TO-Tech Blog

Reader Linda asks: I have two Hp printers how do i get them to install properly? i have the Windows Vista Home premium Operating System 32 bit i have no clue what that means really? So what drivers do i want/ and where do i get them/ From Dell? HP? or Windows Vista?

Fortunately, HP makes finding printer drivers pretty easy. Of course, Vista printer driver availability (for any brand) is still pretty spotty even though Vista has been out for a year now (more if you count Business Edition’s launch in November 2006). Just head over to:

http://support.hp.com/

You’ll be asked to designate which country you are in and then be whisked off to the appropriate site. Select Software & Driver downloads as the task, then type in your printer model in the text box below. Note that even if a Vista compatible driver is available, it may not fully support your printer’s features. For example, my PhotoSmart 7760 prints ok (more or less) but does not report ink supply levels as it does when used with Windows XP.

Although I have a Core 2 Duo notebook and Dual-Dual Core (4 processors) Xeon and Opteron servers at work, I don’t have any dual core Windows PCs at home. So, I found the HP Pavilion a6120n with Core 2 Duo pretty interesting at $400. However, I noticed it used an unfamiliar processor model: E4400. So, I headed over to the Intel Processor Number summary web page to check out the specs for various Core 2 Duo chips. I learned there that the entire 4000 model family does NOT have the Intel Virtualization Technology (VT) feature. I also learned that with the exception of the T5600, the entire 5000 Core 2 Duo model line also lacks VT. Since I run Microsoft Virtual PC and VMware Workstation at home, it is pretty important to have a VT enabled processor. The lesson here is that if virtualization is something you use, check the processor model before buying a new PC or notebook. I know I’m glad that I did before clicking the buy button.

Head over to read this blog entry…

Review: Windows XP

…by a blogger who comments on his experience upgrading from Windows Vista to Windows XP. If it weren’t so true, it would be funny. But, hmm, actually it is funny

Vista’s Windows Update didn’t see any updates when I fired it up this morning. So, I clicked on the option to manually check for updates. It saw the Patch Tuesday Vista patches after that action. Why didn’t it seem them as soon as it fired up? Then, of course, Vista wanted to be rebooted to actually finish installing the patches. Ugh. Vista takes a look time to shutdown and then reboot. Good thing I have multiple computers to work on.

After the reboot Word 2007 decided it wasn’t to open a small DOCX file I had been working on. Now what? After futzing a bit, I checked the net and found that there is an Office 2007 SP1 update. I ran Windows Update again and, again, had it manually check for updates. Now, it sees the Office 2007 SP1 update. Why wasn’t this detected earlier. To make matters worse, the Office 2007 SP1 update was 251MB large and took a while to download. And, of course, it too required a reboot after installing itself. Why in the world with an application need a reboot to install itself. The only two things I can think of that requires a Linux box to reboot are kernel or driver updates.

This is a broken and time-wasting scenario.

The Windows Vista Windwos Experience Index Score never made much sense to me. It grades a PC on 5 factors and then chooses the lowest score as the index. No weighting, no average, just what looks like a poorly thought out implementation of some kind of over simplified Fuzzy Logic. Since the graphics subsystem is generally the weakest component (unless you are a serious gamer), it generally defines the score for the entire system.

I finally got around to upgrading my old Athlon 64-bit 3400+ based PC from 1GB to 2GB RAM. This PC doesn’t have a dedicated graphics card, but the integrated chipset is the Nvidia GeForce 6100 which isn’t too shabby as built-in graphics goes. It uses shared RAM and Vista decided that it had 831MB of available graphics RAM after the upgrade. This was enough to boost the Graphics index from 2.0 to 3.0 and thus raise the entire index score from 2 to 3 as well.

The interesting thing is that the Dell Latitude D620 notebook PC (running Windows Vista Business Edition) with its Core 2 Duo and a dedicated graphics adapter with dedicated graphics score in reduced performance battery saving mode less than this old single core PC of mine because of Microsoft’s scoring quirk. In this case the CPU performance in battery saving mode becomes the weakest component in the score (less than the graphics adapter). The end result is that an aging single core CPU based PC score higher than a Core 2 Duo based one. That just doesn’t sit will with me. And, I don’t think the actual end-user experience matches the scores either.