I'm installing Windows XP Mode on my Windows 7 laptop right now. It's taking quite a while, but I guess what it's doing under the covers is installing Windows XP under Virtual PC.

Oh, hey, it just started up Windows XP. Now it's going through all the normal annoying things you get on a new XP machine, the warning about unused icons on your desktop, the warning about not having any anti-virus software, and all that.

Okay, so I played around with it a bit and it looks like your usual Windows XP virtual machine, only with a few differences. There doesn't seem to be an obvious way to shut the machine down; you can only log off and hibernate it. And there's a fixed user that is automatically logged in. I guess I don't know much about Windows XP Mode yet. I'll have to play with it some more.

Labels: Windows

There was a huge bombshell dropped at work yesterday, which I may blog about in a week or two after it's all sorted out. And things are still going on with my Mom, which I may or may not blog more about at some point. Somehow, I found time to install Windows 7 on my Dell Inspiron while all this stuff was going on, and I'm going to blog about that, since it's a lot more straightforward than any of the work or family stuff.

I used Easy Transfer (as mentioned previously) to back up my stuff, then did a clean install of Win 7, then used Easy Transfer to put the data back, then re-installed all my applications. This went pretty well. Most of the apps found their data, no problem. The one exception was Lotus Notes, which kept its data under the Program Files folder, so Easy Transfer didn't save it. No big deal, though, since I had a fairly plain Notes install on this laptop, so it was easy to just go through the setup again.

So now I've got the 64-bit version of Win 7 Pro running on my laptop, with the usual tools installed -- Office 2007, Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008, Notes 8.5.1, and a bunch of other random stuff. Everything seems to be working, though I haven't really tested everything yet.

Labels: Windows

I've been so busy with family stuff, that I haven't even thought about upgrading any of my machines to Windows 7. I had planned to upgrade my desktop machine and my Inspiron laptop to Win 7 Pro, and my Acer netbook to Win 7 Home. My copy of Win 7 Home hasn't shown up in the mail yet, so I can't do that one yet. And the desktop machine is too important for me to mess with it right now.

So, I'm playing with the Inspiron tonight. It had Vista Ultimate, 32-bit, on it. I'm replacing that with Win 7 Pro, 64-bit. I used Windows Easy Transfer to save my files and settings from the old install to an external drive. I got through the basic Win 7 install fine, and now I'm restoring those files backed up with Easy Transfer. Assuming that works out, then I've got about a dozen programs to install.

I do wish that there had been a reasonable in-place upgrade option to get me from Vista Ultimate to 7 Pro. Even if I had to stick with 32-bit, that would have been fine. Or if there was a way to migrate installed programs along with the files via Easy Transfer. Well, I guess it's not a huge deal. I'm just hoping it's all worth it. I never really had time to play with the Win 7 betas or RC or even the RTM off MSDN, so I don't have much of a clue as to how it'll work out. People keep saying that it's a lot better than Vista, but I have my doubts!

Labels: Windows

At work, I've been gradually setting up a new machine to act as our main file server, print server, and domain controller. The old server is running Windows Server 2003; the new one will be running Windows Server 2008. I haven't really done much Windows sysadmin work lately other than the usual day-to-day stuff, so I'm a bit rusty on AD forests, FSMOs, and stuff like that. I have a bunch of stuff I've been meaning to write up and post, but I haven't had much time for that. I thought I'd mention one thing that I discovered today, though: the Microsoft File Server Migration Toolkit. I just stumbled across this at random, but it seems to be exactly the tool I need to get my shares moved over from the old server to the new one!

Labels: Windows

Notes 8.5 fix pack 1 is out. I've downloaded it and applied it to a few machines. It does seem to fix a few random problems with the initial 8.5 release.

