Category Archives: windows

microsoft, windows

Finding the preview pane in Vista’s Explorer

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I recently came across this (old but interesting) article on creating preview handlers for Vista.

If you have the preview pane showing, you can select a file in Explorer and see a preview of the contents. It is also used for email attachments in Outlook 2007.

This article explains how to use it to create a fast PDF preview based on Foxit, and another for previewing C# source with pretty formatting.

It occurred to me that I rarely see the preview pane in Explorer. It’s not enabled by default. So how do you enable it?

Explorer in Vista has a curious user interface. There are some handy features like favorite links, but adding links to this list is not particularly intuitive. Try drag-and-drop, or right-click the Favorite Links panel and choose Open Favorite Links folder. No, it’s not under Organize, where you would expect.

But I digress. In its default state, Explorer has a toolbar with two menus, Organize and Views. Other menus appear on a semi-random basis according to some broken algorithm which is meant to respond to the context.

If you dislike the capricious toolbar, you can show an old-fashioned menu bar, with top-level entries for File, Edit, View, Tools and Help. That is what I normally use.

Now you might expect that the option to show a preview would be under the Views option on the toolbar, and on the View menu on the menu bar. It’s part of the view, right?

Wrong. To get the preview pane to show, you need to select it under Organize and then the Layout sub-menu. It’s not in the menu bar at all.

Since it is on a sub-menu, it is not surprising that people don’t find it.

Further, I don’t get what concept Organize is meant to represent. It’s helpful to distinguish between things that change the view, like the preview pane or folder options, and things that change the files, like New Folder or Cut. So why is stuff in both categories on this single menu? Who would click Organize to find Delete? Alternatively, if Organize is about modifying files, what is Layout doing there?

Once you have found the preview pane, it’s probably best to turn it off most of the time. The problem is that when you select a Word document, for example, most of Word has to load in the background before it displays…slow. Still, if you have a bunch of Word documents with obscure names, and want to find out quickly what they contain, then the preview pane is really useful.

I hope a faster, more logical and more intuitive Explorer is high on the to-do list for Windows 7.

microsoft, multimedia, windows

Unravelling the reasons for Vista audio glitches

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Since Vista’s first release I’ve been puzzling over why audio in Vista is prone to glitches, when it is meant to be fundamentally better than it was in Windows XP.

I’ve posted previously on the subject:

Audio in Vista: more hell than heaven

Why does audio glitch in Vista?

Another Pro Musician gives up on Vista audio

I myself suffered from this. When I stuck a CD in my Vista PC back in November 2006, it would not play smoothly. I don’t recall ever having this problem before, even back in Windows 3.1 days.

The Guardian commissioned a piece on the subject which is published today. The research showed multiple reasons for Vista’s audio problems. It’s best to show these as a series of scenarios.

1. Consumer buying new Vista PC with on-board audio

The recommended audio driver type for Vista is called WaveRT. The architecture is better than with previous driver models; you can read an official paper on the subject here. If you look at the API, you’ll notice two interfaces, IMiniPortWaveRTStream and IMiniPortWaveRTStreamNotification. The second interface was added at a late stage in the Vista development cycle. According to CakeWalk’s CTO Noel Borthwick, this was because the original API, which lacked this event notification, was very inefficient. Although Microsoft fixed it, the on-board audio drivers came out using the old inefficient driver model for WaveRT. RealTek actually lists support for IMiniPortWaveRTStreamNotification as one of the fixes in its 1.82 driver update, released in November 2007 a year after Vista went RTM.

The fact that the on-board audio vendors provided WaveRT drivers at all was an indication of their early support for Vista’s new driver model. Vendors of add-on audio cards didn’t get round to this much later, or in some cases not at all.

2. Consumer with Vista PC and an add-on card

Although WaveRT is the recommended driver type for Vista, older driver types are also supported. At a higher level, the new WASAPI audio API also emulates older APIs like DirectSound and MME. The quickest way to come up with Vista drivers was to use these legacy APIs. The result is that drivers for add-on cards were probably using inefficient compatibility APIs.

In both consumer cases, this is about apps as well as drivers. Applications make a choice about which Windows audio API to use. In many cases that’s going to mean an emulated API.

