Ok, I know the Service Pack 1 is out and you’re watching it download like a giddy little schoolgirl, but this is a beefy piece of software that should not be applied lightly, especially if you were stupid enough to install release candidates on a production system.

First, backup.

Second, read this blog.

Third, wait. Let someone else blow themselves up first

Then I guess it’s safe to install Conveniently enough, it’s on Windows Update.

One of the most shameful things you can do in IT (short of locking your boss in a data center cage) is having someone show you a really simple solution to your collosal problem… especially if you’ve spent days doing it the wrong way and cannot figure out how to do it right.

So on Friday I’m listening my folks chatter about Network Connections and what a pain the new Control Panel in Vista is. First you have to go to the control panel. Then you have to go to Network panel. Then to Network and Sharing Center. Finally, click on Manage Network Connections. Finally you’re at the screen where you can actually do something. 

Vlad: “Why don’t you just make a shortcut?”

So here is this big secret. Vista has friendly (read: designed for Mac idiots) paths in its explorer windows. Instead of showing you  a path it shows a dynamic navigation bar so you can quickly move throughout the entire hiearchy without clicking back/forward. Though, if you click on any inactive part of the field the path the field goes back to plain full path and gets highlighted. Copy it, paste into a new shortcut and you’re done!

Remember this simple advice when dealing with Vista: If something is starting to look too difficult, you’re thinking too much. Vista was designed to make users too stupid for Windows XP more efficient in getting around areas of Windows they should not be in to begin with. Now when they do make significant configuration changes it will be that much more difficult to troubleshoot. Though to take the other side, something needed to be done with the control panel: there were too many places that needed to be checked, too many boxes and screens to review, too many options. Is the new control panel in Vista a worth-while upgrade or just an annoyance for people that should be in the control panel in the first place? Only time will tell.

Like it or not we are entering the age of Vista and with it comes the inevidable 64bit age. I’ve discussed this in some detail perviously but nearly every processor you can get on the market is 64bit. The only current downside is the driver support for peripherals. For example: HP’s most popular consumer HP Color Laser line for two years running has no 64bit drivers and no intention of coming out either. Unsupported.

But what are computer manufacturers considering to be the biggest upgrade driver with Vista? They are betting on graphics and storage. For example, as little as a year ago the predominant feature on the coming motherboards were still generic audio chipsets, 2 SATA + 2 IDE ports and if you’re lucky 1 PCI-E port.

Today and going forward? Take a look. 6 channel audio. 6 SATA-2 ports with RAID5 support. 3 PCI-E ports, one at 16x. It is clear that the bet being made in the Vista age will be on the media. Big on fast graphics, big on audio and very big on storage.

Last month Microsoft and CompUSA announced a joint effort to launch Vista under Volume Licensing. A misleading headline “CompUSA to Offer Early Sales of Vista” drew a lot of heat from VARs and consultants that went into the traditional anticompetitive manpile and shouted South Park’s “they took r jobs!” slogan as it appeared that retailers would once again get a competitive edge.

And man did they make the most out of this advantage. CompUSA created a launch that would make Jimmy Joe Bob’s Bait & Computer Shop proud. Talk about style points! They dragged out the finest lunch table from the break room, put that 26pt Times New Roman on some flourescent paper, covered it with some Microsoft trifolds and voila…

I am sorry about the blurry shot, I just couldn’t hold the camera steady enough as I laughed at this launch. At least they kept it real “Vista – Slightly more popular than our CompUSA branded CD Jewel Cases”

At least they didn’t squirt this one..

As I have written before, Own Web Now is doing an experimental launch of Office 2007 and Vista to 1000 US customers. We’re basically providing our client’s main technology driver and early adopter a chance to test Vista and Office on adequate hardware and make an educated decision on whether Vista/Office are worth-while for their business based on actual experience not speculative pundants and grapevine commentary.

The results so far are not promising, not promising at all. Among the chief complaints are:

• UAC – Users hate User Access Control and rightfully so, Microsoft did a poor job stealing this technology from Unix. You see, in Unix the su and sudo commands allow you to either permanently or temporarily execute commands on behalf of a root (“Administrator”) user for administrative purposes. By executing a sudo followed by a command, user can execute a single command, similar to Windows /runas. By executing su the user can gain administrative rights for the session and operate as a superuser. This has been an elegant way of doing administration on Unix for decades. Enter Microsoft and their innovation. They implemented the exact same concept of elevated privileges except every time you want to do something as an Administrator you have to click to approve access. No way to save settings for the length of the session so if you’re installing a new piece of hardware you’ll have to click approve a few dozen times to get anything done. It is easy to see why people hate UAC and so far it has been the #1 reason people have asked to be taken off Vista. I have personally walked several people through the disabling of UAC.
• Office Ribbon. Customers are initially very excited with the new Office interface. However, after a few days of use they start to want to go back to Office 2003. The reason? Interface is too prohibitive to allow them to do the tasks they are used to — efficiently. We have proposed building custom ribbons, adding commands and reconstructing the previous look and feel for them. Then we encountered many plugins and addins that no longer worked with Office 2007 and a surprisingly high margin of people has realized just how effective Office 2003 happens to be. Personally, I cannot believe Microsoft did not think to include “classic” interface as an option.
• Vista Effects – Oh they love to see them. Honestly, for the first few days the users cannot get enough of the eye candy that is Vista. Even the one button launch functionality from the keyboard is getting rave reviews. However, thats when the honeymoon ends. Users start to complain about the slowness and lack of responsiveness to some actions. I addressed this issue personally with a local client – and they are not “slower” but they are more animated. For example, windows fade in and out of the view. Same speed, but that half a second that people like to use to review documents or compare things side by side is really irritating our customers.