I haven't applied Domino FP1 to our server yet though. I need to wait for the weekend to do that. I haven't had a lot of problems with 8.5, overall. I've had a few issues with SMSDOM crashing occasionally. I'm on the most recent version; I upgraded SMSDOM right before I upgraded Domino itself. I'm not sure if I should blame this problem on IBM or Symantec. I also upgraded Backup Exec on the Domino server recently. That seems to be working OK, though the Backup Exec Domino agent isn't yet certified to work on 8.5. The Backup Exec upgrade was a pretty big jump, since we'd been running version 10. There isn't a way to directly upgrade from 10 to 12.5, so I just uninstalled 10 and did a fresh install of 12.5, then re-created my daily backup job.

As I side note, I discovered a weird shortcut today. Hold down Ctrl+Alt while you're going into your inbox, and you'll load the "non-java" version, basically the same thing you get if you run Notes in basic mode. I picked this up from a forum post written by Mary Beth Raven. I'm not sure how useful this is to anybody, but for some reason, I think it's kind of cool.

Labels: Lotus, software, Windows

A couple of weeks back, I posted a semi-useful AutoHotKey script, just a little script to paste text from the clipboard, but stripped of formatting. Well, I did some searching, and of course, I'm not the only person to have come up with this basic script. This guy posted a similar script, a couple of years ago. The one thing I learned from his script, which I somehow didn't think of myself, is that, rather than sending the clipboard contents using "SendInput", it's better to put the text *back* on the clipboard, then send ctrl-V. The reason this works better is that, in most applications, a paste is an atomic operation that's easily undoable, whereas using SendInput appears to the application as though you just manually typed out the contents of the clipboard.
I also decided to disable the macro in Excel, since I have an existing macro in Excel that's mapped to ctrl-shift-V, and I don't want to override that. So, bottom line, the macro now looks like this:

#IfWinNotActive Microsoft Excel 
^+V::
myStr := clipboard
myStr := RegExReplace(myStr, "\s+$","")
clipboard := %myStr%
Send ^V

Still nothing terribly amazing, but very useful, and something I was living without for longer that I should have.

Labels: programming, software, Windows

I've been using AutoHotKey for a while now. I've got a few macros programmed into it that are pretty much wired into my brain at this point. There's one thing I've been meaning to write for the last year or so, and just never got around to it. Well, I was in the middle of something on Friday, and I just decided that I needed to stop what I was doing, and just figure out how to write this macro. It turned out to be a lot simpler than I though it was going to be! Now I feel kind of stupid for putting it off for so long.

Basically, I wanted a macro that would do a "Paste Special / Text Only". Mostly, I needed this in Lotus Notes, but there are other apps where it could come in handy. Long ago, I'd taken care of this in Word with a simple one-line VBA macro. But, I never really knew how to do this in Notes. The reason I need this, is that I'm often pasting text from Word, or a web page, or some other app, into Notes. The text goes to the clipboard as formatted text, and if I just do a straight paste into Notes, all the formatting info gets pulled in, and it's usually not a good match for the default e-mail formatting in Notes. So, I'd settled on just selecting Edit, then Paste Special, then Text from the menus. But that's a lot more work than pressing Ctrl-V.

Before yesterday, I'd never looked at the AHK docs closely enough to realize how simple this was. The contents of the clipboard, in plain text format (that's the key there!) are available in a system variable called "clipboard". So, all I really needed to do is call SendInput on that. Duh. Just to get fancy, I also decided that I wanted to trim trailing whitespace from the clipboard contents. So, here's a simple macro that trims trailing whitespace from the contents of the clipboard, and sends it out:

^+V::
myStr := clipboard
myStr := RegExReplace(myStr, "\s+$","")
SendInput %myStr%

I just have that mapped to Ctrl-Shift-V, so I can paste text anywhere, without formatting, no problem. And, yes, I could have written this in one line, but I broke it up so it would be easier to see what I was doing.

The point of this story, I guess, is that AutoHotKey is a wonderful thing, and that some things are simpler than you think they are, if you just sit down and spend a few minutes reading the docs.

