I am about to get rid of the last Windows Vista installation I have at home. This PC has a dual boot, one of which is Windows 7 RC. I will be removing both of them and install Windows 7 Ultimate on it. To migrate some settings and user data I logged in and saw this message. Well, I probably don’t need a solution for Vista. The Windows 7 RC had been pretty good on this hardware even after  being installed on an inferior hard drive (PATA).

Beta will be out next week. It will have Windows Desktop Search 4.0, Bluetooth 2.1, native Blu-Ray support and WCN (Windows Connect Now).

The Windows 7 blog has a new post on Vista UAC. At the end of it says “we have heard feedback both positive and negative”.

Vista Hater: “Positive? I don’t know if anyone EVER will have any positive feedback on that creepy feature.”

Someone in the crowd: “I do. I like the fact that my kids are not clicking on some link and it installs some spy ware.”

Vista Hater: “Your feedback doesn’t count. Moreover, there are other programs out there that can take care of such things for you.”

Someone: “They may be out there. But I have no time or knowledge to find and install those stuff.”

…

May not be the first version. But I have it on 2 computers now. I installed it only after SP1. Actually I had Vista even before the public beta. But then something changed and it became slower. Vista with SP1 is actually pretty good. I also like my OpenSuse Linux servers. What I don’t have is OSX. It is an annoying product. I am sorry, the OSX users are an annoying group, mostly. Also, Apple doesn’t care about openness, not even as much as Microsoft does.

I do have an iPhone, which is the only Apple product and I hate the fact I have to install and use iTunes for syncing the phone. The whole iTunes bundle is a hog on the system. My friends disable the services installed by Apple and run them only when they want.

Why I am writing this now? Well, I was reading some comments in a blog about the new Vista ads. Comments like Vista is a productivity killer, never works, completely broken.

In my experience the only thing that is broken on my Vista PC is the iTunes. It is a piece of crap. It messed up my music folders. Why does it have to physically move around the files to organize? Also, any time I sync my iPhone with iTunes, I cannot use anything else. It holds the whole computer hostage. Will I evere buy a Mac? Don’t know. Definitely not now. Not with the limited experience I have so far with iTunes and iPhone.

If Microsoft wrote Vista for one single set of hardware, it would have performed way better than any OSX crap. Apple fan boys are glotting over an OS that only runs on an extremely limited hardware set. A friend of mine recently sold his only Apple Macbook on ebay. He was fed up with OSX. All along he was running Vista with bootcamp. What a waste of money to get a Macbook to run Vista. That was about $2400? Now he has a Shuttle box in his living room that costed about $1000 including Vista.

Do I like Microsoft. I used to. Even today I don’t hate them but I am not a fanboy. But I like the Microsoft users. They are the most polite users you will see on any message board or blog comments. No matter what the other OS fanboys say, that is where I like to belong.

Read this PC Mag article. The article begins with saying Microsoft is not helpful. I guess this guy just like to blame Microsoft. The software company that makes this software developed the application for Windows XP. Microsoft did not write Windows Vista to be 100% backward compatible with Windows XP. If they did, it would be much bulkier and would not be a lot better than Windows XP in terms security or other features. I am neither a Microsoft fan nor a hater. I completely dislike people making these kind of baseless claims. They are either completely ignorant and incompetent to do their job or they are just extremely prejudiced.

Windows Vista had one of the longest beta period for any OS coming out of Redmond. Most software developers had enough time to test their software against that OS and Microsoft worked thousands of software vendors to iron out compatibility issues. The maker of this software does not seem to have cared about making this happen. The guy who wrote the article did not ask thatquestion. The guy asks the question to Microsoft. Who is responsible for making the BlackBoard software compatible with Windows Vista? Is it Microsoft or the Vendor?

Another fact about Windows Vista is, all along Microsoft claimed it is a completely new OS built from ground up. What it means is that it is not guaranteed that everything that worked on Windows XP will work on Windows Vista. In my own personal experience, Windows XP SP2 broke a lot of software that worked on Windows XP SP1.

Progress cannot be made if we have to stick to everything old.

By blaming the wrong people for your problems you may limiting your choices.

Click on the image to go to TigerDirect page. This is Vista Ultimate 32 bit full version (OEM) DVD from what I see. Check out for yourself.

Get something better to bash Microsoft. This is a piece of code from “programmers” left over for a long time and has debug code in it. Can cause system crash if exploited. Nothing more. What’s the point. There may thousands other ways to crash any given OS or applicationbecause they are all written by “programmers”. And when it crashes, it is someone else’s fault anyway.

Journalism is so cheap these days these people like to ‘elevate’ every one else to their level cheapness. There are many of them call themselves journalist for copying and pasting from elsewhere. You go to every damn news site and see the damn same news down to the level of same words.

Speaking of Microsoft, the spell cheker in the WordPress editor does not work in IE7. I am more concerned about that than this useless vulnerability report.

We all were mad at Windows XP at one time or the other for not responding to your simple commands like a key click or mouse click and do its own stuff. Well, for me it happens all the time because I load way too many stuff that Windows cannot handle all at the same time. With all advances in hardware and software technology you would expect things to be different in 2007. From what I see, you are out of luck unless someone else start making OS and software. I don’t believe OS X or Linux is better in that respect.

I think there needs to be new generation of software developers who can think about true parallel programming to exploit the power of new multiple core processors from the hardware vendors. I am pretty sure game developers are going to be the first ones to truly explore this area. I know that the academics were already there and mainframe OS developers already did it probably 20-30 years ago or more. I am not going there. I am talking about the PC. Microsoft developers are probably still thinking in Visual Basic terms. Just kidding, but this is totally unacceptable.

My Vista 64 bit system won’t respond to commands while its is busy writing to hard disk or installing some software. Or may be just pop a CD with some images in it in to the CD drive. I have a pretty powerful system that gives me a 4.5 Windows Experience Index (most components are 5.5 and above except for one which is 4.5).

I tried to install the PC Mark 05 updated version that supposedly support Windows Vista. I don’t know if if it works with Windows Vista 32 bit but on 64 bit it failed to run. Installation went without any problem. When I run the application Many tests will run without a problem but the HDD tests will not run. I see the HDD Test Target drop down list empty in the advanced settings.

If I click on the details button it spits out garbled stuff in to the internet explorer as part of my graphics card description as well.

I have installed the same PC Mark 05 on the same machine on the Windows XP partition and it works fine. So, it is definitely not a system configuration issue. It must another Windows Vista 64 bit edition compatibility issue. The world (at least that of the software vendors including Microsoft themselves) is not ready for the 64 bit.

After I successfully restored the complete PC backup, I found that my dynamic disks were empty. This is where I store my media before uploading to my Linux server. Data on Linux server is safe so far. A small amount of media was not uploaded to the Linux server and looked like lost. Right now I am running a disk tool to recover that. I have booted in to Windows XP to run this tool. By the way, I had to use one of my previous postto get Windows XP back to boot options. This tool (R-Studio) is known to be a good data recovery tool. It costs $49 for single user NTFS/Linux partition recovery. You can find more about this tool from their web site. I do not have any past experience with this tool. The demo version correctly showed me the files on the Vista messed disk. The scan is still running for one partition. The disk is 500 GB. So, it might take another 4-5 hours to complete the scanning of all partitions.

Never use dynamic disks. I just read a bunch of horror stories from people who created dynamic disks in Windows and had lost all data or lost money to recover the data. Another expensive lesson.

All my basic partitions on other disks were safe. No harms done. Stick with basic partitions.