After having a lot of compatibility issues between Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 and Stardock Object Desktop, I installed Windows XP x64 edition. This is so far working OK. I have a bunch of issues with Object Dock though. Definitely not designed with secure computing in mind.

Today I was trying to download the beta from Adobe using IE7 64 bit edition. Since I did not have an adobe id, I needed to create one. On the first page I entered my email id, check the button that says “create one” and clicked the next page button. IE says it cannot display the page. I tried several times before I installed the already downloaded copy of Opera. Opera is not perfect. I am having trouble right now with wordwrap in opera.

But it did not have a problem registering at adobe and downloading the beta. I went back to IE7 and I still have the same problem. So, it was not a temporary problem with adobe site.

Remember, this is a problem with IE7 64 bit edition. Have not tried with IE7 32 bit edition.

If you plan to use Outlook 2007, you need an extremely powerful computer and capability to kill it from outside of Windows. I have a Core 2 Duo E6700 desktop with 3 GB RAM and 1 TB hard drive. It is not good enough for Outlook 2007. I configured it to get POP3 for my gmail account and for my hotmail account. Nothing else. Every time I open it, after about a minute, my computer stops responding. If I don’t load Outlook 2007, there is no problem.

There is a bunch of other applications and services running on my computer. SQL Server 2005 runs without any problem. When I look at it, SQL Server 2005 uses far less resources than Outlook 2007. Funny thing is, once the system becomes too slow or unresponsive, not even task manager will come up. The system is not hanging because the mouse cursor responds and alt tab works. My only recourse is to press the reset button. Than god, the motherboard makers still have control over the hard reset.

Do you use any version of Outlook? Open the task manager and add the memory usage to the columns displayed. Now sort the list by memory usage and see where Outlook stands. Most probably that is the most memory consuming application on your desktop. Now add the number of threads to the display and sort and see which application uses most number of threads. Outlook probably uses 50 or more threads. For doing what?

I am glad that Linux desktops are becoming more and more user friendly. I was surprised by the quality of Open SuSE 10.2. It is well beyond Windows XP. May be not as good as Vista in looks. But If you are satisfied with the looks of XP and crave more security and freedom, jump to Open SuSE 10.2. I do not have a clean install of Open SuSE 10.2, it is just a patch on top SuSE Linux 10.1. I am impressed by that. I don’t know if there will be more enhancements if I did a clean install. This one runs on a pretty old Intel Pentium 4 machine and responds pretty well. I have not used Office applications on this machine because I use it as server rather than as a workstation. It looks like I will be slowly switching to Linux. Sorry Mac fans, I am not fan of extreme propriety hardware and software. Microsoft is good enough if I have to use propriety stuff.

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).

Some are calling it vaporware. Is it really vaporware? Just because it got delayed a few times doesn’t mean that it is vaporware. Vaporware is something a company claims to exist or in development but no one has seen anything. Here we are at Vista Beta 2 and beyond. Almost anyone could get a copy of it and install and see how it looks, behaves and performs. As far as I am concerned  this is not vaporware. This is a tangible product.

Now as far as the quality and features concerned, I am not that impressed. Especially with the quality. Then again, it is still a product in the development stage. They will have to tweak it a lot to perform better. There are not many device drivers available right now. An example is Logitech. They do not seem to have a road-map for Vista drivers. You will not see any mention of Vista on their web site. Audio drivers from Realtek works most of the time. It is a pain to get that driver installed. The ATI driver is one that worked perfectly and never crashed.

One of the interesting thing is the new gaming platform called XNA that will allow you to play the same game on Vista and Xbox 360. New Windows media player has fresh look and improved features but still doesn’t have DVD playback capability. Are they expecting HD-DVD movies to be ready and popular by the time Vista comes out?

As usual the is initial version of Vista going to be buggy and you need to wait for SP1 to get a reliable one? May be. But even with that kind of quality, it may be a lot secure than XP. You may want to upgrade just for security reasons. You can sacrifice all that fancy Aero theme to gain some performance.

One way to upgrade Vista is to upgrade from your existing XP. I did this and the performance was really bad on a powerful computer. I am not sure what the reason is, but it could be the XP drivers running in some secure mode that is causing this sluggishness. I did a fresh install on the same computer and Vista was flying. Everything looked good except for the fact that there were many missing drivers.

The new start menu is a pretty good concept. I don’t know if they copied it from somewhere else. The XP start menu idea was good when it came out but it got cluttered pretty soon. One of the things you must always do in a UI concept is to put a lot of data and see how it looks and works. If your testing involves only a few data items, you will definitely hit the wall as soon as you release it. Features like start menu cannot be modified during every patch. Those need to be well thought out tested with lots of data. The key is lots of data.

Internet explorer is still the bad bloat in Vista. They should have paid more attention to it. They were just responding to the Firefox threat by adding features on top of the existing bloat that takes forever to load takes up the precious system resources.

Will I upgrade to Vista? Yes, if I can afford the Ultimate Edition.