The long awaited , update to Vista was released on Tuesday. After my experienced with it, I have to say it is the most painful service pack ever from Microsoft. Remember the times when all you had to do is install the service pack, do one reboot and all is done ? well not anymore. Prepare to leave things overnight , expect it not to install, and take another hour reverting changes, and expect to have no indication of what went wrong. This was my experience while installing Vista SP1.

I downloaded the standalone install, let in install. It goes up to stage 3, and when it is 100% complete, the screen shows "Install was not successful, Reverting changes". This process goes on for about an hour and 2 reboots. The reversal is actually good, it brings back my  system to the pre- SP1 install state. After trying this since Tuesday and getting no where, I took the step of re-installing Vista.

I used the Upgrade option, as not to loose any of my settings or files. I then applied SP1 to this "fresh" installation and it worked !!.  SP1, includes all updates since the Vista release, and I think the setup process gets confused on a Vista system, that is fully patched.

Therefore, the "works-for-me-anecdotal" method to get SP1 to install, is to re-install Vista, and then apply SP1. Do not use windows update after the Vista re-install. Disable any anti-virus  and anti-spyware.

Haven't noticed any major performance improvements yet though. Though it seems a bit faster. Resume from hibernation is noticeably faster. I had issues where the system would hang when resuming. Will wait and see.

Fingers crossed....

I've got my new laptop mostly working my way. Spent last weekend installing all what I need. I skipped VS 2005 and went straight for Orcas. Got most of the applications I need installed. The laptop came with Vista Home. I had to upgrade it to Vista Ultimate before I could do anything useful with it.

The keyboard feels a bit clunky compared to my old laptop. Maybe this is because the keyboard area is larger and the base of the laptop is much thicker. Winamp crashes when trying to play http streams.  Can't figure out yet how to enable Integrated Authentication in IIS 7, to debug web apps with Orcas (works fine with the built-in web server though). Orcas needs to run as administrator. HD content plays well after installing the K-Lite codec pack.

File copy is DEAD slow in Vista. Doesn't seem to be able to re-connect to a wireless network after resuming from hibernation when DHCP is enabled. Haven't had any major show stopper crashes yet. I'll give it a spin for a few more weeks, and probably install XP.

And yes Live Writer froze 3 times while writing this post.

I should be receiving my copy sometime this month. This was for answering a question after the UK  Vista and Office developer launch event. I thought I didn't  win since I didn?t get the email from MS. Yesterday I requested a list of the winners and my name is on the list.  Yippee !!  :)

Ok, now I have to find a laptop to run it, my current laptop is showing its age. In retrospect, I should have entered the Office competition because I would be able to use that on this laptop. 

Update 18-12-2006.

This is no longer an issue, with the final release of Outlook 2007. I don't know where it has been fixed, either on AVG or Outlook.

A very dissappointing development is that, Grisoft has decided to discontinue the free edition of AVG.

There is an e-mail rendering problem with Outlook 2007 Beta 2 when used with the Grisoft AVG Outlook plugin.  AVG certifies each incoming email as safe. This causes Outlook not to render the message body. Outgoing messages are blank too.

The fix is to disable the email scanner. I found that the message bodies of my pre and post AVG emails are readable.

AVG says this is about MS not following standards, no comments from the Office team yet. Hope this is fixed soon, as AVG offers an excellent free , light weight AV solution.

The installation was quite faster than previous Office installs. No glitches, I've installed Beta 2 on both my home and work computers. Now, after installing i fired up Word 2007, and then I was lost. "How do I open a file ?".

The main menu bar (File, Edit etc.. ) was missing. I had to fiddle around a bit to find that the big round button with the Office logo on the top left corner IS the file menu. As usual Office has its own look and feel apart from the OS, but this time MS has taken it even further. Office has its own Themes. Yes, Beta 2 comes with a light blue XP theme, and the black/grey Vista theme. Both themes have the Vista look and feel.

Other than the big UI changes, Word has support for blogging, Beta 2 supports Wordpress, Livejournal, Typepad blogs. dasBlog and .Text blog support will be added in a future version. I cant add new blog entries, but I can modify existing posts. This in my opinion is a major feature, because the blog editors out there do not have the spell checking features of Word.

There are no major UI changes in Outlook, as in Word, everything looks mostly the same. There is the To-Do bar on the side, and support for RSS feeds. Task management is much more nicer and I can organize them by tasks due next week, this week, no due date etc.. with just a right click. Outlook now has inline spell checking, no need to hit F7. Everything went well on my office computer, but Outlook 2007 does not read any of my e-mails on my laptop. The message body is blank. Hope it didn’t bork my emails !!. Another cool feature in Outlook is the message attachment preview. Word, Excel and images can be previewed in the message preview pane itself.

If  you want a FTP login to change to a directory upon login heres what to do.

Create a vritual directory or directory with the same name as the user login

If the user login is john, create a directory under the FTP root named "john". On logging in john will access ftp:///ftp.myserver.com/john.

After adding an extra 1 GB of RAM, I found that my laptop will not hibernate. This is a bug in Windows XP. A bit of Googling got me here;

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=909095

However, the fix is not available for download yet. You have to call MS support and they will email the fix. I somehow got the patch. Download it here, extract the file to a folder and install.

I was reading a blog post on blogs.msdn.com about why each version of VS is tied to a version of the runtime, and the reasons why multiple versions of the runtime are not supported. Anyways I can't find the link :).

For VS 2005, an add-in is under development to build under 1.1.  Targetting the latest version of  .Net is viable for server side projects (ASP .Net etc..). However, for client applications this is not always possible.  The majority of Windows computers will now have the 1.1 Framework, so applications can be deployed without worrying too much about distributing a 20 MB runtime. It will probably take about 6 months to a year for the same thing to happen to the 2.0 Framework. Untill then, those developing for 1.1 are still stuck with an IDE that rewrites code, makes controls disappear and other magical stuff that makes one tear their hair out.

On the same topic, where can I find statistics on what percentage of Windows machines have what version of the runtime. Internet Explorer sends the .Net version on the UA string, so it might be possible to measure the usage of 2.0 versus 1.1 This should be easy for MS to pull up from their web server logs and publish the stats :)..

http://www.konfabulator.com/

All I can say is download and check it out, pretty cool addes those cool things to your destop till Longhorn (eh Vista) is released.

http://www.rojakpot.com/default.aspx?location=3&var1=143&var2=0

A very helpful article to optimize your Windows system. I've tried the suggestions on my Windows XP Pro laptop. There is a significant and noticeable difference now. Diskeeper is required to defragment the hard drive and the page file. A trial version of Diskeeper is available.

The article provides a good explanation of Windows memory fundamentals. A free page file defragmentation utility is available from Sysinternals.

This is what I have done to my system (Intel Centrino 1.6 GHz, 512 MB RAM, 60GB).

1. Install Diskeeper, and defragment the hard disc.
2. Check the page file usage using the taskmanager performance tab. Monitor the max size under normal use(Outlook, winamp, OneNote,Word, Visual Studio,Opera,Azureaus).
3. In the virtual memory settings, set the initial size to 512 MB and the maximum size to 768MB. 
4. Use Diskeeper to defragment the page file at the next boot.
5. Schedule Diskeeper to run regularly.