So far the experience across the board has been similar. Here are the stages of Vista/Office adoption:

1. Acknowledgment - “They finally did something to make me more productive instead of same ol’”
2. Admission - “I have to say, I love it, I can’t believe how smooth it is!”
3. Denial - “Really, it won’t work with Vista? I have to click on it every time?”
4. Anger - “I can’t believe this is so slow. I can’t handle clicking on 3 menus just to format my spreadsheet.”
5. Acceptance - “I can’t believe how good we have it on XP. We won’t be upgrading…”

…

So dear J Allard.. I would love to see you make me eat my words and fix the above pain points before Vista/Office 2007 becomes generally available and your arrogance puts both Microsoft and Microsoft Partners out of billions of dollars. No, those are not fighting words, those are the facts as my fellow partners and customers see them.

On the servers, yes.

On the Windows workstations and peripherals, not quite.

There has been a fair bit of discussion on whether we are ready for 64bit platforms and more to the point, are we building systems that can power the coming 64bit wave of Exchange and Longhorn?

On the server side the response has been a resounding yes. Many have pointed out that 64bit processors such as Opteron have been out since 2003. You can also note that all Dell entry-level Pentium and Xeon servers are 64bit.

So we are 64bit capable. But are we ready for 64bit?

Not quite. Lack of drivers. Lack of support. Most of all, lack of faith among the early adopters. Nearly everyone that went to 64bit Windows XP has regretted it and most have rolled back to the 32bit edition. The trend with Vista is not pretty either. Many have complained about the lack of 64bit optimization in Vista, claiming that the Pentium-D class systems ran significantly faster in the 32bit than 64bit editions.

Drivers are perhaps the biggest complaint. They are not getting any better. For example, not a single modern printer in my house has a 64bit driver.

Who will gamble on 64bit?

Not Microsoft, they will sell the workstation OS regardless of the platform. No Dell, they aren’t stupid enough to flood their support lines with unhappy customers that just bought a brand new Dell and cannot use any of their older peripherals. Not the OEM manufacturers, they of all have the least budget and interest to support a microscopic market share. Don’t believe me? Ask Macintosh users about how many peripherals worked with them in the 3–7% market share days. Ask Donald Becker why he had to write nearly every network driver in Linux. Ask Redhat why they had to bend over backwards and deal with sellout criticism when they shipped kernels with modules that simply could not be compiled from source. You get my drift, OEM’s are going to be looked at for drivers but they have traditionally not been the leader. As a matter of fact, OEM model is in the exact opposite direction — they rush to ship the product with drivers that “work” and only after the adoption rate falls below the RMA rate do they start to fix the issues.

Grim scenario indeed.

So we are 64bit capable. We just aren’t ready.

The following comes courtesy of Tom Anderson of Business Information Systems. He went through with the Vista Business Upgrade and below are his remarks. Thanks for sharing Tom and hopefully everyone will find it useful.

OK, I have worked through my first use of the Vista Business Upgrade. Here is what I have discovered thus far:

1.      I ordered the user license from my distributor. After receiving the license information, I went to the eopen site accepted the license and downloaded Vista Business Upgrade. I selected .iso format (only choice).

2.      After the download completed, I notice that the extension on the file was .img and not .iso. After some assistance from the board, I renamed the file with the .iso extension. I then used Nero to burn the image to DVD.

3.      My question in the beginning was whether or not you could boot from the DVD and install to a wiped disk. Well, the answer is Yes you can. The DVD is bootable and Vista installs like a charm. I simply told it I wanted to do a clean install and it handled everything from there. In less than 20 minutes, I had a fully functional machine.

4.      What really surprised me in the beginning is that I was never asked for the Product Key, but after some investigation I get the notion that this takes place during the Activation process. Can anyone confirm this?

Spent the last day or so going through the process of Vista rollouts on our development systems and I thought I’d give you an honest take on the changes from RC2 to RTM that went live on MSDN and Connect last night.

