to a date before you installed that buggy driver. This will save you well over 1 GB of space.
Secondly, I set custom settings for the swap file so that it was set to a permanent size and was stored on another partition. This begs the question "how efficient is paged memory when used as a file on a filesystem, instead of using a whole partition for swapspace?". Linux uses a partition for its swapfile. This not only appears to be faster and more efficient, but is a boon on a system running many OS's. Each copy of Linux can make use of the same swap partition.
I was quite shocked to see a 'hyberfile.sys' file on drive C:. This is a hibernation file generated when the system hibernates. Why was it on my drive when I have never hibernated this system? TechTalkz.com comes to the rescue with the answer.
http://www.techtalkz.com/tips-n-tricks/3871-how-disable-hibernation-windows-vista.html
Amazingly Vista had made the decision for me that it would generate a hibernation file, even though I had never used or planned to use the feature. Turning it off involved me having to run the command line prompt as an administrator by right clicking on it and choosing "run as administrator" to avoid the "You do not have permission to enable or disable the hibernation feature" error message. I was logged in as an administrator with user account control (a subject for another blog entry) switched on, I expected to be able to issue the command from a prompt with the UAC pop up appearing to raise my privileges when needed, this did not happen. I was also surprised that there was no ability to turn off hibernation using a control panel and that it was impossible to remove many windows components using the "Programs and features" control panel.
Thirdly I used the excellent 'CCleaner' application to clear out old data including old prefetch data and caches.
What is the result of all these settings? The system had grown to have over 12Gb used, perilously close to the 16Gb partition limit. With the above settings it is now using a much healthier 8Gb. Although after streamlining Vista it is still 3 times bigger than Linux!
What can Microsoft do to improve these issues?
Wrong! I was quite shocked that almost 10 Gb of hard disk space had been used up. All I had done was to install the OS into the 16Gb partition I had reserved for Vista, thinking that would be more than enough. Then I installed drivers, and downloaded OS updates. Where on earth had all my hard disk space gone?
At this point it may be interesting to point out the experience of installing an OS on other platforms. Firstly lets look at OSX, a base install of which comes in at around 3Gb after OS updates have been installed. Once the admittedly rather large iLife suite (a digital lifestyle suite of 5 powerful applications) is installed this reaches a quite large 9Gb. The Mac is supporting both 64 bit and 32 bit apps, but is also supporting two processor lines having the ability to seamlessly run software made for the PowerPC or Intel processors.
With Linux, the installation process and efficiency is most impressive. Linux comes in many guises or "distributions", Ubuntu Linux installs from a 700Mb CD ROM, it expands very quickly to just over 2Gb. This not only includes a state of the art OS, but also many large applications including a full office suite!
The Disk Usage Utility that comes with Ubuntu 8.10
Why am I insisting on installing Vista on a 16Gb partition on a 3 year old laptop? The first reason is that I want a level playing field to test Vista against Ubuntu because you really start to see the relative efficiencies of an operating system when it is running on the same hardware. As I write this using Vista my laptop fan is blowing twice as hard as it does in Ubuntu when doing the same task, seeming to suggest that the computer is having to work harder to run Vista. I am using Firefox 3 and Google docs in both OS's so there is no difference between them.
So what can be done about Vista's heavy demand for storage space? Not a lot, it turns out. Whatever you do, don't delete what might appear to be duplicates from within the 'winsxs' folder. These are not duplicate files, but duplicate references to files. A colleague of mine found the perfect link describing what on earth the oft misunderstood 'winsxs' folder actually is, many thanks for that Neil.
http://blogs.technet.com/askcore/archive/2008/09/17/what-is-the-winsxs-directory-in-windows-2008-and-windows-vista-and-why-is-it-so-large.aspx
To try to slim things down the first thing I did was to turn off system restore, this means that your system will not be able to turn the clock back to a date before you installed that buggy driver. This will save you well over 1 GB of space.
