Finally, A Replacement for Vista and XP

It looks like Windows 7 is coming out very soon! Microsoft released the Release Candidate of Windows 7 last month and usually when they do this, the final release comes out 3-5 months later. I downloaded and installed the Release Candidate for Windows 7, which is publicly available to anyone who wishes to try it out (I do not recommend doing so on production computers).

The download should be available until at least June 2009. The software, however, is time-bomb trial-ware which will disable itself on June 1, 2010.

I installed it on my main desktop computer onto a secondary partition and configured it in such a way that it dual boots both my primary/production Vista OS and my Windows 7 Release Candidate OS. I have been playing around with it for about 2 weeks off and on. I can say that this new operating system will finally be a replacement for Windows Vista and Windows XP. I can tell the difference in performance and usability, even on the same machine, when doing similar tasks in both Vista and 7. It is stable, solid, clean, and feels very fast.  It uses a lot less hardware resources than Vista or even XP and puts all the computing power at the forefront for the user’s disposal rather than using it all up for its own thing. It resembles Vista a bit, and was built on the Vista core, but feels less flashy and more modest.  Applications that run on Vista should run on Windows 7, and hardware that runs Vista will run Windows 7. There are also several compatibility options for Windows XP-era applications as well.

One of the goals of Microsoft was to improve the performance from Vista, and they have addressed this by both increasing the speed of the OS and by developing features that help the user operate more efficiently.
Overall, Microsoft worked on providing a fundamentally secure platform, helping secure anywhere access, protecting users and infrastructure, and helping protect data.

There are many new features to explore, but here is a quick bullet point list of some of the highlights:

• Improved desktop search
• Internet Explorer 8 for improved Internet security
• DirectAccess (automatically connect remote workstations to Windows Server 2008)
• BranchCache (used to sync files between corporate and branch offices)
• Improved BitLocker (drive encryption)
• BitLocker To Go (encrypt portable devices such as USB keys)
• Built-in Biometric support
• Improved taskbar
• Improved device management
• Better compatibility for both hardware and software
• Windows Touch (for touch screen enabled monitors)
• Tight integration with Windows Live online services
• Remote media streaming
• PlayTo
• Windows Media Center improvements

Before the Release Candidate was released, Microsoft fixed over 2,000 bugs that were reported by beta testers (including me). With the success of the Release Candidate, I have already decided that I will be upgrading to Windows 7 on both my production workstation and my laptop as soon as it comes to market. I’m not even worried about application compatibility or hardware compatibility as all of my applications already work fine in the RC and anything that runs in Vista should run in Windows 7 with no problems. My computers will feel like new computers again with the performance, reliability, stability, security enhancements that Windows 7 offers over XP or Vista.

Additional Microsoft Resources

Videos: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/videos.aspx
Windows 7 Home: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/default.aspx
New Features: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/whats-new.aspx

My Take on Windows Vista

A lot of people are confused about the transition from Windows XP to Windows Vista, especially since Microsoft has really pushed for Vista despite a rocky, well-published start. In this blog post, I’m going to talk about this very situation and give you my honest take on the whole deal with Windows Vista. Read on!

My Take On Windows Vista

For starters, it has always been my policy to stay away from any new operating system release until at least the first service pack (SP) has been released for that particular OS. I did this back in the days of Windows 98, 2000, and even XP. I held onto Windows 2000 the longest, for at least 4 years, well beyond the time frame of Windows XP’s service pack 1 release. I can even recall how people complained about Windows XP’s flaws and shortcomings when it was first released. I’ve seen reviews of the “new Fisher Price toy operating system that does not offer any new, exciting features over Windows 2000″. However, Windows XP is an exception to Microsoft’s line of operating systems because of the fact that it has been the operating system of choice for over 7 years now (it was released in 2001). As such, it has been patched, re-patched, updated, and is currently at SP3 level. The result of 7 years of Patch Tuesday updates has brought on a rock-solid operating system that millions of users have come to love and appreciate. As an IT tech, computer gamer, and computer hobbyist, it still remains my operating system of choice for myself, friends, family, and clients. I currently run Windows XP on my primary desktop PC as well as my “Tech Station” PC that I use to backup hard drives and serve out files on my network.

My Dell XPS m1330 Laptop Came Preloaded with…

I purchased my new Dell laptop back in November of 2007 preloaded with, you guessed it, Windows Vista. The first service pack was not yet released for Vista at this time, so I actually did break my own golden rule of “wait for SP1″. However, since I am an IT technician, I have to stay on top of the game and keep my knowledge and skills sharp with the latest software and hardware technologies. This was the only reason I chose to get my laptop preloaded with Vista. Despite all of the negative publicity surrounding Vista in terms of performance, stability, and most importantly, compatibility, I personally did not experience any problems whatsoever with my Vista laptop. However, with other clients’ Vista computers, the most common problems I faced were:

• Printer compatibility: Very, very rocky in the beginning. It was nearly impossible to get even a 6 month old printer to work with Vista as drivers were not released. Microsoft had completely changed the printing subsystem, so as a result, it broke a lot of applications’ printing capabilities as well as printers.
• Software compatibility: While Vista does have a “compatibility mode” feature where you can make programs run as if it were installed on Windows XP, for example, they were still flaky and unstable in some cases.
• Learning curve: The user interface of Vista has changed dramatically from XP. It took time for some clients to adjust to the interface. While you can turn off a lot of Vista’s new user interface features, and make it look practically like XP, it’s still a different and unfamiliar way of doing things.
• Performance: Forget about running Vista on less than 2 GB of RAM. You can also forget about running Vista’s Aero interface on a slower, older graphics card. Memory requirements for Windows XP are recommended to be at least 128 MB (512 for even better performance) whereas Vista recommends 1 GB. It’s such a huge leap in memory requirements, but luckily memory upgrades have become dirt cheap.