3. Pro audio user with add-on card

The situation for pro audio users is different again. On-board cards lack necessary features for pro audio. Pro audio applications have long bypassed the Windows audio stack to reduce latency, using either ASIO or WDM kernel streaming. This avoids the problems mentioned in (1) and (2) above, because ASIO and WDM kernel streaming work the same in Vista as in XP. However, even here Vista is less satisfactory than XP, because the OS imposes a greater overhead, and because according to Borthwick there are bugs which only Microsoft can fix. An example is mentioned in this interview in Create Digital Music:

Peter: Some users have reported MIDI performance issues — specifically, jitter — under Vista. How much of an issue is this? What are the factors that cause it?

Noel: Both Cakewalk and Digidesign and Cakewalk logged this issue with Microsoft. The root cause of this problem was found to be in the WinMM.DLL and was due to an inefficient check being done on every WinMM API call.  It has been addressed in Vista SP1.

The issue itself was pretty severe and impacted MIDI timing on playback and recording. As compared to XP, in Vista we observed timing discrepancies as far out as 150 ticks. You could also run into cases where MIDI events were lost while playing.

Here’s one instance where SP1 definitely improves matters; nevertheless, Borthwick told me that SP1 is not a cure-all and some other bugs remain unresolved.

Myth-busting

Some people think that Vista’s DRM is responsible for audio problems. Nobody I talked to thought that was the case. It doesn’t apply in the common cases mentioned above.

What about moving the audio stack out of the kernel? Probably not an issue, certainly not in the pro audio case, where things work the same as before.

Fixing Vista audio

Vista audio is definitely improving. SP1, improved WaveRT drivers for on-board sound, decent drivers for add-on cards, all are happening. It probably will reach the point where it is better than XP in some circumstances, because there are genuine improvements in the audio stack. If you are reading this and get glitches, check that you really have the latest drivers and updates.

64-bit has the potential to be really good, though driver support is dire right now.

It’s still a sorry tale and I suspect has lost Microsoft a lot of momentum in the pro audio world, and also among consumer users like myself who were surprised and disappointed by glitching audio.

Preventable? Ultimately I feel this is a symptom of Vista actually being rushed (despite long delays), thanks to the famous reset. There’s also the question of why the WaveRT API wasn’t done right at an earlier stage, which (if the above analysis is right) could have saved much grief. Finally it seems that the emulation layers are just too inefficient.

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microsoft, software, windows

How to speed up Windows Vista: official and unofficial tips

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Microsoft has published an article on speeding up Vista, aimed at general users.

It’s not too bad. Here’s the summary:

  • Delete programs you never use
  • Limit how many programs load at startup
  • Defragment your hard drive
  • Clean up your hard disk
  • Run fewer programs at the same time
  • Turn off visual effects
  • Restart regularly
  • Add more memory
  • Check for viruses and spyware
  • Disable services you don’t need

Still, it’s a bit scattergun. I prefer a two-stage approach to improving performance (same applies to a single application):

  1. Find out what is slow
  2. Speed it up, or leave it out

For example, the benefits of adding memory tail off after a certain point. Task Manager will tell you to what extent RAM is slowing down Vista. Further, adding memory beyond 3GB is pretty much wasted on 32-bit Vista, since the system can only address 4GB, and the BIOS plus devices will use a lot of the 4th GB address space. That said, a system that is critically short of RAM (in other words, constantly swapping out memory to the hard drive) is in my opinion broken and unusable. Adding RAM in such cases delivers huge rewards.

Uninstalling programs gives little performance benefit if they are not running (unless disk space is limited). The aim is to reduce the number of running processes, not entries in the Start menu.

Vista defragments your drive regularly, by default. The benefits are often rather small, so it would be equally valid to suggest removing it from the schedule, or scheduling it to run less frequently.

The advice to restart regularly needs examination. Yes, a reboot can fix a sluggish machine. But it shouldn’t be necessary, and I recall that keeping Vista always-on was intended to be a benefit of the OS. Yes, here’s a quote from Power Management in Windows Vista [ppt]:

  • Windows Vista promotes the use of sleep as the default off state

In the right circumstances, Vista can run for ages without any problem. I’ve actually had Media Center (Vista Ultimate) run for several months without any issues; though this kind of thing is not very green so that’s another reason to do regular switch-offs. Still, to my mind “restart regularly” is a symptom of some problem that should be fixed.