Secondly, I set custom settings for the swap file so that it was set to a permanent size and was stored on another partition. This begs the question "how efficient is paged memory when used as a file on a filesystem, instead of using a whole partition for swapspace?". Linux uses a partition for its swapfile. This not only appears to be faster and more efficient, but is a boon on a system running many OS's. Each copy of Linux can make use of the same swap partition.
I was quite shocked to see a 'hyberfile.sys' file on drive C:. This is a hibernation file generated when the system hibernates. Why was it on my drive when I have never hibernated this system? TechTalkz.com comes to the rescue with the answer.
http://www.techtalkz.com/tips-n-tricks/3871-how-disable-hibernation-windows-vista.html
Amazingly Vista had made the decision for me that it would generate a hibernation file, even though I had never used or planned to use the feature. Turning it off involved me having to run the command line prompt as an administrator by right clicking on it and choosing "run as administrator" to avoid the "You do not have permission to enable or disable the hibernation feature" error message. I was logged in as an administrator with user account control (a subject for another blog entry) switched on, I expected to be able to issue the command from a prompt with the UAC pop up appearing to raise my privileges when needed, this did not happen. I was also surprised that there was no ability to turn off hibernation using a control panel and that it was impossible to remove many windows components using the "Programs and features" control panel.
Thirdly I used the excellent 'CCleaner' application to clear out old data including old prefetch data and caches.
What is the result of all these settings? The system had grown to have over 12Gb used, perilously close to the 16Gb partition limit. With the above settings it is now using a much healthier 8Gb. Although after streamlining Vista it is still 3 times bigger than Linux!
What can Microsoft do to improve these issues?
- Let the user choose which additional apps to install when installing Windows
- Allow the ability to remove windows components
- Make memory usage more efficient
- Use tighter coding for applications and their data
- Do not assume what the user wants, a hibernation file should only exist after the user has chosen to use that function
- Use swap partitions
- Improve UAC
Versions of Vista
Is it me, or does the multitude of Windows versions confuse you? Just off the top of my head, I can think of quite a few. I am completely ignoring the huge list of other versions of windows with mixed names based on version number, or year, or what have you.
Windows Vista Home Basic
Windows Vista Home Premium
Windows Vista Enterprise Edition
Windows Vista Business Edition
Windows Vista Ultimate Edition
Windows Vista Server 2008
I've not even mentioned the 64 bit versions! After reading the compare editions part of Microsoft's website I'd like to know why Microsoft thinks that only Premium and Ultimate customers will want to play DVD's? Why are home users not allowed to use 'bitlocker' to encrypt their data, is their data less valuable? Why are home basic users denied an easy to use backup system?
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/compare-editions/default.aspx
Ubuntu comes in 32bit and 64bit versions of the following.
Ubuntu
Ubuntu Server
There are several other spin off Ubuntu based distributions. Facilities to install DVD support, encryption and backup is available for free from an easy to use package manager.
http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu
Apple produces the most streamlined set of products
OSX Leopard
OSX Leopard Server
OSX has all the facilities needed in a business or home machine including the ability to play and make DVDs out of the box (making DVD's is part of the iLife suite supplied free with every Mac), it runs 64bit and 32bit applications, it is able to support 32GB of RAM and 8 processor cores , it also comes with extensive encryption facilities using 'File Vault' and 'Disk Utility', easy to use backup facilities are also built in. Everything just works, out of the box - nothing needs to be installed.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/
What could Microsoft do to streamline their product line?
I suggest they should combine the 32bit and 64bit versions of windows and make Windows 7 the main and only OS that can do as much or as little as you would like it to. This version of Windows would install as 64bit on 64bit hardware being able to seamlessly run 32bit apps and drivers, and would install a 32bit version of itself on 32bit hardware. The same version of windows should also offer to install a minimal set-up suitable for netbooks.
Windows 7 should do everything that 'home basic, home premium, ultimate, enterprise and business' does, it should be easily customisable to make it suitable for both the home and business.
Windows 7 Server should just be the server optimised version of Windows.
