My Evening with Vista

That is not a typo, i did not have dinner with Andre or even an Andre action figure but spent the evening playing around with Microsoft Vista.

How did it start?

Well, i got Vista with my laptop as part of the infamous 'vista capable' program and hated it - slow, annoying, ugly. So I switched the dell laptop to Ubuntu and it has been happy ever since. This weekend i decided to clean out the storage room with ideas of turning it into a guest room or playroom for Liam this summer. There were two dell machines there that i thought i should probably sell at least one of them. They are:

Machine #1 - Dell Precision 470
Dual Xeon 3.2Ghz processors, 4gig ram, ATI Radeon 2400 pro 256mb pci-e

Machine #2 - Dell Precision 450
Single Xeon 3.2Ghz processor, 1 gig ram, Nvidia Quadro FX 128mb agp

I had installed ubuntu 8.10 on the 470 and it ran fine but the HP evo dual xeon box runs so well that there is no need for a faster machine. No stimulus spending required for Linux. A ran across the vista home premium cd and decided to install it for a lark. Removed the 1.5 terabyte hard drive and replaced it with a spare 320gig IDE drive. Stuck in the Vista cd and booted.

The Install

Went pretty smoothly with a couple of reboots and then Vista started. Put in the serial number and activated. The aero rendering is quite good, very similar to osx or ubuntu, in face the color scheme reminded me of Suse. so how did it do with the hardware?

ATI video card - Installed as generic vga compatible
Sound card - no driver with vista cd so not working
Network - detected and working

I tried the search for drivers function but it just spun its wheels for a while. So then i started the update manager and downloaded lots of updates. This process led to the system detecting the ATI radeon card. I also went off to the ati web site and downloaded and installed the latest driver. Then something interesting happened - vista seemed to realize the sound card was not working and added it as a 'task' to its list of things to do. It went off and scoured the net for a dell/intel integrated audio driver and installed it. This was impressive and a very good idea. Computer systems should be self-healing, to know when hardware is not working and to fix it. One of the big annoyances with XP is the countless hours searching, installing and configuring drivers manually. I'm no big fan of Microsoft because of they way they treat their customers, but this was impressive.

I then decided to upgrade the video card so pulled the ATI and put in a Nvidia 8600GT. The result was a return to the vga compatible setting and back to the net to find the nvidia vista driver and after installing it to take the machine for some speed tests.

How Fast is It?

I dragged a cpu and ram meter to the widgets or gadgets area so i could keep an eye on things while i did stuff. The ram meter rarely budged beyond 25% but the cpu meter frequently red lined around 100% when installing software or drivers or doing other stuff - which meant the machine was basically frozen - similar to doing large file copy operations on XP. This is something i had forgotten as a Linux/OSX user with all dual cpu machines - the os is always responsive, which makes the whole experience seem faster as you are never made to wait.

I wondered about this so i did the ctrl-alt-del to look at the task manager and check the performance. Lo - there were only 2 'cpus' listed when Linux showed 4. It turns out the Vista home editions are crippled - they do not support more than 1 cpu, rendering those versions unwanted in my home.

Next i tested the Windows Vista Experience Index which gave good scores except for the video card which it listed as the lowest level a 1. This is impossible, the 8600 is a fast card. The windows help suggested 'refreshing' the index which i did twice with no change. Why?

It turns out there is a 'feature' in Vista or a bug that causes this when you change the hardware, the index never gets refreshed. The solution was to goto:

%SYSTEMROOT%\Performance\WinSat\DataStore

and delete all the files in the folder and re-run the index and now we get 4.9 and 5.3 for the graphics index (with the nvidia setting set to best looking at the expense of performance). Eye-candy trumps speed! And the areo eye-candy is very, very good. Windows has finally caught up to Linux and OSX!

Switch the Drive

One thing i wanted to test is the common windows problem of switching drives or computers. The solution is usually to re-install the operating system which is a hoot to long-time mac users. Anyway, i pulled the 320 gig hard drive from the 470 and put it in the dell 450 - which is almost functionally the same machine but this one only had a single cpu.

Booted and Vista came up and detected all the hardware (as the drivers were already there) and rebooted twice. The only problem is a message that says you have 3 days to activate. We had already activated on the old machine but it seems to have forgotten. Doesn't microsoft ever think that people upgrade or switch computers regularly? Ask their fricking employees.

Anyway let's try it. We click activate and it says we have to use the automated phone system. This should be fun - should we use the dial phone in this room? Bet it won't work - doesn't microsoft know that some users have dial phones? So we grab a touchpad phone.

Well that was a 'fun' 6 minutes. Why make it so hard for a licensed customer? I'm sure those who pirate the program don't have to listen to a relentlessly perky robo-attendant just to use a product they bought.

Anyway we are now activated. I'll drag the cpu meter to the sidebar to see how vista does with only 1 gig. The ram meter is at 43% with IE loaded and the system does not feel sluggish at all.

Summary

Install - not bad. Too many reboots but fairly smooth and some impressive new features. I give it 4 out of 5.
Looks - impressive rendering, seems well integrated. 5/5
Other - no dual cpu support, poor backwards compatibility, stupid product activaction. I give it 2/5. Microsoft could learn a thing from Apple about taking care of their customers. For example:

- When i had an SE/30 mac and apple went to the powerPC architecture my programs still ran while vendors re-wrote their applications
- When i had a G3/350 running OS9 and apple introduced OSX i could still run my classic programs. In fact, many years later my dual G5 box still runs Civilization - Call to Power (which also runs on an 040 mac!). I did not have to pay for a new program when the OS changed.
- Now that apple has switched to Intel cpu's, the older powerPC applications still run while vendors re-write native programs.

The point is that Apple took care of its customers through all of those upgrades but Microsoft forgot about it's customers - why did they not provide an XP emulation layer with Vista using a VM. This would provide users time to make the switch from old and crappy XP that works with what you got and new shiny Vista that doesn't. Windows 7 is XP to Vista's ME so it will be a success but people don't forget when they have been screwed. Microsoft should have been listening to their customers instead of the record and movie companies.

Business 101 - don't get in the way of the customer!