LostCarPark's Journal

My sister killed her old laptop in an unfortunate "spilt milk" accident. Fortunately it was covered by the extended warrenty/insurance she'd taken out. They collected it from her, checked it out, declared it deceased, then sent her vouchers for a new one.

She's left the replacement with me for the last few days to "set it up" for her. Of course it has Vista on it, I thought about putting XP on, but her dislike of Vista isn't as passionate as mine, so it didn't seem worth the effort, so I'm just trying to make it as bearable as possible. Nuked Norton trialware and installed AVG free. Nuked Internet Explorer (well hid - you can't uninstall it without breaking windows) and installed Firefox, nuked MS Works and installed OpenOffice. Nuked MS Live messenger and installed Pidgen. That covers the basics.

For some reason, I couldn't get it to copy any of the above from my network. It would connect to the network and browse for files, but as soon as I tried to copy anything, I got "permission denied". Go figure. Disabling UAC didn't help. As the only reason for connecting to the network was to copy those files, I abandoned it and stuck them on a USB drive.

Meanwhile I'm having much more fun with Linux. After experimenting with several alternative distros on the EeePC, I've gone back to the default Xandros. Everything else I've tried has had incomplete hardware support, and took much longer to boot. A shame, as Ubuntu in particular had some nice extra features. Even the Xandros "advanced desktop" mode (or for anyone familiar with Linux desktops, KDE) adds about five seconds to the boot time. So far I've found nothing that comes close to the ten seconds that the standard Xandros/IceWM manages, which I have to say is an impressive achievement on the part of the Asus developers.

Instead of a shiny new distro, I've been experimenting with customising the standard desktop, and have come up with a few useful scripts. I almost have a script working that sets the Eee clock speed to a battery saving 630Mhz when on battery power, but switches up to a speedy 900Mhz on mains power (the EeePC has a 900Mhz processor underclocked to 630Mhz to help it achieve a decent battery life). There's just one part of it that's giving trouble with file permissions that I think I just need to find the right start-up script to insert a fix.

Oh, and I've just finished making a wallpaper image of some milk bottles with a red "no" sign for Brenda's wallpaper.

Now I must get back to my novel...

No, not "Read the 'effing manual" but the even more annoying "Reduced Functionality Mode".

This "feature" was introduced with Windows Vista as part of WGA which is short for "Windows Genuine Advantage". It should be noted that so far this seems to be mainly an advantage to Microsoft. I have experience in XP of the system deciding it's not genuine because of a minor hardware change and been quizzed by a Microsoft employee as a result. But at least XP lets things run relatively normally until you get around to fixing the problem.

Vista's RFM disables all applications except Internet Explorer until you fix the problem, as well as shutting down after an hour of use. Supposedly this is to force you to get the issue resolved quickly.

I fully respect a company's right to protect its revenue, but not at the expense of legitimate customers. So if you're going to implement something like that, you'd better make sure it works. Reliably. All the time. Otherwise you're saying "we're not going to let you use your computer because we think you're a thieving b**tard."

Unfortunately for thousands of users, that's exactly what's happened, and naturally a lot of users haven't been happy about this.

So what a surprise when it's revealed that Service Pack 1 will remove RFM and go back to the lower level annoyances of XP's WGA.

Of course, machines already in RFM won't be able to install it.

Mark Minasi asks Why exactly does everyone hate Vista?

He comes to the conclusion that it was the same with every new version, and that it will pass and we'll all be happy with Vista soon.

I have to say I beg to differ. I have used almost every previous release of Windows since 1.0 (I was 16 when that came out), and while there have been versions I have had reservations about, I've always been able to see the improvements. I might have waited for a service pack to fix the bugs, but I've generally migrated eventually.

But after a fair bit of experience of Vista on other people's computers, I can't see myself wanting it on my computer. Not now, not at the first service pack, not ever.

There isn't a single reason for this, but rather a multitude of things that contribute to a general feeling of unease.

First are the user interface changes. Microsoft have regularly introduced user interface changes in the past, but they've always made an effort to accommodate their old user base. I knew people who used the Windows 2 file management thingy for years on Windows 3 because it was what they were used to. And there were plenty of people running the Windows 3 file manager on Windows 95. And I still know lots of people who run the Win2K look and feel on XP.

But Vista has dumped the old menu/toolbar system and replaced it with a new "ribbon" system. How much contempt do Microsoft feel they can treat their existing users with? Lots of "power user" commands are just gone. There may be other ways of achieving the same thing, but they take time to figure out, when the old command wasn't doing anyone any harm. A small one I found quite useful was the "Help... About" command. You could open any Explorer Window and use it to find out how much memory the computer had. It's not the end of the world that it's gone, but I found it quite handy and there was no real need to just nuke it.

Office 2007 is, of course, where the real fun begins. It's not part of Vista, but the two are closely related, and shows what MS now think of their existing user base. There should be an option to turn off the new interface and switch back to the old one, but there isn't. Even an option to put the old menu above the new ribbons would give existing users a half-way house. There are some very pretty things in the new UI, but if you're an experienced user and know how to do something the "old way" it can be very frustrating. Where is the "Save As" command on the new interface? The irony is now that the free OpenOffice suite is now easier for an existing user to adapt to than the new version of Office.

But aside from all the user interface changes, there are the new security "enhancements". I can't help feeling that many of these create an illusion of security without actually making the computer any more secure. Take the constant stream of "Windows needs your permission to do this" requests. How long before users stop reading them and just click yes on auto. I know a thing or two about them and I still find myself doing it. I have on occasion clicked without thinking then realised that I shouldn't have, but for many users there is no understanding or realisation. When will Microsoft realise that running in administrator accounts will never really be secure. The only real solution is to use restricted user accounts. It may take a little user training for users, but I don't see how the result could be any worse than what users are put through now. It will also take some thorough beating around the heads of application vendors to get them to produce applications that can work, and preferably install, in user mode accounts.

Finally there's the new swooshy graphics effects that Vista does. They look cute (unless you happen to be one of the not inconsiderable number of people who hate them), until you realise your 3D graphics card is running at full tilt, your CPU is at 97% and your laptop's battery life has been cut to about 7 minutes...

Well, I say finally, but there's probably a few other things I haven't thought of. I hear rumour of some new DRM stuff that I haven't had a chance to check out properly, for example.

I hope never to have a computer with Vista installed. I'm somewhat relieved that the company I work for rolled out XP to desktops last year. Our previous desktop upgrade was to NT4 in about 1998, so I think we're safe from Vista for a while. I still use XP at home, but I'm finding Ubuntu increasingly usable, and if some of the big software vendors realise that there's money in releasing Linux versions of their apps, it could be bye-bye Windows.

Alternatively, maybe Microsoft will one day stop treating their users with contempt and I might like the next version of Windows.

Now all I have to do is wait for the replies telling me I should switch to a Mac.