Rants Tagged with “Microsoft”
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I thought I'd mention a problem I had with my new Vista installation.
I have a separate partion for my data, so when I upgrade to Vista I didn't do a clean format of the entire drive, but just did a clean install of Vista. Works great!
The only exception was that I did not have permission to access, modify or delete some files on my data drive. I am an administrator, what do you mean I don't have permission? After googling the problem, I discovered that the owner of these few wierd files was an unknown entity. To fix it, I used the Advanced button the security tab of the file/folder properties to change the owner to my admin account. Once I had the ownership, it was as simple as adding the appropriate permissions.
Works great now.
I really like the realtime (or near real-time) preview of the windows on the Taskbar in Vista. Check it out:
I spent the weekend downloading and upgrading my main XP box with this pre-RC1 test build. Yes, I said upgrading XP! The good news is that is build is very very good. Not perfect, but very good! I am able to use it as my main box.
I have tested VS.NET 2005, SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005, MS Office 2003, and even games (ok I am addicted to WoW). All of these programs worked. The only problem I had was that I wasn't granted access to my old Documents folder, but I would guess that has more to do with the fact that I changed the location of the folder with TweakXP.
When the RC comes out, I think it will be close to ready for prime time. I am psyched.
Back on July 20th, Paul Therrott wrote a long blog entry explaining his experience with WGA (I stopped it from installing so I didn't try to work with it). His big problem was that WGA reported that his version was pirated. I think he (and most of us) assumed that WGA was not working correctly.
Read down to the end of the article. It looks like he got with Microsoft and worked it out...guess what? He has a pirated version of Windows. The online retailer that he purchased it from actually sold him a pirated version. Wow. Funny...sad...still no reason to push WGA down as a "security update".
It looks like Microsoft is going to start charging for the Office 2007 Beta (only $1.50 but that's not the point). This seems asinine to me. Microsoft is getting feedback and a huge testbed as well as buy-in from early adopters, so they should be able to eat the download costs. I've always understood the fee for the DVD/CD packages, but for the download?
It seems to me that Microsoft is headed in the wrong direction the last year. Pushing the anti-piracy app as a "patch" in Windows Update; pushing IE7 in Windows Update; and now this. It is as if someone inside MS has decided that it is now ok to use thier muscle. The post-Justice department era is over and Microsoft seems like its heading down the arrogance road again.
I've been on the bandwagon a lot the past ten years, but if this continues I can only imagine that their dominance will slip even more than it has (looking at the Apple Laptop sales figures is a sobering reality to the slippage). With Bill on his way out and the prospects of real leadership at the top of Microsoft fading, I hope someone will step up and right the ship. The guy who designed Lotus Notes and Groove might just end up running Microsoft. That just scares me.
I've heard again and again that Microsoft is "betting the company" on Vista. That's pretty scary as many of the 'Vista' features have either died (e.g. WinFS, Peer to Peer sharing, personal encryption) or have been back-ported to XP (.NET 3.0). Vista may be the new Windows ME.
I'd love to hear what people are thinking about these latest moves by Microsoft. Am I wrong?
While I am happy for Mark Russinovich and his people, I hope this doesn't mean the end to free access to SysInternals. What do you think?
I have been attempting to try out some new software from Microsoft (including Glidepath and Visual Studio Database Edition). Both of these require SQL Server Express installed. Problem is that I install a Developer Edition of SQL Server 2005 (as well as 2000) because it is more feature friendly than SQL Server Express. Why does Microsoft insist I have a third Database server? Why can't it prompt me to tell it what database to use, or at least attempt to find SQL Server 2005 as the default instance on the current machine? Just stoopid in my opinion. It's keeping me from trying out and possibly exhaulting these new interesting projects.
"There I said it..."
I know this has been all over the blogosphere by now, but I wanted to make sure people knew about Windows Genuine Advantage being snuck into Windows Update. Here is a ZDNet article that walks through Windows Update to show how deceptive the install is. I am disappointed in Microsoft over installing this tool via Windows Update. While I don't work for Microsoft, I am a fan of what they do in general.
The problem with WGA is that it is an anti-piracy measure, not a security update. The idea is to have users trust Windows Update and turn it on so they can't get hacked, right? By trying to sneak this onto computer systems to see if they are genuine, they are undermining the trust factor for most users. Through the generosity of Microsoft (through their MVP program), I have legal versions of Windows running throughout my network. But I still didn't install WGA. Why? Its the principle.
My less techinically savvy friends are going to see this on a news site or other place and think twice next time there is a Windows Update alert. So they won't install the update and they get comprimised. They they think Windows in an inferior product. Is this going to help Microsoft get more Windows licenses? Nope. They consider an iBook next time.
Microsoft, think this more next time. I am disappointed...
I spent the majority of yesterday moving my primary laptop to Vista. I got a new 100G/7200RPM drive, so I decided to chew up some of the space with a dual boot. I got to late last night (about 6am) when I decided it was a dead proposition and I needed to revert to my XP SP2 desktop. Good news is that a majority of the software I loaded on Vista worked without a hitch. At the end of the day it came to that a few critical pieces of software weren't Vista-ready.
Vista Setup
Getting Vista installed was a snap and with the exception of the touchpad driver, everything worked flawlessly (and after installing the XP touchpad driver I was good to go).
Productivity Software
I installed Office XP to have Word and PowerPoint to do some work where Office 2007 might cause some compatibility issues. I then installed Office 2007 over it and it worked well side-by-side. I've been told that Outlook 2007 and Outlook XP won't work side-by-side so I didn't even try.
Outlook 2007 was a big problem. While it worked as advertised (and my SpamBayes Add-in worked well), I couldn't search at all my messages. Outlook 2007 seemed to want to use the Vista built-in search which wasn't working with Outlook, and brute force searching was simply broken. The rest of Office 2007 seemed to work fine though I live in Outlook.
I tried installing Small Business Accounting and it depended on .NET Framework 1.1 which wasn't installed curiously. I installed the .NET Framework 1.1 with SP1, but Vista complained the whole way and in the end it still didn't work.
Development Software
I got Visual Studio 2005 installed without a hitch. I did have to install IIS (as its not installed by default) before installing 2005, but it worked well.
I installed SQL 2000 and SQL 2005, having to tell Vista to install it even though it told me it didn't work right on Vista. I had to be sure. After installation, SQL 2000 worked fine. SQL 2005 on the other hand is completely broken under Vista. The server works, but none of the tools work at all.
Conclusion
I had decided to live with most of the problems of Vista but the SQL 2005 tools not working became the death-knell of my ability to go Vista now. Beta 2 is looking very good, its just not quite ready yet. Too bad, I was really hoping to go that direction.
On a side note, the user protection stuff that was constantly asking permission to do simple things (e.g. deleting a file from the desktop) was frustrating and I ended up turning it off and being a bad boy and running as full-admin all the time.
My only other comment on Vista was that explorer.exe was constantly crashing and losing my optical drives. It came up fast, but was part of my frustration.
In this news.com article, they explore a problem I wondered about when I first saw Avalon two years ago. I am hoping that MS will make this better during optimization. I had heard that the Avalon team was hoping that battery life and mobile GPU's wouild be better when Avalon shipped. Not surprisingly, the battery life of laptops is essentially the same as it was two years ago (IMHO), though Mobile GPU's may be better.
What do you think?