Turning off visual effects is reasonable advice, though once again it may not yield much benefit. I tried it on my system and was surprised how little difference it made. Reason: I am running with Aero and a decent-ish graphics card, and hardware acceleration seems to handle the visual effects rather easily. Once again, if it’s not the thing slowing you down, then removing it won’t speed you up. You can test this quite simply, though it is tedious. Try it both ways. Did it make a difference? Measure it if possible.

It really is worth using the built-in tools, like Task Manager and the Reliability and Performance Monitor, to see which processes are grabbing lots of RAM and CPU. One of the good things about Vista is that such tools are easy to find. Click Start, type “reliability”, and click the link.

I’d also like to see mention of some favourite candidates for slowing down Vista:

1. Outlook 2007

2. The indexing service

3. Anti-virus software

4. Windows Defender

Hmmm, at least three of these are from Microsoft. Perhaps they are too embarrassing to mention.

Finally, I suspect disk performance is a big factor in real-world Vista speed. The reason is that many apps are very talkative when it comes to disk access. Here’s something to try. Go along to the Systernals site and download process monitor. This gives a good picture of what the actual processes on your Vista box are up to. Note how many events are occurring, how many of them involve file i/o, and which processes are responsible. You will also discover a large part of the reason why Outlook 2007 is so slow.

PS Another article, also just published, has good coverage of swap files and ReadyBoost.

microsoft, software, windows

Polarisation

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Slashdot takes the IBM line:

At this point nobody has the vaguest idea what OOXML will look like in February, or even whether it will be in any sort of stable condition by the end of March. ‘While we are talking about interoperability, who else do you think is going to provide long term complete support for this already-dead OOXML format that Microsoft Office 2007 uses today? Interoperability means that other applications can process the files fully and not just products from Microsoft. I would even go so far as to go back to those few OOXML files you have already created and create .doc, .ppt, and .xls versions of them for future use, if you want to make sure you can read them and you don’t want to commit yourself to Microsoft’s products for the rest of their lives

Alexander Falk, CEO of Altova, which makes a popular Windows XML editor:

I see the ISO vote as a non-event. In my opinion, the real-world adoption of OOXML is primarily driven by the ubiquity of Microsoft Office much more than any standards body…In terms of actual customer inquiries regarding need for ODF, we have not seen any interest from our customers…My advice to dev shops is to start working with OOXML as early as possible.

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internet, microsoft, web authoring, windows

Why Internet Explorer users get the worst of the Web

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Microsoft’s Chris Wilson has a post on Compatibility and IE8 which introduces yet another compatibility switch. IE8 will apparently have three modes: Quirks, Standards, and Even More Standard.

Here’s the key paragraph:

… developers of many sites had worked around many of the shortcomings or outright errors in IE6, and now expected IE7 to work just like IE6. Web developers expected us, for example, to maintain our model for how content overflows its box, even in “standards mode,” even though it didn’t follow the specification – because they’d already made their content work with our model. In many cases, these sites would have worked better if they had served IE7 the same content and stylesheets they were serving when visited with a non-IE browser, but they had “fixed their content” for IE. Sites didn’t work, and users experienced problems.

In other words, so many web pages have “If IE, do this” coded into them, that pages actually break if IE behaves correctly. Alternative browsers will do a better job, even if IE is equally standards-compliant, because they do not suffer the effects of these workarounds.

Microsoft’s proposed solution is to make the supposed Standards mode a new quirks mode, this time frozen to IE7 compatibility, and to force developers to add a further meta tag to enable the better standards compliance of which IE8 is capable.

It actually goes beyond that. Aaron Gustafson explains the rationale for the new X-UA-Compatible meta tag which enables web developers to specify what browser versions their page supports. The idea seems to be that browsers parse this tag and behave accordingly.

This sounds uncomfortable to me. Versioning problems are inherently intransigent – DLL Hell, the Windows GetVersion mess – and this could get equally messy. It is also imposing a substantial burden on browser developers.

