Au-Revoir Windows 7

Or should that be "à bientôt"? I've replaced my test version of Windows 7 with my original Vista installation. I've not had any specific problems with Windows 7, in fact the whole experience has been really good. It is just that there are a few things I want to do which don't work too well on Windows 7. I can't get the Cloud development environment to work for some reason, and I'd like to have back the buttons on my MacBook.

I'm leaving 7 on the tiny tablet though, the performance hike is something that I really appreciate on that device.  If you have a machine that chugs a bit under Vista then you should think seriously about moving onto Windows 7.

I used the restore option to put back the Vista image I made a while back before I went out to PDC. I always image my machine before I take it out and about, and so all I had to do was drop back the documents directory and I'm back up to date. Oh, that and install a whole bunch of updates....

The restore option worked really well. I just left the machine for an hour or so and when it rebooted I was back in the past.

Windows 7 Looks Lovely

I vividly remember writing blog posts about how much I liked the look of Windows Vista. I also vividly remember the torrid times I've had with hardware that didn't work and computer manufacturers who had plain lied when they labelled their machines "Vista Capable". More like Vista Culpable I reckon.

So, I will ask you, dear reader, to bear all this in mind while I wax lyrical about Windows 7....

It does look nice though. It seems to reflect a "back to basics" approach where Microsoft have taken the things that are important to the user (it works and goes fast) and put them right back at the forefront of the development. And the new bits that they have added seem to be genuinely useful as opposed to pretty.


Steven Sinofsky and friend showing off Windows 7

Some things that have irritated me for ages seem to have been fixed, and the new bits look really nice.

Today we got a pre-beta of the operating system as part of "The Goods" package that they give out (which also includes a spiffy hard disk with lots of stuff on it) and, having chatted with a Microsoft chap at one of the Hands On Labs, I reckon I'm just going to put it on all of my machines and see what happens. I don't think I'll be disappointed.

Doing the Impossible with Vista

I put Service pack 1 on another machine today. It was the media PC I built a while back and use it for watching the odd telly program. The upgrade took ages. There was much hard disk rattling and everything moved as if in treacle. I wasn't very impressed to be honest, in fact after the upgrade everything seemed to have slowed right down, even simple things like opening up the browser took over a minute. Very poor. Then one program claimed that there was not enough memory for it to run, which was a strange thing for it to say on a one gig machine with nothing else loaded.

Except that it wasn't a one gig machine any more. The ram had come loose and I had Vista Ultimate running on a box with 256M of RAM. I suppose I should have spotted this earlier, but I'm very impressed that it did anything at all. I opened up the box and re-seated the chips and it seems a lot better now....

Vista Speak Easy

I'm listening...

I'm presently marking loads of software submissions from our second year course. This involves looking at some designs, making some comments, coming up with a mark and them moving on to the next one.

A hundred times.

I thought that rather than type everything I'd try speaking it instead. So, for the first time, I hooked a microphone up to the computer and fired up Vista's speech recognition.

I didn't have particularly high hopes. The last time I saw it being used was when a hapless presenter tried to show off a beta version of windows at a talk they were giving. The results were highly amusing, and probably the product of beta code and a dodgy microphone setup. However, they did serve to put me off trying to use the system (although it is very funning when the presenter says "delete sentence" and the system dutifully puts "delete sentence" into the text).

The training session is interesting. You go through learning how to control the program whilst at the same time the system is learning how you speak. This means that you can say profoundly wrong things as you train it, and it still seems to work (although this will come back and haunt you later when it uses the trained data to try and make sense of your real speech).

It took a while to complete all the training tasks, but there are a large number of options and you really could use the speech interface to control pretty much all of the machine. The text correction stuff is very clever, and makes it easy to correct particular errors.

Then it was time to use the system in anger. And it worked pretty well. I could just dictate comments and they are decoded and fed them into the window where the cursor happens to be. I didn't find any particular need to speak more slowly, the system actually seems to work better if you throw a whole load of text at it rather than single words - probably because it uses a lot of extra context information from the text to decode the sounds. I knew I was on to something when I started using the voice input to write and send an email. The only problem is that you have to compose the whole sentence in your head before saying it, and this is not usually how I write.

Having said all this, I'm definitely going to get a proper microphone and start using the speech input as part of the way I work. If you've never tried it I'd recommend it, I'm not sure which versions of Vista it is supplied with (I'm using Ultimate - which seems to have everything) but if it is there it is definitely worth a go.

Vista Time Travel

I love it when systems are designed to accommodate my own stupidity. Like when I half remove a bunch of camera drivers, fully install the new ones and then find that, not surprisingly, things don't work any more.

Previously there would have been a lot of cursing and muttering and attempts to get the system back to a "known good state" (i.e. before I started fiddling with it).

