Vista tag

Neowin, NVNews have reported that a new patch has been sent out to testers fixing many, very annoying performance and reliability issues in Vista. Included in the fixes are the problems that drove me back to XP:

938979 Vista Performance and Reliability Pack
This update resolves a number of individual issues which may be affecting some computers running Windows Vista. These issues have been reported by customers using the Error Reporting service, product support, or other means. Installing this update will improve the performance and responsiveness for some scenarios and improves reliability of Windows Vista in a variety of scenarios. Some examples of the improvements contained in this update are:

* Improves performance in resuming back to the desktop from the Photo and Windows Energy screensaver.
* Resolves an issue where some secured web pages using advanced security technologies may not get displayed in Internet Explorer on Windows Vista.
* Resolves an issue where a shared printer may not get installed if the printer is connected to a Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 system and User Access Control is disabled on the Vista client.
* Resolves an issue where creating AVI files on Vista may get corrupted.
* Improves the performance in calculating the ‘estimated time remaining’ when copying/moving large files.
* Improves performance in bringing up Login Screen after resuming from Hibernate.
* Resolves an issue where synchronization of offline files to a server can get corrupted.
* Resolves a compatibility issue with RAW images created by Canon EOS 1D/1DS Digital SLR Camera which can lead to data loss. This only affects RAW images created by these two specific camera models.
* Resolves an issue where a computer can lose its default Gateway address when resuming from sleep mode.
* Improves the performance when copying or moving entire directories containing large amounts of data or files.
* Improves the performance of Vista’s Memory Manager in specific customer scenarios and prevents some issues which may lead to memory corruption.

938194 Vista Compatibility and Reliability Pack
This update resolves a number of individual issues which may be affecting some computers running Windows Vista. These issues have been reported by customers using the Error Reporting service, product support, or other means. Installing this update will improve the reliability and hardware compatibility of Windows Vista in a variety of scenarios. Some examples of the improvements contained in this update are:

* Improved reliability and compatibility of Vista when used with newer graphics cards in several specific scenarios and configurations.
* Improved reliability when working with external displays on a laptop.
* Increased compatibility with many video drivers.
* Improved visual appearance of games with high intensity graphics.
* Improved quality of playback for HD-DVD and Blue-Ray disks on large monitors.
* Improved reliability for Internet Explorer when some third party toolbars are installed on Vista.
* Improved Vista reliability in networking configuration scenarios.
* Improved the reliability of Windows Calendar in Vista.
* Improved reliability of systems that were upgraded from XP to Vista.
* Increased compatibility with many printer drivers.
* Increased reliability and performance of Vista when entering sleep and resuming from sleep.

Some minor annoyances that I had (such as the no sound when going into hibernation while something is making a noise) aren’t in that list, but still, this is very promising from Microsoft. See the link for the downloads.

Will it send me back to Vista? No, not yet. I’ll wait until SP1 thankyouverymuch. I’ve had my pre-SP1 fun - that’s for sure.

Speaking of computers, it seems mine is playing up tonight, but I think it has something to do with the powerboard I’m using, or even the power supply (need to get that replaced soon anyhow). I dunno though, there were times when not even the graphics card BIOS would start…

Ahh, question mark ending headlines.

Word is getting round that Microsoft is ready to release a beta version of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 the week of 16th July.

Word (from various sources who asked not to be named) is Microsoft is gearing up to drop Vista SP1 some time the week of July 16. And despite what Microsoft seemingly led Google, the U.S. Department of Justice and other company watchers to believe, the final version of Vista SP1 is sounding like November 2007.

Usually service packs have a whole heap of patches and fixes all in one go that justifies that 150MB+ file size, with a couple of new features thrown in. There is already word of new replacement products that we may see:

• Windows Mail is to be replaced with Windows Live Mail, currently in beta (and looking good too for a basic email app) and does a couple of changes in Vista (such as hiding the Contacts folder in favour of the Address Book in WLM).
• Windows Instant Search is to be replaced with Windows Live Search Center, or Windows Search 4.0 (to be released for both Windows XP and Vista).
• Internet Explorer 8 beta is rumoured to be out the same time SP1 is.