Has Microsoft made the right decision? Trouble is, there is no right decision, only a least-bad decision. Personally I think it is the wrong decision, if only because it perpetuates the problem. It would be better for IE to do the correct thing by default, and to support meta tags that turn on quirks modes of various kinds, or an option in browser preferences, rather than doing the incorrect thing by default.

Still, Wilson makes a case for the decision and has some supporters. Nevertheless, he is getting a rough ride, in part because the IE team has failed to engage with the community – note for example the long silences on the IE blog. Why is Wilson telling us now about this decision, as opposed to discussing the options more widely before it was set in stone, as I suspect it now is? Even within the Web Standards Project, some of whose members assisted Microsoft, there is tension because it it appears that other members were excluded from the discussion.

Another point which I’m sure won’t go unnoticed is that Wilson makes a good case for using alternative browsers. IE users get inferior markup.

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microsoft, windows

Changing the motherboard or storage controller underneath Windows XP and Vista

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Can you change your motherboard without reinstalling your operating system? Sometimes you can, sometimes you can’t. Last week I decided it was time to upgrade the desktop PC on which I do much of my work. The old motherboard was nearly three years old – an Intel 915PBL, which I purchased in order to run 64-bit Windows XP. At the time I was indignant because the BIOS swallowed a full 1GB of my RAM.

Technology has moved on, so I purchased an Intel DP35DP board (I still have a high regard for Intel’s manufacturing quality) and a core 2 quad Q6600 processor. I appreciate that this is now not quite leading edge, but it has been out long enough to be a reasonable price. So I backed up my files, performed the motherboard surgery, and switched on.

For sure I was not depending on being able to continue without reinstalling the operating system. This is not a supported procedure. On the other hand, I figured it would be interesting to try; and so it proved. After all, I’ve had enough trouble installing things like Visual Studio 6 and Adobe Creative Suite 3, not to want to repeat the experience.

My desktop PC is a little complex. There are three SATA drives and three Windows installations. One is Window XP x64 (the original installation); one is Windows XP Pro 32-bit; and one is Windows Vista Pro 32-bit. I work mostly in Vista. Initially, none of these worked with my new motherboard. Attempting to boot Vista caused an immediate restart, and both XP installations blue screened.

The key problem is the storage controller. Typically, you will get a STOP 0x0000007B if your new motherboard has a different storage controller than the old one. The above link is to a Microsoft knowledgebase article for Windows XP, and you will see that it suggests two solutions. One is to perform an in-place upgrade, also known as a repair install. This is where you reinstall Windows to the same location, and it sorts out the device drivers and other critical problems without blowing away your documents or applications. The other is to do a new clean install – not really a fix, more an admission of failure.

Vista no longer supports repair installs. More on this later.

Note that the main issue is getting Windows to boot. Once it does boot, you will likely get all sorts of device errors, but these can usually be fixed. Fixing stuff if you cannot boot at all is more challenging.

Health warning

Since you are still reading, I assume you are in one of two categories. Either you are inquisitive about the innards of Windows; or you have a problem because Windows will not boot. Here’s my disclaimer. The steps I describe below are not supported, guaranteed ways to rescue Windows; and if you experiment with a working Windows installation, you could break it. If you try any of them, it’s at your own risk.

The AHCI problem

Intel’s new boards usually have three settings for the SATA controller. One is IDE, which is best for legacy compatibility. One is AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface), which is best for features. The third is RAID, which combines AHCI and a sort of hardware RAID (sometimes known as fakeRAID because it isn’t really hardware RAID, but never mind). Intel boards used to default to IDE, but this one defaulted to RAID which is now Intel’s recommendation. Even if you only have one drive, you can easily set up RAID later if you start with that setting. If you plan to install Linux, you might be better off with plain AHCI.

Repair Install on XP x64

For my first experiment, I tried a repair install on XP x64. It did not go well. There was some minor awkwardness. Intel supplies the crucial RAID drivers on antiquated media called floppy disk. You need this during Windows setup (press F6). However, the motherboard has no Floppy Disk connector; you have to use USB. Luckily I have a USB external floppy which came with a laptop some years ago, so that bit worked. Unfortunately, the repair install seemed to hang on a screen which said “Installing Devices” and promised to complete in 35 minutes. I left it overnight and it said the same thing in the morning, though it had not technically crashed and who knows, perhaps it would have completed one day.

