Vista musings......

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Microsoft's Vista OS has had a rocky existence in the computing world.  There is a hate/hate relationship with the media and the industry, and a long suffering "run from the room screaming" relationship from consumers.

I have always tried to discuss Vista in a less passionate way, mainly because I haven't really played with it.  I use a old Powerbook as my main desktop, and have XP and Ubuntu on other computers at home and work.  I don't see myself as an Apple fanboy, it is just that OSX just works, and after trouble shooting Windows boxes all day, it is nice to come home to something that works.

As mentioned, my exposure to Vista had been minimal until last night when I was asked to sort out a couple of problems on a friend's laptop.  The problems ranged from: the laptop not working on the home wireless point - to email not working - to "Vista isn't compatible with my work email so how do I downgrade to XP?"

The vibe was that my friend, a solicitor, didn't know much about computers, but he did know that he didn't like Vista.  Now before I go into the problems and the way I fixed them, I just wanted to talk about issue of Vista's popularity.  If you look at the evolution of Vista's roll out, it wasn't much different to XP, or even Win 95.  So why is there such a stigma around Vista?

The main issue Vista started with was its hardware requirements.  Unlike the jump from Win 2000 to Win XP, where the requirement almost dropped, XP to Vista was a huge move up and that wouldn't have been that big a problem if the hardware vendors and Microsoft had been honest about it.  Vista really needs at least 3 gig of RAM, and yet vendors were selling laptops with 512k of RAM pre-installed with Vista.  It is little wonder users didn't like Vista when their new PC could only run one program at a time.

Couple that with the normal driver support issues that come with a new OS (or at least a Microsoft OS), and the Apple switcher ads that picked up on the public hesitance, and you had a failed product before they had a chance to patch it.

Is this fair?  OK, so they made one little mistake, should that condemn Vista today?  Well, we know that Microsoft are looking to release Windows 7 maybe early next year, so I guess that is a yes.  As mentioned above, I finally got a chance to play with Vista.  And I think as I run through the fixes, you will come to the same conclusion as me, and that is:

Vista isn't really that bad, in fact, it's probably a secure Windows OS, suffering from bad user perception.

1. Wireless network problem

My friend had a small Netgear ADSL Modem with wireless and a 4 port switch, which was set up with his old laptop, but he hasn't been able to get it to work with his new Vista laptop.

Of course, Vista was to blame for all this.  He had another friend try and fix the problem before, and this attempt left a Netcomm modem (NB1300) on the floor, giving my friend Internet access from Ethernet cable.  This wasn't good enough, as he needed to move the laptop around.

Problem 1 - Plugged in the Netgear to find that it couldn't get ADSL sync.  Most likely it had a power spike through the phone line.  So I tested the WiFi and 4 port switch to find them working.

Problem 2 - Having the Netgear not connecting to the Internet was definitely a problem, but as I investigated, I found that the WiFi have WEP security enabled and a white list for MAC addresses.  This had been set up for his old laptop, and, of course, was not letting his new laptop onto the wireless network.

Solution - Being the nice guy I am, I changed all the WiFi settings to just WAP security with a simple password for my friend.  Then I changed the network settings so the Netgear shared the Netcomm's Internet, thus saving the purchase of a new modem/router, well, at least until the zapped Netgear dies completely.

So problem solved, and nothing to do with Vista, in fact I found the networking in Vista to be pretty good.  It gave much more info than XP, and it had much better integration for wireless networks.

2.  Personal email problem

This one was very straight forward, as my friend just wanted an email program working so he could get his personal mail on the laptop.  He had that new Outlook, which he uses at work, so I just surfed over to his ISP's website and found the settings and then set up his email.  No real trick there, but my friend just didn't know and blamed Vista.

3.  The Work email problem

The work email issue was important enough that if I couldn't get it working, we would have to downgrade to XP.

And if that wasn't enough pressure, the highly paid IT guys at work had said that the internal Webmail system would not work on Vista.  I had heard of Vista having problems with third party software before, but I couldn't see why there would be a problem with a webmail system.  I was even more perplexed when he showed me the website and the problem.

The webmail system was Outlook Web Access, and the problem was that when you went to reply, the text field had a little red cross, so you couldn't enter any text.  I didn't want to doubt the highly paid IT guy, but I couldn't see why Vista would be compatible with Exchange (a Microsoft server product).  I thought maybe a patch was needed, or at worst, a fix on the server, but I was sure that the problem could be solved.

Well, Google search is a tech's best friend, and with the simple "outlook web access red x vista" search, I found heaps of info on the problem.  The fix was just a simple security setting change, not in Vista, but in the Outlook Web Access options.  The problem seems to have more to do with IE7 than Vista, fix details here.

Conclusion

In the end I had one happy friend, and me doing the happy dance.  It took just an hour to sort out some real issues that had him ready to scrap Vista and start again. Not that XP wouldn't have solved his problems anyway, but I still think that it would have been blamed on Vista.

I actually like working with Vista.  Everything was in its right place and worked pretty much the same as XP, but with the little improvements that you would expect from a newer OS.  As pretty as it looks, it was still a little slow for 2 gig, and lacked the punchiness of XP.

All up I think Vista has been done wrong by Microsoft, hardware vendors, tech media and the IT guys who have just put it in the "too hard" basket.  Vista is suffering the great OS leveler - the home user, and if Microsoft doesn't get a positive spin on Windows 7, I really can't see it doing much better.

Jason Remnant

...if it's Vista, it's probably Broken, even if it isn't.

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Comments

[alan]

and u were just becoming so popular to

[Jason]

Haha oneday you to will join the Darkside Alan. But really i just call it as i see it, and i guess I still don't use Vista at home so you would be in a better position to comment if you do.