Labels: programming, software, Windows

Based on this article and this one too, both by Woody Leonhard, it looks like I won't be able to do an in-place upgrade from Vista Ultimate to Win 7 Pro. I'm running Vista Ultimate on my desktop PC and my Inspiron laptop, and I was actually hoping to do an in-place upgrade on them both. Oh well. I guess if I'm forced to do a wipe & clean install, then that gives me the opportunity to switch from 32-bit to 64-bit too.

I was really hoping I could get away with an in-place upgrade though. It wasn't that long ago that I did a clean install of Vista on my desktop PC, when I bought a new hard drive. It took a lot of time to get everything re-installed and set up after that. And, on the laptop, I'm a little worried about getting all the Dell drivers installed and working after a clean OS install.

I guess if I have to do it, I'll figure it out. I'll probably try 64-bit on the laptop, and see if it works. If it does, that'll be great. I've never had a 64-bit OS on any of my Windows machines at home, so that'll be something new. My desktop PC has a 64-bit chip too, but it's an older AMD chip, so I'm a little leery of trying a 64-bit OS on there, without first replacing the motherboard and CPU with something more modern.

Labels: Windows

I pre-ordered a copy of Windows 7 Home today, to go along with the two copies of Win 7 Pro I pre-ordered a while back. My plan is to install Pro on my desktop machine and my Inspiron laptop, and to use the Home upgrade on either my new Aspire One, or a VM on my Mac. I don't think I've ever bought three copies of an OS upgrade before. I hope it's worth it!

I listened to a podcast on Windows 7 yesterday that was pretty interesting. If the company I work for was in better shape, I'd love to roll out Win 7 to all our users. I don't see any way we could afford it though, either financially or in terms of the time commitment. I think we'll be sticking with WIndows XP for the foreseeable future.

Labels: Windows

I went ahead and pre-ordered two copies of Windows 7 Professional today. The pre-order deal ($99) is supposedly half the price that they'll normally charge for an upgrade ($200). Microsoft has been kind of vague about when the pre-order deal expires, so it may be safe to wait until a lot closer to October to order, but it can't hurt to do it now. I'm pretty sure Amazon won't charge my credit card until it ships.

My intention is to upgrade both my desktop machine and my laptop to Win 7, soon after the release. They're both running Vista Ultimate right now. There's no half-price deal on the Win 7 Ultimate upgrade, so that's only available for the full price of $220, effectively more than twice the $99 Pro deal. I don't think there's enough extra stuff in Ultimate to justify that price, so I'm going to drop back to Pro when I go to 7. It's all very confusing. I don't know why Microsoft broke Vista into so many SKU's, and I don't know why they're not simplifying it with 7. (Maybe they are simplifying it a bit, but the whole "Ultimate" thing is still dumb.)

Labels: Windows

I had a few spare minutes today, so I installed Chandler on my PC at work. No major problems with the install, or with creating an account on Chandler Hub. I played around with it a bit, and so far, I like it. It's reasonably fast to load and use. Since it's a cross-platform app written in Python, I was concerned that it would be slow, and maybe have some user interface quirks. Not that a cross-platform Python app *can't* be fast and have a good UI, but a lot of the time, that's not the case.

The e-mail integration, as I mentioned in my post yesterday, is a little weird. Chandler uses IMAP to create three folders in your mail file, Chandler Events, Chandler Messages, and Chandler Starred. When you drop messages in these folders, they appear in Chandler. That part seemed to work OK with my Lotus Notes mailbox.

Chandler can also send e-mail. That, I thought, would be straightforward. It's just attaching to an SMTP server. I have plenty of apps that use my Domino server to send SMTP mail, so I didn't expect any difficulty there. I didn't have any problems just connecting to the server. However, I've found that the e-mails sent from Chandler don't render correctly in Notes. A bunch of XML, which is probably supposed to be hidden, shows up in the message. I did some testing, and the e-mails from Chandler look fine in GMail, and in Apple's Mail.app. They look like a mess in Notes though. Oh, and I tried Notes 7, 8, and 8.5 clients, and it's the same either way. I did find, though, that the e-mails in Notes look fine when I'm accessing my mailbox from my iPod or BlackBerry.