If you ever hit this issue, read this thread. What you have to do is to restart the machine and press F8 to get the advanced startup options. Timing this may be tricky, since setup configures itself for immediate startup. If you get really stuck, find some way to edit boot.ini to insert a delay. Once you have pressed F8, choose the Debugging mode. The repair install will now complete within a sane time. There’s another solution discussed in the thread I’ve referenced above, which involves identifying which device is causing the hang and then preventing setup from attempting to install it; but the Debugging option worked fine for me.

As it happens, I didn’t discover this fix until later. I got diverted by 32-bit XP.

Fixing 32-bit Windows

After getting stuck on XP x64, I took a look at 32-bit XP. The X64 repair install had mucked up the boot menu; but that’s easy to fix from a recovery console. Being a little discouraged, I decided to try the legacy IDE settings for the SATA controller. Good old XP Pro then started, no hassle, no need for a repair install. It detected various new devices, and I ran the Intel driver utility from the CD that came with the motherboard. I also had to reinstall the NVidia graphics driver. My first success.

First attempt with Vista

Vista on the other hand still would not work. It is less amenable than XP to controller changes; I gather this may be something to do with speeding up the boot process by disabling “unnecessary” drivers. Anyway, it blue-screened irrespective of the setting for the SATA controller. It was then I discovered that Vista has removed the option for a repair install. What you do instead is to boot from the setup CD or DVD and choose the option to “Repair your computer”. Then it runs a Startup Repair wizard which tries to fix your Vista. I tried this on all the SATA settings, and it failed. On the first try it thought it might have succeeded and invited me to restart Windows, but it still blue-screened. On subsequent attempts the wizard made some lengthy disk-checking efforts only to inform me that I had a corrupt volume and should give up.

I’m not impressed with Startup Repair. I think XP’s Repair Install is brilliant, and Vista’s Startup Repair is brain dead. I’ll explain shortly.

You can do a sort-of repair install with Vista by “upgrading” an existing install – but you can only start an upgrade from within the instance of Windows that you want to upgrade. In other words, if you can’t boot then this is not an option. Do NOT do an over-the-top clean install. You will lose all your settings.

At this point I nearly gave up and did a clean install of Vista. I still had the nagging thought that if only I could get Vista to load the right storage controller driver, it would probably start up. So I left it for the moment and went back to 32-bit XP, my success story. I wanted to discover if I could switch to the SATA RAID option without breaking it.

Switching an installed Windows OS to AHCI or RAID

This thought led me to an illuminating discussion. This explains that if you want to switch Windows to use a different storage controller, for which the driver is not installed, you do so by manually copying the driver to system32\drivers; and editing the registry so that Windows can use the new driver when booting. For this to work, you need to know the hardware ID of your controller. This is something like:

PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2822&CC_0104

One way to find this ID is to clean install a second copy of Windows to a temporary location, and then look at the storage controller properties in device manager. Alternatively you can experiment with some likely values, or try several at once. The discussion I’ve linked provides some reg files which show the critical entries.

This looked interesting, so I followed the steps in the first post of the thread, shut down, then restarted with the BIOS setting changed to AHCI. Success – XP Pro started, and I was able to run Intel’s driver setup to clean up the installation.

Getting more confident now, I found the hardware ID for the RAID controller (the hardware ID changes when you change the BIOS setting) and added that to the registry. The actual driver is the same. Success again – XP now started using the Intel Matrix Storage RAID.

XP was done now, especially as I also discovered the fix for x64 described above. But Vista, the one that mattered to me most, was still broken. Nevertheless, I now had a much better idea of how to fix it.

Offline registry editing

Now is the moment to mention a little-known feature of the Windows registry editor. 99% of the time, you edit the Windows registry from within a running instance of Windows. However, the registry editor has an entry in the File menu called Load Hive. The way this works is not particularly intuitive. You select the root of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, then choose Load Hive and navigate to a registry database file that is not part of the active registry. In my case, the hive I needed to load was SYSTEM, located in System32\Config. You may possibly know this if you have ever had to recover Windows when it will not boot because of registry corruption. When you click OK to load the hive, the registry editor prompts you for a key name. Enter something like “Vista Repair”. The loaded hive then appears as a sub-folder under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.