The Future of Windows XP

Microsoft officially stopped selling Windows XP on June 30, 2008. You can no longer walk into a retail store to pick up a copy of Windows XP. However, the good news is, OEMs like Dell or me can still provide copies of Windows XP on preloaded systems. You can purchase a Dell with a valid Windows Vista license and legally “downgrade” to Windows XP and the computer will come shipped with XP preloaded and ready to go. The same holds true if you want to purchase a PC from me, although there won’t be a Vista software DVD included – only Windows XP.

Windows XP patches and support will continue until the end of 2014, even though sales will officially end, regardless of Dell, OEM, etc, at the end of 2009.

So, in short, we have until Q4 2009 to get our hands on Windows XP but our investment in Windows XP is good ’til 2014.

The Bottom Line: Should We Embrace Windows Vista?

My short answer to that is yes, but only for very specific situations. If you are running brand new hardware and have business applications that do support Vista, then it would be an ideal choice. If you have a relatively new Windows XP computer that has absolutely no problems, then there is certainly no need to upgrade to Vista. You wouldn’t be missing out on anything if you chose not to go to Vista in that case.

In my recent experience with working with Windows XP and loading updated third party software, I have noticed some programs actually get broken with their latest update, since they were “fixed” or “optimized” for Vista. This has happened in some cases with clients’ computers and networks where business applications that were once rock-solid on Windows XP became very buggy and broken due to updates tailored for Vista compatibility. Ouch!

As for me, I love the fact that I’m running Vista on my laptop because it is great with managing battery life, networking/wireless connectivity in multiple locations, and has gotten much, much more stable with SP1. However, I’m not in a hurry to switch my main desktop PC over to Vista anytime soon. In fact, I have decided to hang on to my current setup, as-is, until at least 2010, when Windows 7 is slated to come out. At that time, I will upgrade with totally new hardware that would be more compatible and in line with the requirements of the next generation operating system.

Bill Gates Retires

Microsoft Corp Chairman Bill Gates is stepping down from daily operations at the software maker, to focus on his philanthropic efforts. Go here to see a cool time line of all the major events in the life of Microsoft, the company he co-founded in 1975, and in the Gates’ life.

Microsoft Outlook 2003 Opening and closing e-mail was very SLOW

Until now.

I came across this great post: http://forums.spybot.info/showthread.php?t=11047

I had been searching for an answer to the slowness that I was experiencing with opening and even closing emails with Outlook 2003. Whenever I double-clicked an e-mail message, more so HTML in particular, it would draw the window border on the screen, then approximately 5-10 seconds later finally display the message. VERY annoying since I am a power user with e-mail and expect it to be extremely quick.

What’s interesting to note is I used to have XP Professional with Internet Explorer 6. I also was very diligent in keeping up-to-date with SpyBot Search & Destroy immunization updates as well as SpywareBlaster immunization updates. These two programs add a huge list of known bad websites to IE and FireFox’s blacklists. With XP Pro and IE6 and full immunizations from both programs, I never had an issue with Outlook.

I purchased dual Western Digital Raptor 150GB 10,000RPM drives and decided to wipe the OS and reinstall. I run the Raptors in a RAID-1 setup for maximum redundancy and with the elite Intel SATA Matrix controller, it is extremely fast. I loaded XP Pro again, loaded all security updates, including Internet Explorer 7, loaded Outlook 2003 again, loaded SpyBot and SpywareBlaster with full immunizations. I also switched permanently to FireFox as my main browser. Before, I was dancing around with IE6 and FireFox, mainly using IE6 cuz of the extremely fast load time.

So with this brand new OS reinstall and everything nice and fresh, I one day noticed how slow Outlook 2003 starting behaving. Opening e-mails was taking 5-10 seconds at times. Other times it was extremely quick and instantaneous. I tried EVERYTHING. I tried removing some features during Office’s setup program for Outlook. I trimmed the fat, so to speak. I removed Add-ins such as Adobe PDF, Exchange forms, etc. I really dived in.

Finally, however, I find the solution via http://forums.spybot.info/showthread.php?t=11047

I uninstalled SpyBot and SpywareBlaster completely and immediately noticed an improvement with Outlook. HTML e-mails now open up instantaneously!

Internet Explorer 7 is probably the main culprit however. One client had experienced strange printing behavior where the text was printed out extremely small. It was later determined, after several hours, days, and a couple weeks of random troubleshooting, that it was IE7. A complete uninstall of IE7 was the remedy for the small print problem in her Outlook 2000 and Outlook 2003 emails (I had tried upgrading her to Outlook 2003 to fix the problem).

The moral of the story: Why does Microsoft’s software affect other, almost completely non-related software? IT MAKES NO SENSE!