unixwiz

The lastest Get A Mac ad sums up my feelings about vista.

Funny, M$ Winders, MacOSX Funny, M$ Winders, MacOSX

We got our copy of Windows Vista at work the other day. So I decided to see just how well my Sun Ultra 20 M2 would run it. Needless to say, the Ultra 20 M2 only scored a 5.2 out of 10 on the Microsoft User Experience scale (it’s built in thingy).. That is pretty bad considering it has a Quadro FX 1500 Graphics Accelerator, 1 Dual-Core AMD Opteron – Model 1218, 2 GB of ram, and 2 x 250 GB SATA harddrives. It does run the Aero interface, but every time you open a window or any of those special effects happen it pegs the CPU at between 30 and 40%. Chris tried it on his Ultra 20 (original version), and it would only scored a 2.X and would not run the Aero interface. But now I am stuck with Vista on the machine (which also has Solaris 10 and XP on it) since Vista some how hosed my XP installation. So I will now list my complaints about it:

1. Install took 3 reboots to install. You would think that since it is delivered on DVD, that it would only need 1 boot, and then you are done.
2. Too many popup’s. Every time you download a program to install, or try to run something it constantly asks are you sure you want to run this?
3. You can not set Firefox as the default browser. I tell Firefox every time it starts to make it the default browser, and as soon as you close it IE becomes the default again. I even changed it in the Default Program’s settings in Windows and it never sticks.
4. During the Install it asks you to create an account, this account is automatically given Administrator rights still, and even with Admin rights it still keeps asking you all the questions.
5. Before I changed the start menu to the classic mode, I clicked what I thought was the “shutdown” icon. The machine immediately went to sleep. It took me unplugging the power from the machine to get it to boot right again. I think this is how they are trying to say that Vista boots so fast, when it never really is booting just resuming from hibernate mode.
6. The desktop icons are either freakishly huge or small and crappy, no real in between.
7. The pop-ups, did I mention that already, I will get screen shots later, but they are so annoying
8. The constant popping/fading of windows. Every time an application opens a new window it will pop and fade in/out. How annoying..
9. Activation failed every time with some “DNS” error.. Ended up going in and clicking on the “Change Product Key” and typing the same product key in and it all of the sudden said it was activated.
10. Control Panel is almost completely different, new names for old stuff
11. Logging, take a look in the system log stuff and see all the stuff that it logs, install Office 2007 and see any more of what is logged.

Overall I am not impressed at all. If you put it besides Mac OS X, it is trying to mimic everything, but is so badly done that it requires a huge machine to run it on.

And if you did not see The Daily Show last night on Comedy Central, John Stewart was interviewing Bill Gates about Vista, it was a very funny interview and John kept trying to get Bill’s password out of him. Sorry Bill but this is one OS i will not be installing on my home PC.

(N.B. The version of Windows Vista I was using was the Enterprise Edition.)

Funny, M$ Winders, Rant, Work Funny, M$ Winders, Rant, Work

Why does MS Windows still use drive letters when every other OS in the world does not? I don’t have a clue, but it made me lose EVERYTHING on my iPod tonight.. I went to sync up some new songs to it and to charge it up (havn’t done it in a while) and every time I connected the iPod, iTunes would say that it detected a iPod in recovery mode and that I needed to “restore” it and update the firmware. What is weird is it played fine, so I could not figure out what was wrong, but since it had been in my bag for about 2 months with out any attention maybe something got borked so I said what the heck and told it to restore it. (Which wipes everything off of my ipod.) So I finish the little process and now iTunes still says that the iPod is in restore mode. So I went to google and looked around and found This Apple info doc. The key and what pissed me off the most is this:

If after restoring your iPod, the message described above reappears, the iPod drive letter may need to be reassigned.

See the “Change the Drive Letter” section of this document for steps to assign a different drive letter.

Why on earth couldn’t they have made their error message a little more descriptive in iTunes.. So I go in and the iPod wanted to use the H drive for some reason. That drive is in use by a network share from my Solaris 10 machine. So I changed the iPod to use I drive and now it works fine.. What sucks is now I have to reload all my music on to it. So I guess what this is about is, if you have an iPod and are using iTunes on Windows and get that error. Check your drive letters before you restore it, it might save you a ton of work. The other thing, drop windows and just move to a mac, which is what I am going to do with my iPod now.

Interesting, M$ Winders, MacBook Pro, Random Stuff, Rant, iTunes Interesting, iTunes, M$ Winders, MacBook Pro, Random Stuff, Rant

This afternoon, Justin and I decided to take a fresh installation of Windows XP and see if we could “junk” it up like some students do with tool bars, spyware, and ad ware. To say the least, we found it hard to find some of the stuff we wanted to install, but we did get a lot installed. (The whole point for this exercise was to test our student portal system because we have had reports from students that stuff does not work right. So we decided to put everything we could on a machine to see what all would break it.) So here is a screen shot of our Windows XP machine with some tool bars installed (click on it to get the bigger version).

We only found one so far that actually prevented us from doing stuff. It was the one that has the “CleanMyPC” line. Once we disabled it’s popup blocker everything worked fine.

As for what we installed, here is a list not in any particular order:

• Google Toolbar
• Yahoo Toolbar
• Alexa Toolbar
• Viewpoint Toolbar
• AOL Toolbar
• Dogpile Toolbar
• Search Hippo Toolbar
• Norton Internet Security (30 day trial from Yahoo)
• Weatherbug
• The Weather Channel toolbar and desktop
• Hotbar
• Newest AOL IM client
• SideStep Side bar (not in this picture)

Needless to say after we installed SideStep and went to Travelocity to do a search, Internet Explorer just went away. No error messages, No “send this bug to MS” messages, just vanished. We also had it at one point where the actual viewable web portion of the screen was about only 1 inch high. So now we are looking for what the students have actually installed so we can see if we can reproduce what is on their machines.

Funny, Interesting, M$ Winders, Work Funny, Interesting, M$ Winders, Work

if you haven’t seen them on the tv already, there are 3 new Apple Mac tv ad’s. I was joking with a co-worker today that Apples new slogan should be:

An Apple a day keeps Dr. Watson away

For those who don’t know what Dr. Watson is, it is a program error debuger for Windows.

If Apple had a contest for new slogans I wish I could enter this to win something ..

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