The Good: Vista, Aero & Performance

• Performance: Microsoft really optimized Vista, full Aero runs on entry level video cards. I have so far tested it on the laptop and the PC and with all features enabled the system performs admirably even with the integrated video cards.
• Laptop: Dell Inspiron 6000 with ATI X300 with Vista Ultimate x32. System “Windows Experience Rating” rated at 1.7 with the graphics performance ranked at 2.4. The system performs very well but can get choppy with full screen video. 
• Desktop: AMD Athlon x64 3200 with NVIDIA 6100 with Vista Ultimate x64. System “Windows Experience Rating” rated at 2.8 with the graphics performance ranked at 2.8. The processor and memory speed (not capacity) really trump the laptop in terms of Windows Experience rating but the video ranking is almost the same.
• Stability: Rock solid, 0 blue screens, 0 crashes during setup, 0 crashes in networking setup, 0 timeouts on the core components and flawless integration with the registration site, activation and else.

The desktop has less ram but it is significantly faster ram. The desktop also has an integrated video card with no dedicated memory while the laptop has dedicated video memory. The result: desktop outperforms the laptop handily even under heavy graphics load.

Conclusion: Ever since the famous “640k ought to be enough for anybody” fake quote from Bill Gates one tradition still alive with Vista is: you better get a lot of ram. Initially when we first started testing Vista the general advice was to be prepared to spend a lot of money on the video adapter (get at least 256MB DDR dedicated to video) but as you can tell from the numbers above that is simply not going to be a requirement for business computing. While gamers always live on the edge, businesses will do quite alright with the integrated video controllers even with all the Aero goodness.

So Vista team…. again, congratulations. After about 12 hours of uptime I’m extatic.

The Bad: Microsoft Office 2007

I hate to do this at the launch but Office 2007 appears to have been rushed and so far I am only going to talk about Outlook since thas what I live in. The stability is nowhere near 2003 levels and despite working through several crashes the experience on the laptop and on the desktop is in line with the B2TR (Beta 2 Technical Refresh) code. The configuration and setup are done remarkably well but the overall experience of hanging, crashing, timing out, lack of responsiveness makes this for a very bad experience for a released product.

So right now Vista good, Office Outlook 2007 bad… will update as I make more headway.

Just a heads up, Microsoft Vista DVD (full release) is now available on MSDN’s web site.

Gentlemen, start your leeching.

Update: As of 9:14 AM EST: “None of the MSDN subscribers are able to obtain a Vista product key. They are working on that.” According to Microsoft MSDN Support line (800) 759–4744

It has been a while since I’ve written a technical article and my Vista laptop reminded me tonight just how much the Windows Update process has improved. Not very earth shattering on the surface, but very elegant and streamlined to put most of the functionality at the fingertips. Click on the images to zoom in.

The first, and most important, change that I cannot actually show you was the one reminding me that there is an update available. Consumers and businesses do not have a special mark on their calendar for “Second Tuesday” and most never bother to click on the link to install Windows security updates. Most even ask me: “Should I install those?” I have to say I cannot blame them, have you seen a workstation lately? It has at least five items all screaming to be enabled, upgraded, patched, refreshed or looked at. I can say with a small level of certainty that the lower right hand corner of the screen has permanently been placed out of focus for many Windows users because of its continuous annoyance.

Vista, to its credit, makes the availability of the security patch front and center. Mine came with a large yellow bar asking me to update my Windows Vista. Nice touch. When I clicked on it I was taken directly to the Control Panel for Windows Update. As you can tell, it is quite clear as to what is important and why:

“Always install the latest updates to enhance your computer’s security and performance”

Now you can actually see the available updates in full detail by clicking on View available updates.

Check the ones you wish to install and click on the Install button.

You’re presented with a license to install updates. Still a bug there, as you can tell the textbox only has vertical scroll although the license text itself continues to roll on. They either need to turn on the wrapping in the text area or add in a horizontal scrollbar. On the plus side, you can print the license agreement.

Click on Finish and the update process gets started.

If you want to look at the details “Click to view progress.” cloud does give quite a bit of details. It gives you an idea of your current patching process. Mine for example is set to apply updates at 3:00 AM automatically. I can see my update history and literally everything related to patching in Vista off the single control panel. Very slick.

Ahh… watching the security patch on a beta system… we’ve certainly made it far.

And we’re finished!

Just to check, let me see which updates I have made:

Every now and then you will have to roll back a patch, this will not change with Vista. In the past you had to go through the Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs panel, check the box to show updates and then navigate down to the KB article. As you can tell from the above the accessibility has really improved.

And the screen we all hope we never have to see is very interesting as well. It groups into categories (Organize dropdown) so you can quickly find your program and uninstall the problematic patch.

Not earth shattering but I dig it. The entire process seems thought through and presented in a way that a user will get more information on their fingertips without being overloaded with unnecessary details that would discourage patching.