TO-Tech Blog

I earlier compared Windows Vista to the Sony PS3 (expensive and not selling well). More recently, I’ve been thinking of Windows Vista and Windows XP to be the current analog to the Windows Me and Windows 98 SE relationship. Windows Me was a disasterous release that followed the stable and well supported Windows 98 SE (Second Edition). Vista follows the stable and well supported XP. I’m apparently not alone in this general line of thought as exhibited by commentary over on CNet.
Why Microsoft must abandon Vista to save itself

Speaking of Windows 98SE, I wrote a somewhat tongue-in-cheek item over on the O’Reilly Network titled…

Microsoft should release Windows 98 SE as Open Source

These days, I think that while it is still unlikely to happen, I think Windows would see a resurgence if Windows 98 SE’s code were released as Open Source to allow the vast number of talented developers out there to clean it up, secure it, and enhance it.

First, a mini-rant. Microsoft should take the lead from Apple’s Mac OS X and have one single version of Vista. Why, for example is Bitlocker available in the Ultimate Edition (and Enterprise) but not the Business Edition? Don’t business users without Software Assurance need to encrypt too?

Did you know that there is a Windows Vista Ultimate blog? Yep, you can find it at…

Windows Vista Ultimate Blog

It seems to be updated about once a quarter with two previous mini-blog bursts in mid-March and early July. In the meantime, Vista Ulitimate Edition users have enjoyed seeing, um, absolutely nothing except the usual security hold patches released (some printer drivers that work would be nice but don’t seem to exist). The blog announces that the DreamScene pack that was supposed to be released much earlier (Vista’s ship date would have been nice) was finally released. So, yep, there are some new animated desktops and the ability to use your own video (I thought we could already do that?).

StarDock has a site at dream.wincustomize.com dedicated to DreamScene. This DreamGallery site provides two free utilities, DreamScapes and DreamMaker, to provide new functions to DreamScene.

Well, I guess we have to wait for December or January for the next blog update from the Vista Ultimate Blog. I’d prefer something to removes or reduces the impact of the DRM slow-down code myself so that Vista would be a bit peppier on a “mere” Core 2 Duo box.

VMware has a promotion that lets you get two free ACE client licenses. You can find the promotion info on their site at…
Free VMware Workstation ACE Option Pack Promotion

Just bringing closure to my little experiment with SpinRite and a nasty looking 120GB drive. After watching SpinRite grind through a single sector for something like 10 days, I noted its spot and stopped it. After fussing around a bit with SpinRite and level 1 (which doesn’t mark problems permanently), I decided to restart it at just beyond the problem area and let it go on at level 2 over the long Labor Day weekend. As you can see from the screen photo above, it finished the last half (really about 43%) in 41 hours and 25 minutes. You can see that the second half of the drive was in pretty bad shape too though it did manage to recover 3 spots. I’m planning to reboot the drive to see what happened to the Linux system on the drive after going through this long SpinRite repair process. The drive should obviously be put out to pasture. But, I’ll keep it around the office in case I need to show anyone what a bad drive looks like in SpinRite.

I don’t want this blog to just focus on computing processes that take forever (e.g., my last couple of SpinRite posts). But, here’s another one. This time I’m playing with VMware Workstation 6 and its ACE/Pocket ACE add-on. ACE lets you take a VMware virtual machine image and deploy it with full enterprise policy controls to multiple targets. Pocket ACE takes this one step further by letting you deploy a VM with an installed Guest OS to a portable storage device such as a USB flash drive, iPod, or portable USB hard drive. The idea is that you can take this device, plug it in to a Windows or Linux PC, and run your virtual environment from the portable device without installing anything on the host PC.

So, I built a Fedora 7 virtual machine using VMware Workstation 6 with ACE. I fully patched the relatively small system and installed one application (Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0.6 with my email profile in an account). After doing that, I created a deployable ACE configuration (all wizard driven). Finally, I plugged in a USB hard drive and started the Pocket ACE deployment process. That was over three hours ago. As you can see from my screen shot, it is maybe at the 10% mark at this point. I’m going to leave it running overnight and see how far it gets.

Now, the PC I’m testing this on is just a single core Athlon 64-bit CPU running Windows Vista (32-bit version) Ultimate Edition. Still, this seems awfully slow to me. Will it take 30 hours to complete? I hope not. Stay tuned to yet another TO-Tech marathon process.

UPDATE: It turns out that while VMware Pocket ACE’s deployment process is slow, it is not as glacial as I originally thought. It looks like Pocket ACE didn’t like the external hard drive I used to test it initially. I tried it a couple more times and watched it progress to different levels (all the way up to 40% on one test) and then lock up. I connected a Western Digital MyBook external drive and Pocket ACE was able to deploy my Fedora 7 Linux VM to it in about an hour (still slow but better than overnight). I’m not sure what it doesn’t like about the first hard drive (an old 40GB drive in a Coolmax HD-360 USB enclosure). My first thought was that the drive couldn’t handle sustained large file copies. However, I copied over two VMware Workstation ACE VM directories (10.9 GB of files) and everything copied over fine.