Changes are yet to be announced.

Windows XP was released in October 2001, to have its first service pack released in September 2002.

I have suddenly grown to quite like Democracy Player since I’ve started to really get into YouTube. I can subscribe to YouTube channels and it downloads the latest ones, oh and video casts and stuff. It has a nice channel guide too. It plays almost anything as on Windows it has VLC in the backend.

Problem in Vista though? VLC’s default settings don’t work for everyone. It appears ATi cards support the default Direct3D mode, and nVidia supports OpenGL, the non-default. Democracy Player won’t let you change rendering modes, and picking them from your own VLC setup doesn’t help. If you start a video, Vista will fall back into Aero Basic.

But, now they do! I worked late in the night to get it working properly, and I came with a solution. First, get the 0.9.6 RC0 release, then, to quote my post on the Democracy forums:

If you have VLC installed, play with the video output until you get it working properly (as in, you can see the video and it doesn’t bust down to Aero basic). Modes that have apparently worked are DirectX, Direct3D and OpenGL (I think OpenGL works on nVidia cards, as I have a 7900GS and it works for me).

Once you have done that, go to Start, and type in “C:\Users\your username\AppData\Roaming\vlc”. You’ll see a “vlcrc” file. Copy that.

Now, go to where you installed Democracy, ie C:\Program Files\Participatory Culture Foundation\Democracy Player. Paste the vlcrc file in there. Start Democracy and run a video.

Only problem I have is in full screen mode it fails to make the controls disappear, the moment they do they return again.

Now, it won’t revert back to Aero basic. As said, the only problem is getting full screen to work properly. I’m not sure what the issue is there, but I’m sure the developers can find something.

Microsoft Open Source Software Labs (Port 25) have released a plugin that fixes a problem in the latest version of Windows - there is no Netscape Plugin for Windows Media Player built into Vista. It is backwards compatible down to version 6.4 (yes, long before WMP went all media-library like).

• Download the plugin at Port 25

This diminishes the need to go and download each DLL separately from a strange website.

It has also been announced that they will soon release a plugin to enable CardSpace in Firefox, the identity management system in .NET 3.0 for web sites. (In Vista, press the Windows key, and type cardspace, though card does seem sufficient)

One of the recent things I’ve been doing in Vista is playing around with stacks. A new view in Windows Explorer in Vista is to stack your files into groups by attribute. In reality, it is a bunch of searches for specific files with pretty icons. To stack folders, you can click on the arrow next to the heading you want to stack (say, Name) and selecting “Stack by Name”. You’ll then get lots of icons with files holding a certain name.

This can be helpful in certain situations. One of the things I like to keep organised is my music. In XP, I would’ve had to create a folder to each artist, then another for each album. In Vista, I can do half that work automatically.

I just type “kind:music” in the search box, then go Artist → Stack by Artist, and all my music is magically put into virtual folders. (We first type kind:music because of the folder images that can add unnecessary cruft).

Now I can double-click on an artist and get all the music by that artist.

But, what if I want to get a certain album? Well, this is why I said “half that work automatically.” It cannot remember stacks within stacks, but you can still do so. Just go Album → Stack by Album. The music is then stacked by album.

You can navigate the stacks just like any folder from the folder tree as well.

Now you may think this all useless because you can’t access this in Open dialogs. You are mistaken. Click on the Save Search button in Explorer to save it to your Saved Searches folder (or anywhere else for that matter). Then, open up an Open dialog box somewhere, goto Saved Searches and double-click your new search. Tah-da!