There is no Save; simply make the edits you want, then select the top level of the loaded hive – eg. “Vista Repair” – and choose File – Unload Hive.

This had to be worth a try. I booted my poorly machine into Windows XP, then went to another machine on the network running Vista. I copied the SYSTEM hive from the broken Vista across the network, made a backup, then loaded it into registry editor. Finally, I manually made the changes pretty much as in the reg file used to migrate XP to a new storage controller, though what I actually did was to pattern the changes on an existing storage controller entry in the working Vista registry. Note that an offline registry has no “Current Control Set” hive. This is actually a runtime link to ControlSet01. So, for offline editing, you edit ControlSet01.

I also made the normal registry fix for enabling AHCI on Vista. Then I unloaded the hive and copied it back to my broken Vista. I also added the actual driver to system32\drivers, of course. In my case the driver is called iastor.sys, from Intel’s floppy disk.

Vista boots

The result was amazing. I restarted the PC with the new motherboard, and instead of a blue screen I got:

Press CTRL+ALT+DELETE to log on

Nothing much to add now. I logged  on, installed various drivers, and everything works. I have a quad core CPU:

and an Intel RAID storage controller:

Vista itself seems fine. It is solid and significantly faster than before, as you would expect.

Thoughts on Vista Startup Repair

Despite my success, I’m not impressed with the Vista Startup Repair. First, why couldn’t Microsoft’s wizard do what I did manually? Second, why has the excellent Repair Install option disappeared from Vista? Vista’s repair and restore options seem to presume that the hardware has not changed; yet I’d have thought a replaced motherboard would be one of the more common scenarios where you would want to repair a Vista installation.

The whole business of changed hardware is something of a dark secret in Windows backup and restore. In an enterprise environment it is not so bad, because you have redundancy, and a single failed machine (server or workstation) should not be a problem. Something like Small Business Server is different, because typically this is a single, business-critical machine. If your 2-year old Small Business Server box disappears in the night, and you purchase a new box and stuff in your backup tapes, it will not necessarily be easy to restore.

Still, I must also credit Windows with considerable resilience once it can find a working storage controller driver. It pretty much sorts itself out after that.

Coming next: a clean install of 64-bit Vista. It makes sense.

PostScript:

Anyone interested in this esoteric topic is also advised to read this article on ArsTechnica and this related thread. Note the advice on removing non-present devices from device manager. There’s also this Microsoft article (non-Vista) which is a variant on the Repair Install. Let me also note the main area of uncertainty regarding repair installs: it may not be safe with regard to recovering a fully patched system. In principle you can re-apply service packs or hotfixes, but what if Windows Update thinks a hotfix has already been applied when in fact it has been undone? It’s a good question and I’m not sure at the moment what the answer is.

The Microsoft article above also makes an interesting point about OEM licenses. If you replace the motherboard with something other than the same model, it is considered a new computer and OEM licenses cannot be transferred.

apple, windows

My Mac day: Jobs of the print variety

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While Steve Jobs was extolling the merits of thin laptops (I prefer small to thin, but tastes differ), I was in the depths of /var/log fixing a print issue with a friend’s Mac Mini and her LexMark printer.

It was almost the same issue as described here by Ted Landau, though I got there a bit quicker thanks in part to his post. Symptom: you hit print, but get a printer stopped message. You can restart the print job but it immediately stops again.

It wasn’t obvious what was wrong, especially as the printer passed all its self-tests including printing its test page. There were no clues in the OS X GUI. The USB cable was OK.

I was helped by familiarity with other Unix-like operating systems. The first thing to look for is an error log, and in this case there was one sensibly located at /var/log/cups. It told me that a cartridge change had been detected and the new cartridge was not yet aligned, a condition that the driver treated as a fatal error. At this point the user confessed that the black cartridge was new, and that the printer had not worked since. However, she had run the alignment utility, several times in fact. Getting warm.

In Landau’s case, there was old ink in the cartridge bay preventing a good connection. In my case, the cartridge itself was faulty; a replacement worked fine. The deceptive aspect is that the cartridge had ink and could print; it just could not register its alignment for some reason.