Windows Vista Home Basic
Windows Vista Home Premium
Windows Vista Enterprise Edition
Windows Vista Business Edition
Windows Vista Ultimate Edition
Windows Vista Server 2008
I've not even mentioned the 64 bit versions! After reading the compare editions part of Microsoft's website I'd like to know why Microsoft thinks that only Premium and Ultimate customers will want to play DVD's? Why are home users not allowed to use 'bitlocker' to encrypt their data, is their data less valuable? Why are home basic users denied an easy to use backup system?
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/compare-editions/default.aspx
Ubuntu comes in 32bit and 64bit versions of the following.
Ubuntu
Ubuntu Server
There are several other spin off Ubuntu based distributions. Facilities to install DVD support, encryption and backup is available for free from an easy to use package manager.
http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu
Apple produces the most streamlined set of products
OSX Leopard
OSX Leopard Server
OSX has all the facilities needed in a business or home machine including the ability to play and make DVDs out of the box (making DVD's is part of the iLife suite supplied free with every Mac), it runs 64bit and 32bit applications, it is able to support 32GB of RAM and 8 processor cores , it also comes with extensive encryption facilities using 'File Vault' and 'Disk Utility', easy to use backup facilities are also built in. Everything just works, out of the box - nothing needs to be installed.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/
What could Microsoft do to streamline their product line?
I suggest they should combine the 32bit and 64bit versions of windows and make Windows 7 the main and only OS that can do as much or as little as you would like it to. This version of Windows would install as 64bit on 64bit hardware being able to seamlessly run 32bit apps and drivers, and would install a 32bit version of itself on 32bit hardware. The same version of windows should also offer to install a minimal set-up suitable for netbooks.
Windows 7 should do everything that 'home basic, home premium, ultimate, enterprise and business' does, it should be easily customisable to make it suitable for both the home and business.
Windows 7 Server should just be the server optimised version of Windows.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Introduction
There are those that think that Windows Vista is absolutely terrible, and there are those that think that it is perfection personified. Both of these views are wrong! The truth lay somewhere between these views. Vista has flaws, Linux has flaws, and yes even OSX has flaws. However these flaws tend to not overlap. Putting it another way, a feature implemented poorly in one OS is often implemented well in another. We can all learn from each other for the benefit of Windows, Linux and OSX users.
The aim of this blog is not just to moan about what is lacking in Windows (although I will certainly do a little moaning, possibly even rising to a rant occasionally) but to offer simple advice, hints & tips, solutions, and recommendations about how to improve Windows aimed at the Windows Vista user. There will be the odd tip thrown in for XP and I will eventually shift focus onto Windows 7.
I do not apologise in the slightest for being a Mac user, nor for the fact that my preferred OS on my Sony laptop is Linux. I believe it is a strength, not a weakness to have experience of the many OS's out there. At work my Mac mini running OSX Leopard and Dell running Vista Enterprise have been happily joined to each other for a year now. Like any good marriage the strengths of one make up for the weaknesses of the other, and that goes both ways.
If you are OS curious, willing to learn if the other side of the fence is indeed greener or just a different shade, and you are willing to help your fellow OS users in a friendly fashion then you are welcome here.
The aim of this blog is not just to moan about what is lacking in Windows (although I will certainly do a little moaning, possibly even rising to a rant occasionally) but to offer simple advice, hints & tips, solutions, and recommendations about how to improve Windows aimed at the Windows Vista user. There will be the odd tip thrown in for XP and I will eventually shift focus onto Windows 7.
I do not apologise in the slightest for being a Mac user, nor for the fact that my preferred OS on my Sony laptop is Linux. I believe it is a strength, not a weakness to have experience of the many OS's out there. At work my Mac mini running OSX Leopard and Dell running Vista Enterprise have been happily joined to each other for a year now. Like any good marriage the strengths of one make up for the weaknesses of the other, and that goes both ways.
If you are OS curious, willing to learn if the other side of the fence is indeed greener or just a different shade, and you are willing to help your fellow OS users in a friendly fashion then you are welcome here.
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