I finish off this post with a tip that not even US PC World knew. If you are finding the icons too large or too small, you can quickly resize them by holding down Ctrl and rolling the mouse wheel - roll up to make them bigger, roll down to make them smaller. The thing PC World didn’t mention in the article above was that this applies to the desktop as well. Just go to your desktop then Ctrl+Mouse Wheel. And yes, if you make the icons 32×32 (the old size), the shortcut icon will overlap a quarter of the icon. Just scroll down one more and it won’t.

Vista, I tried to like you but you aren’t giving me as much joy as I had hoped.

I recently bought a new graphics card, a GeForce 7900GS. I was happy to finally have a powerful graphics card to play games smoothly. However, when I played City of Heroes, I got low frame rates. Like, really low. About 10 FPS. Disappointed, I installed XP again. And the increase in performance was big, I could now muster 25 FPS. Sure, not what I was hoping for, but much better. I had been told by the fellows at the City of Heroes boards I need at least 2GB of RAM - especially on Vista. I thought, fair enough. Then I checked out task manager.

Notice how not alot of my RAM is free. And also notice how most of the pagefile (which it decided to be 2.2GB) is also taken up. What gives?

Sure, I haven’t shut it down for a while (I hibernate) but still. I have Windows Media Player playing music, and Firefox running. There is a lot to like in Vista, but for now the cons just keep weighing my experience down with Vista.

I might flick over to the old bootloader soon Vista if you don’t behave.

If you are using Vista, these two tips that I posted late last year might help you out with two open source problems:

• Using The GIMP with Windows Vista
• Getting Windows Media Player and Firefox to play nicely in Windows Vista

Now that I’m in Vista full time I’ll be updating my blog with any tips and tricks I find with problems lurking about (such as the Creative Live! card one below).

I finally got my copy of Windows Vista (Business) and installed it last night. The “wow” lasted for about five seconds until I had to grapple with Creative’s lack of Live! 5.1 drivers. Unfortunately, they will never ever be produced. So I’ll have to upgrade my sound card.

I tried the kX drivers at first, but the version downloadable from the site didn’t work correctly with Vista (it sort of does, just the Mixer didn’t work). I then tried the modded drivers and they didn’t work at all. I then took out the sound card and tried the onboard sound. No luck with any of the drivers I downloaded (from Gigabyte, Intel or Realtek). I then found newer kX drivers on the forums (Version M), so I put back in my sound card and tried those. It works, not perfectly (full Vista support will be in 3539, not 3538), but it’ll do.

I think I might just upgrade to an Audigy card, as my current card is getting on and I’m hearing pops and clicks every so often.

So now starts my Vista.

Oh man, whoever thought of that should be shot.

Windows Vista has been released to the masses today. And, Microsoft updated the Windows website.

• Windows

After McAfee and Symantec’s swings at Microsoft - saying that the giant isn’t cooperating with them - another virus maker has come out and said that there is no evidence of Microsoft stopping them from doing anything.

Kaspersky labs, a Russian based security group, has said in Reuters on Friday:

“From what we have seen of Vista we cannot tell that Microsoft is blocking access to the core,” Kaspersky Lab Chief Executive and co-founder Natalya Kaspersky told Reuters in an interview in Paris.

No surprises here. Soon after McAfee and Symantec made swings at Microsoft, BetaNews had gone out to find other companies opinion. Sophos also found no problems with the Vista security model, in fact saying:

Conceivably, if Sophos wanted to provide a “total security solution,” given this new set of circumstances, wouldn’t it need to understand some of PatchGuard’s secrets? Surprisingly, O’Brien told us no. “At this point in time, Sophos does not see the need to be able to access the kernel within the Microsoft operating system,” he said.

“If there is a point in time where the kernel becomes the subject of malware being written specifically to it, then I would expect that we would go back to Microsoft and tell them we need to be able to access the kernel. But at this point, it doesn’t appear to be necessary.”

So, this seems to be the big security companies being the only ones kicking up a fuss. They have the most to lose I suppose. Still, you shouldn’t get McAfee or Symantec products anyway - they are overpriced and resource hogging. You should just find some free alternatives (that also happily work with Vista).