But with Vista I just fire up the recovery menu and step back in time to the good old days, when things worked, and try again. And I made an interesting discovery, which is that if I don't do stupid things it works a lot better....

Wide Screen Pain

My new notebook has a wide screen display which, over the week away, I'd rather learnt to like. So, bearing in mind that I spend a lot of time staring at a monitor screen I thought I'd get a new wider one. So I did.

The new monitor has a fantastic, jaw dropping display of amazing quality. Which is just as well, because otherwise I might have chucked it through the window by now. It is a 22 inch HP job, with an HDMI input as well as VGA and a lovely glossy finish. However, it and Vista just don't get on.

I know exactly how this should work. I know because I've read the White Paper "Transient Multimon Manager (TMM) Ver. 1.1" by Yu-Kuan Lin Program Manager, Mobile PC Business Unit. This is well written, comprehensive and has some nice scenarios that explain just what should happen. Essentially, the whole thing has been designed so that you set a monitor up once, Vista remembers that setup and then replicates it each time you plug that monitor in again.

This does not happen.

What happens is that you set it up once, and next time you plug it in the system does what the heck it likes, with a range of implausible and hard to select display options. Should you be stupid enough to let the screen saver kick in it then does something else. And if you are such an idiot as to put the machine to sleep you can look forward to no screen, a black screen with a cursor, a screen that you can't do anything with because the window is on the other screen or the blue screen of death when you come back depending on the whim of the system.

I'm not sure who to blame here. The monitor has the habit of reporting itself to Vista as one of a number of devices. The HP monitor control program refuses to believe that an HP monitor is plugged in. The Nvidia display driver doesn't even let me change options and Vista seems quite happy that nothing is wrong.

As for me, the picture is so good that I'm just about prepared to live with it for now. But I've lost a couple of hours trying to find out why something which should just be plug and play is nothing of the sort.

Windows Vista Performance Patches

There are a couple of patches that you might want to apply to your Vista machine. I've put them on two of mine, and whilst I've not noticed a huge improvement, they haven't made things worse....

KB938194:Improves the compatibility and reliability of Windows Vista
KB938979: Improves the performance and reliability of Windows Vista

Taking your memories with you

I've been spending some time scanning old photographs and loading them up onto the computer. It helps to pass the time whilst watching dross TV and I've found some gems in amongst the albums. The thing that has impressed me most is the quality of the results though. Using a fairly modest Canon scanner and 6x4 inch prints I've been able to get some very nice looking results, even when viewed on the big screen telly.

Today I used the Vista Media Centre option to burn a whole bunch of pictures onto a DVD. This is wonderful. It gives you a lovely, ever changing slide show of pictures which works in any DVD player. I've been dishing these out to family members, who have been very impressed. Even though the images include one of me wearing shorts.

Wonder of Webguide

Some time ago I bought a thing called a Slingbox. Then I sold it. Never used it much and it was too fiddly to make it control the TV. And if I did do this I got into terrible trouble with the family for switching channels from a hotel room in India. (I didn't want to watch anything, I just wanted to prove I could do it).

The underlying idea (get at your recorded programs from anywhere in the world) is a great one, but it relies on fairly kludgy technology, with the Slingbox digitising an incoming video signal before sending it off down the network.

Things are a lot easier now I've got my Sony media PC sitting under the PC, with a hard disk full of recorded TV. Because everything is networked I can navigate my way to recorded programs and view them over the network. But it is a bit of faff to find the program files, and I still have to go to the Media PC itself to set up my recordings.

That is I did, until I installed Webguide. This is a smashing little program that runs on the media centre and serves out web pages that let me set up recordings and stream media around the house (and onto the web if I open up the firewall and sort out IP address discovery).

It even works to mobile devices too. The idea is very simple and it works a treat. There are versions for Vista PCs and also Windows XP Media Centre edition machines.

If you have got a media pc you should (or even must) get a copy of this program. The installation is a tad fiddly, but it does most of the hard stuff for you automatically.

The price for this is only 18 dollars, or less than ten pounds. Well worth it.

The Humming Bag of Danger

My bag has started humming to itself. Scared me half to death when I first heard it at 3:00am. Scared me even more when I found out what it was.

Under Vista, if I ask my machine to Sleep it doesn't quite behave the same as it used to. Sometimes it wakes up. In my bag. Being wrapped in plastic doesn't do much for airflow, so the thing just sits there humming and getting hot. I'm sure it would shut down before it set fire to the house, but it is rather worrying.

Number one son has had the same thing happen with his Mac Portable, so this thing might be becoming common.  The way I see it, if you are putting your machine in your bag, you really should hibernate the device. This copies the entire memory to disk and then shuts down completely. The effect is similar to sleep, except that it takes a bit longer to wake up because the file has to be loaded off the disk when the power comes back on. With sleep the memory content is retained and so the machine can come back instantly. But it seems like computers are becoming lighter sleepers.....


