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.

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.

Although I have a slightly newer (Athlon 64-bit) PC running Windows Vista, my main PC is a 3 year old Athlon 32-bit based PC running Windows XP Media Edition. Last week this main PC started acting funny. It started taking longer and longer to boot up. Finally on Thursday evening, it failed to boot.

My first though was that this might be a good excuse to buy a Core 2 Duo PC :-). But, I surprised myself by thinking I did not want my main PC to run Windows Vista. I preferred XP for this PC because it syncs with my Windows Mobile smartphone (not sure I trust WMDC on Vista) and it is where my family photos reside (UAC makes even copying files to an external USB hard drive for backups an exercise in frustration). So, although I actually like Windows Vista enough to run it on my main PC at work (a Core 2 Duo notebook), I’m not willing to run it on my main home PC. This surprised me quite a bit. Has anyone else been faced with this issue? What did you decide? Stay with XP or move on to Vista?

BTW: Listening carefully, I noted three long beeps. Though I couldn’t find any boot sound diagnostic info for this particular PC (an eMachines PC), I guessed that it might indicate a RAM problem. So, I pulled the DIMM from the second socket and, yep, the PC booted with just 512MB in DIMM socket 0. I pulled a 512MB DIMM from my Linux box (rarely used these days since I usually run Linux as virtual machine using either Microsoft Virtual PC or VMware Workstation) and put it in my main PC. I also decided to upgrade my Vista box from 1GB to 2GB and have a pair of DIMMs on order from Crucial. I’m sure Virtual PC and VMware Workstation will be happier with more RAM.

BTW: The photo above is my collection of dead RAM from the last couple of years.

This is probably old news to most people. But, I only noticed this evening that the Vista Windows Photo Gallery displays videos as well as still images. Yeah, doh. I usually work on my family photos on a old Windows XP PC because XP on the old PC seems to run faster than Vista on a newer PC. In fact, even simple things like list files in Windows Explorer seems much faster on XP than Vista.

I have an old Celeron based XP PC with 1GB RAM in my office as well as a relatively new(ish) Core 2 Duo notebook running Vista with 2GB RAM. Vista seems to take forever just bringing up a list of files while XP (on a Celeron) is pretty fast. At home it is an ancient Athlon 32-bit box running XP and a slightly less ancient Athlon 64-bit box running Vista (32-bit).
In any case, if you are running Windows Vista and have a mix of still photos and videos in a folder (I keep all files from my digital camera, still and video by month to ease backups to DVD+R discs), double click on a still image near a video file (AVI in my case) to bring up Windows Photo Gallery. Then, press the forward button to move from file to file. The video should start playing right in Photo Gallery after a few seconds delay.

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.

First PC Magazine’s John Dvorak writes Me and My Mac. In it he talks about the Mac he got for his work for Podshow. He says he is not switching to a Mac for personal use, but uses it at that office and has been recommending Macs to friends.

The outgoing PC Magazine Editor in Chief Jim Louderback wrote in his final column Passing the Torch: I could go on and on about the lack of drivers, the bizarre wake-up rituals, the strange and nonreproducible system quirks, and more. But I won’t bore you with the details. The upshot is that even after nine months, Vista just ain’t cutting it. I definitely gave Microsoft too much of a free pass on this operating system: I expected it to get the kinks worked out more quickly. Boy, was I fooled! If Microsoft can’t get Vista working, I might just do the unthinkable: I might move to Linux.

In a previous blog entry I cited a survey by Patchlink reporting that 87% of the businesses they surveyed said they would stay with Windows XP. I haven’t experienced all the problems reported by Louderback and other people. But, I’ve seen a bunch including the nearly inaccessible network settings and printer driver problems in Vista.

I like a lot of the features in Vista and still use it daily. But, I have to admit that my next “PC” will probably be a new Mac mini to replace my 1st generation PowerPC-based Mac mini running Mac OS X Leopard and either VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop for Mac for Windows compatibility.

Is Vista the end of the line for Windows as the dominant desktop OS? Will web-based applications and Mac OS X or Linux start getting more traction?

The PC World article…

Businesses Rethink Vista

…reports on surveys conducted by Patchlink that indicates that the number of businesses who said they were staying with Windows XP instead of upgrading to Vista went up from 53% in December 2006 (before Vista was released) 87% in July.

One of my blog items over on the O’Reilly Media WindowsDevCenter site…

Windows Vista Doesn’t Run Any of My Software! Oh, Really?

…posted on May 1 continues to draw venomous comments about Windows Vista because of its software compatibility and lack of hardware driver support. Now, many of these comments are made without actually naming a single specific application. So, there may be a bit of anti-Microsoft trolling at work there. I’ve used Windows Vista for over two years now (Beta, Release Candidate, and production versions) and have run into only a handful of applications that didn’t work. But, I’ve definitely run into a bunch of hardware driver issues. That said, I actually like Windows Vista and use it for a good chunk of the day on my notebook PC at work.

Given the general anti-Vista sentiment appears to be rising, I wonder if Windows Vista may be Microsoft’s PlayStation 3. Sony’s PS2 was the dominant game console for many years. Even the Xbox really didn’t do much more than dent its dominance. But, the PS3 doesn’t seem very popular except with hard core gamers. The Nintendo Wii and the Xbox 360 seems to have over-taken the PS3.

I think Vista’s problem is that it didn’t go far enough. Its incompatibility and user experience issues (I hate those UAC pop-ups) stem from trying to bandaid over years of Windows code. Microsoft should have bitten the bullet the way Apple did when they moved from OS 9 to OS X. Microsoft could have dealt with compatibility issues by providing a big upgrade to their Virtual PC product (instead of the incremental one they produced). A Microsoft Virtual PC that had the features of VMware Workstation and bundled with a Windows XP SP2 license would have allowed Vista users to simply move their current environment to a virtual machine and then migrate to the real Vista Windows as applications and drivers arrived. Instead, Virtual PC is too weak in the USB support area to really do much good as a complete virtualized environment.

With good virtual machine support available for the Mac (Parallels Desktop for Mac and VMWare Fusion), I wonder if we might see the migration there instead of Vista. The big problem, of course, is that most people will have to buy an XP license which is hard to find these days and somewhat expensive to do if one is found (since their old PCs probably came with a non-transferable OEM Windows XP). But, still if one is going to have application and hardware compatibility issues, why not move to a modern Linux or Mac OS X operating system instead of sticking with the nearly six year old Windows XP?
So, does Windows XP == Sony PS2? And, does Windows Vista == Sony PS3? We’ll should know within the next 12 months or so. I’m going to keep using Vista on my PCs (and just bought VMware Fusion to try to virtualize it on a Mac). But, I may be in the minority if the various published reports are true.