Landau has a little rant about this:

Neither Lexmark’s nor Apple’s software were able to get the relevant error message to pop up anywhere where a user would be likely to see it. Having no message at all in the Printer Queue and having the key message buried in a cups log file is not the ideal situation.

His underlying point is correct. The cuddly GUI hides huge complexity. Windows is the same of course.

The point I will make is that both operating systems do a poor job of surfacing error logs. In Windows most logs are accessible through the Event Viewer GUI, but only advanced users find this. When a hard drive fails, you sometimes find that the event log (presuming you recover it sufficiently to read it) has been reporting bad blocks for ages, but the user was unaware.

In this case I suspect the real issue is Lexmark’s poor driver, which could have reported this problem in a sane manner.

How did we fix computers pre-Google?

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linux, microsoft, open source, Uncategorized, windows

Becta’s report on Vista and Office 2007: wise advice, or mere polemic?

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I read Becta’s report on Vista and Office. Becta is a UK government agency supporting IT in education. The report is a ponderous affair and tells us that XP still works, so why bother with Vista; and that Office 2007 saves by default in a tiresome new format that few other applications can open; and that free office suites like Open Office work well so why pay for something else?

All this is fair enough; but I’m surprised that Becta didn’t spot a couple of other things. One is that Office 2007 can easily be set to save by default in the old Office binary formats that pretty much everything can read. The other is that while ODF is indeed an ISO standard, it is also pretty awkward from a compatibility point of view.* So I’m surprised by this recommendation:

When specifying new systems, schools and colleges should normally insist on the desktop having access to office productivity software that is capable of opening, editing and saving documents in the international standard ODF, and setting it as the default file format.

I suppose the idea is that if kids come home with their homework on a USB key and find that their documents will not open on the home PC running Microsoft Office, that they just download and install Open Office. Fair enough I suppose; but why not just use .doc and .xls?

The report adds:

Becta did not conduct technical assessments of the merits of either the existing international document standard (ODF) or the proposed second international document standard (OOXML).

There is however a lengthy discussion of the inadequacies of the half-baked ODF converter add-in which Microsoft has sponsored. I agree; but I’m not sure why it merits so much space.

I would have found it interesting to see a bit more examination of the merits or otherwise of the ribbon UI in Office 2007; better, worse, or indifferent for education? What about overall usability and functionality versus Open Office? It would also have been good if Becta had considered the large market share Microsoft Office enjoys, especially in business. Like it or not, it is relevant to this discussion.

I didn’t see much attention given to security, which is perhaps the biggest single reason for adopting Vista versus XP (it could also be a reason not to use Windows at all). This is not only a matter of Vista being more secure, if it is, but also that it aims to fix the insecurity of Windows long-term by fostering well-behaved applications that will enable future versions of Windows to be more tightly locked-down. Not interesting in education? I’m surprised, since when I talk to IT people in education, security is one of their chief concerns.

I find myself wondering whether this is really a document aiming to offer wise and objective guidance to schools, or a more polemical report promoting ODF and open source in education.

I reckon there is a good case for promoting open source in education. However, considered as a report on Vista and Office 2007 this is a poor effort.

*PS: It is interesting to see what Asus has done with its Eee PC, which  actually gets an oblique mention in Becta’s report:

We have also noted the emergence of low-cost innovative ‘mini-notebooks’ that have been brought to the market running a version of Linux and a range of Linux-based applications including OpenOffice.org.

On my review Eee, which was supplied by RM for the education market, Open Office is set to save in the Microsoft formats by default. I imagine that Asus wanted to make the Eee fit seamlessly into a Microsoft environment if necessary. It must have been a conscious decision, since an untweaked Open Office install uses the Open Document formats by default.

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linux, microsoft, open source, windows

8GB Asus Eee PC from April 2008, Windows or Linux

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RM has announced an upgraded version of its popular miniBook, also known as the Asus Eee PC. The details:

  • 1GB RAM (up from 512MB in the current version)
  • 8GB solid state drive (up from 4GB)
  • Same 7″ screen, webcam and built-in mic, speakers
  • Prices “in the region of” £229 + VAT for Linux, £259 + VAT for Windows XP Home
  • Available from April 2008

I would assume that the same machine will also be available from other vendors, with small price variations.