I'm an idiot. No, really. Hard to believe, but it's true. Here's the proof.

I've been using my Motion LS800 tablet PC for a while and I really like it. It is tiny, works well and is on the way to becoming my traveling companion of choice. But it could really use more memory if I want to run Vista comfortably on it. And I do.

It is supposed to be a bit hard to take to pieces and upgrade, but to someone who had a lot of Meccano as a kid this sounded like a challenge. So I ordered a memory stick from Ebuyer and yesterday it arrived.

Getting the back off the device was OK, there were some nasty plastic catches but nothing I can't handle. A tip though, if you are thinking of upgrading a Motion Tablet, grow your thumbnails a little bit so you can slide them under the edge of the back and then use them to pop back the little tabs without scratching the case. I'm kind of due for a manicure at the moment, and that helped a lot. Anyhoo, I got the back off and pulled out the old memory chip. Then I get the new chip out of the package and I hit a snag. These memory devices have a little slot which aligns with a tag in the memory socket. Except on the new chip the slot didn't. It was around half a millimeter in the wrong direction.

And this is where the idiot bit comes in. A smart person would have just gone "Oh dear, have to send it back and get a replacement". But an idiot goes "I'll just grab a nailfile and open up the slot a bit so that it fits". So I did. And after a tiny bit of adjustment I had it fitting perfectly. But of course it didn't work. So now I have an expensive damaged component (which I probably damaged) that doesn't work. A situation broadly similar to taking a bundle of fivers and flushing them down the toilet.  In my defence, it had been a long day at work and I wasn't mentally at my best at the time I did all this. But I still think I'm an idiot.

I'm not sure if the slot was in the wrong place because it is a different type of memory (even though I took special care to make sure that it was the right type) or because the thing was badly made. I've sent the whole thing back to Ebuyer (with a note inside explaining what an idiot I've been and throwing myself on their good nature).

And to cap it all, after I'd put original memory back in and put the Motion back together I find I've lost one of the screws that holds the back on.



Got a spare quid? Near a newsagent? Nip in and buy a copy of "Windows Vista - The Official Magazine". It is only 99p, so you'll even get change. Then open the magazine to page 86. And there I am. Some time back I got a request for some "picture tips" for the magazine. And a photo of me looking suitably heroic. And they've printed my mugshot and one of the tips. Wowzer. Fame at last. They've even put my blog URL on the page. (if you have read the magazine and followed the link here, well done and feel free to stick around - take a look at Trip Hazard next - new episode coming soon)

I've been using Vista for a while and really rather like it. Every now and then I find something new and wonderful that it does (like the search feature in explorer. I've just found 2194 files of mine that contain the word cheese. Took six seconds to do the search- fantastic).

Since I'm now supposed to be a Vista expert I'll post the odd Vista tip as I find it.

Vista is a Scroll Wheel

I've had Vista running for a couple of weeks now. I'll not deny that I've had problems, but I reckon that most of these are down to the fact I'm using pre-release drivers for my particular hardware. Hopefully by the time Vista is turned loose on the world these will have been fixed.

Anyhoo, I like it. It is a bit like the scroll wheel on the mouse. I remember the first time that I got a mouse with a scroll wheel. At first I couldn't see much point, but as I used more applications which supported it I got to use it more and more. Some time back I used some very old programs which did not support it and I found them very hard to get to grips with.

Vista is like that. Its usefulness kind of creeps up on you. I like the 3D effects. I like the way that I'm finding it easier to move between folders, see what files I've selected and navigate around running programs. When I use an XP machine it feels clunky and less elegant and I'm now glad to get back to Vista.

I've stressed it really hard, with loads of simultaneous applications doing lots of different things and it just seems to come back for more. Drivers not withstanding, this is one solid operating system.

And, like the scroll wheel, I reckon it is going to be the way that we use computers for some time to come.

Mouse Waggling

Many years ago I got hold of the first version of Windows NT (Version 3.1 for some strange, marketing related, reason). This was the beginning of "proper" 32 bit operating systems underneath Windows, a trend which has continued all the way to Windows XP and finally Vista.

However, as it was based on an Intel 486 chip with only 64 MBytes of memory the operating system used to struggle a bit. We used to have a game called "mouse waggling", where you would fire up the performance counter and see how much CPU load you could create just by moving the mouse pointer around the screen. Sad but fun (particularly on somebody else's computer). A good player could get up to 50 or 60%.

I tried the game today on Vista (it has some really nice performance displays in the sidebar). Except this time I was dragging a window, complete with contents, over a large and complex desktop.  The needle does move, but nothing like as far as it used to. I guess this is down to the use of the graphics hardware to underpin the display system, either way it is impressive.