The Eee is already a great machine and having more space is nice, though it’s a shame that the biggest weakness of the Eee is not yet being addressed: the limited 480 pixels vertical resolution of the screen. This makes some applications and web sites hard to use, since few are designed for this size of screen. In some cases dialogs appear with no buttons; in other cases there is little working area left because of the space taken up by toolbars or header and footer panels.

Why Windows? RM says:

The introduction of the Windows based miniBook means that schools that already have curriculum software which is Windows based can add this to the miniBook. Also, schools with Microsoft Volume License agreements have a route to upgrade to XP Pro and enable network connection using Windows.

I can see that there is demand for this. On the other hand, Windows needs some tweaking in order to work at its best on the Eee. One of the issues is that frequent writes to the solid state drive are reckoned to reduce its life, so it makes sense to configure Windows without a swap file as well as cutting out unnecessary components.

Will the Windows Eee, which costs £30.00 more (plus VAT), come with an equally generous suite of bundled open-source applications, such as Open Office, as found on the Linux version? It will be interesting to see, though I doubt it.

It will be fascinating to see how take-up of the Linux and Windows versions compares, both in the education market, and more widely. I’d suggest that Linux is better suited to the device, but Windows has familiarity, compatibility, and arguably ease of use advantages. It will be a shame if Windows ends up dominating on the Eee, as it has given a boost to the visibility and adoption of Linux on the desktop.

microsoft, software, software development, windows

SharePoint’s secret sauce

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Just before Christmas I spoke to Daz Wilkin, Microsoft Developer Platform Evangelist, about Office development and Sharepoint. I’ve wanted to catch up on Sharepoint for some time, since it is achieving significant usage. Here’s a recent study which claims that:

the number of SharePoint applications in place today will quadruple over the next 12 months

Wilkin says that:

SharePoint is approaching becoming a billion dollar business for Microsoft. It’s vastly exceeded all of our estimates.

I suspect that journalists, myself included, have given Sharepoint insufficient attention. One reason is that it is a slippery product to describe and seems to straddle several categories, such as portal server, smart file store, and workflow platform. “I don’t think Microsoft has done a bang-up job in being able to articulate it. It is many things to many people,” says Wilkin.

Another problem is the confusion over SharePoint Portal Server (paid for) and SharePoint Services (free add-on for Windows server). You can find a point-by-point comparison here. The free SharePoint Services, on which Portal Server is built, are surprisingly rich. Once you have them installed, which can be a little painful, you get instant wikis and blogs, shared documents with versioning, permissions, and the ability to open and save directly from Office applications, shared calendars and tasks, and online forums. Here’s the settings panel for a shared document store:

Site options including content approval,versioning,permissions and check out 

It’s a shame that document versioning is off by default, but there is plenty of value in these features. Note we are mainly talking intranet rather than internet, though hosting SharePoint is a growing industry and it is also core to Microsoft’s own hosted service efforts.

Why is installation painful? Well, you need Windows Server, and if you want to use ASP.NET for something other than SharePoint on the same box, it needs a bit of tweaking. For example, if you run Exchange and install SharePoint Services, it breaks Outlook Web Access. On my server I got round this by adding a second host name in local DNS, pointing to the same machine, and using this for the SharePoint site using IIS host headers. Real-world businesses either install SharePoint on a separate server, or have Small Business Server which builds it in, so this is mainly an issue for journalists and the like. Perhaps this is a small factor in why SharePoint gets less coverage than it should; it is not something we can just pick up and use like Office itself.

So why is SharePoint taking off? According to Wilkin, it is about “group productivity”. He talks about how SharePoint deals with the classic document review process. Emailing documents around a company and getting numerous edited versions back is a hassle. Apparently Microsoft itself is now using SharePoint more intensively, and users just check-out a document, make changes, and check it back in. He adds,

…If you then combine that with the ease with which you can check that document into a workflow, and then have it automatically routed around the organization, and then very naturally combine that with data going in and out of backend systems whatever they are, that to me is the magic. Customers tend to get the value more quickly than some of the ISVs.

Visual Studio 2008 has support for SharePoint projects and this is something I plan to write about soon. If anyone has been doing SharePoint and/or Workflow Foundation development, I’d be interested to know how you found it.