Boomerang Settings

I've just about got Vista how I want it. Every now and then I do something which means I have to load or configure another program I used to use, but most of the time I can putter along and get things done. And I rather like my new workplace. Except for one thing.

Settings that I've changed keep reverting back to their previous values. I'm using a network storage device which is based on a Linux processor and uses SAMBA, so I have to modify a Local Security Policy to make it work. I can make the change fine, and the drive works fine for a while. Then the setting flips back to the original value. Similarly, to get Outlook to log on to our Exchange server I've had to add a registry key. Which keeps vanishing.

The only thing I can think of is that the system thinks it is under attack, and puts things back to their safe values. I've had a cursory dig around but nothing out there tells me how to fix it. Very strange.

A Dangerous Obsession

If you think about it, you really shouldn't let people with an obsessive nature anywhere near computers. When I was much younger I knew a chap called John. Actually, now I am older I still know a chap called John, but it is a different John, and not important right now. Anyhoo, John had one of the first microcomputers, a Nascom. It had a 25 lines of 40 characters display. And 8 KBytes of RAM. And he could write Basic programs on it and store them on a cassette tape. What power. I was dead jealous. One Monday he came in to work looking even more haggard and disheveled than ever, which for John was saying something. We asked him if he had enjoyed a pleasant weekend.

 "Not really" he replied "I wanted to see the robots feet and it took ages to get it to work".

Turns out that the Nascom had a display character set which contained graphical images, including little robots. Snag was that these were not displayed completely, because the screen hardware skipped some lines when it drew the raster. The feet were missed off. For John this was a bad thing. So he spent an entire weekend rewiring the hardware so that all the scan lines were drawn. And he could see his robots feet. We thought this was silly, and could hardly see the difference extra pixels made.

I was reminded of this during my attempts to get Vista Aero Glass to work on my Toshiba M200 this weekend. For those that don't know, Glass gives you a funky effect around each window, so you can sort of see through to the one beneath it. This adds very little to the usability of your computer, but it is very cute, particularly if you understand how fiendishly hard it is to draw this kind of thing. And my rather elderly Tosh machine can just about do it. But only if you download a special driver, customise the initialisation file and then throw in a registry hack. And it only sort of works, in that every now and then it runs out of display memory and drops back to boring old opaque window edges.

But getting glass on my desktop became very important to me, and I spent far too much time trying and failing to make it work. Finally I had a glass display running and I showed number one wife the finished result.

"I can't see the difference" she said.

A Peek at Office 2007

Yesterday I took my life in my hands and upgraded from Office 2003 to Office 2007. Of course I had a backup. Of course...

Anyhoo, unlike the move to 2003, where on the surface things were pretty much the same as before, when you go to 2007, your whole world changes. The file menu has gone, and in its place you have an Office Button which sometimes glows for no reason that I've been able to establish.

In use I'm reminded of when I got to use a posh SLR camera many years ago. The arrangement of the controls seemed rather arbitrary and counter intuitive. Until I started using it. Then I found that the buttons and levers were actually just where you needed them. Someone who knew a lot about the business of taking photographs had put the features on the hardware in just the right way.

Office 2007 is very like this. After a while you find that commands you used to use a lot and had bother finding (undo and the Format Painter in my experience) have been made big, bold and easy to find. The grouping of tools into particular tasks makes it much easier to find what you want to do, and encourages you to try things that you hadn't seen before. I've only used Word and PowerPoint, but they are shaping up very well.

So far I only have one major grouse. Like most people, I use Styles a lot. Therefore I was pleased to see that Styles have been given an overhaul, which much better preview and the ability to sort the list of styles into alphabetical order. Finally.

However, there is one thing which they do seem to have got wrong in a big way. In the old Word you could click on a paragraph and the style of that paragraph would be instantly displayed in the toolbar. In the new Word the styles are shown on a kind of rotating panel which is good because you can see more than one and easily select from those available. But they don't automatically change to show you the style of the paragraph you are presently typing.

Even if you get a full list of the styles on the screen this still doesn't help if the style you are using is not on the part of the list you can see. So when I'm typing there is frequently nothing telling me which style I'm presently using, and I really hate that.

For me this is a major step backwards and almost, but not quite, negates the good things that they have done in this area. Perhaps there is an option you can select which will make this work better. I certainly hope so.

I'll write more about the shiny new bits as I find them.

Put some magic into your life

Now you can have one....

My all new "Magic Message System" is now available for download. If you've ever wanted a message system as good as the one in Computer Science at Hull University then you can have one... For now. I'm going to make it play videos and do 3D next. And I might not give that version away......

Because it uses Windows Presentation Foundation you will need either Vista or XP with .NET Version 3.0 installed.

So, what does it do? Well, it will display a slideshow of your Flickr pictures and at the same time read messages off an RSS feed reader of your choosing. We are going to use it on our plasma screen in the meeting area.

You can find it here.