When things go wrong with e-mail rendering in Notes, it can be hard to figure out where things went wrong. First, the Domino server may screw something up before it gets to your mail file. If it's not that, then it might be something related to your mail file template, or to the Notes client software. Since this problem occurs in Notes 7, 8, and 8.5, I'm guessing it's not a simple client quirk. It could be something in my mail file template. That's still on version 7, and I can't really change that without upgrading my Domino server.

So, bottom line, if I can't get the outgoing e-mail to look OK in Notes, Chandler is going to be mostly useless for me. If I can get that working, then it's promising.

Oh, and one other interesting thing about Chandler. There's a book called "Dreaming in Code" about the initial development process on Chandler. This book is frequently compared to Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine, which is a great book about the development of a minicomputer back in the 70's. Chandler's development process, apparently, was a bit rocky. At the time the book was written, the program had been in development for several years, and hadn't produced a workable 1.0 release yet. I think that the author's original intention was to document the development of a revolutionary open source app that would really be a killer app that would compete with Outlook and maybe Lotus Notes. In the end, he wound up with a book documenting a lot of things that could go wrong with a development project, which is maybe an even more interesting book than he would have gotten if the project had gone well. (I haven't actually read this book yet, so I'm generalizing from the reviews I've read. I do want to pick up the book and read it at some point.)

Labels: GTD, software, Windows

So I decided to mess around with Boot Camp tonight, and maybe install Win 7 on my Mac.
First problem: I figure out that Boot Camp Assistant isn't installed on my Mac. So, I have to get the OS X install DVD, and figure out where the installer is, and run that. OK.
Next problem: When I set up my new 500 GB drive a couple of weeks ago, I used 400 GB for my Mac partition, and left 100 GB for a possible Windows partition. Thinking ahead is good, yes? Apparently, no. Boot Camp Assistant doesn't recognize that. It cheerfully offers to subdivide my 400 GB partition, so I can use part of *that* for Windows, but it doesn't even see that 100 GB unpartitioned space.
So, now I've re-sized my main partition to take up the whole drive. Maybe tomorrow night I'll run BCA again and see about breaking it back up into two partitions.

Labels: Apple, Windows

I've been slowing working on moving over from XP to Vista on my main home desktop machine since August 2008. I finally decided to finish up on that today.

I had been running in a dual-boot config since August, with XP on my old drive, and Vista on a new drive. My goal for today was to switch to a plain old single-boot config, with the Vista drive as drive 0 and the XP drive reformatted, so I can use it for backups, as drive 1. The problem, of course, is that the old XP drive was technically the boot drive. You'd think it wouldn't be too hard to switch things around so that I could boot from the Vista drive, but it's actually a bit of a pain. I followed the instructions here, which sounded like they covered my situation perfectly, but that didn't work, and I wound up having to boot the machine with my Vista install DVD and run a repair. It took awhile to get all the way through this, but I seem to have a working Vista install now, booting off the Vista drive. And I'm reformatting the old XP drive right now.

This all took longer than it should have. Microsoft really didn't need to make the Vista boot process so darn arcane. But hey, I'm now 100% Vista, just in time for Windows 7 to come out...

Labels: Vista, Windows

I've been using MobileMe to sync contact & calendar data between my MacBook and my iPod Touch for a while now. It works pretty well. Today, I decided to go one more step, and set up MobileMe on my Vista desktop machine to sync with Outlook. The contacts were no problem; they synced up fine the first time through, and I then went through them and weeded out a few duplicates.

The calendar was a little trickier. I have three calendars in MobileMe: Home, Work, and Birthdays. The birthday calendar is populated automatically via MenuCalendarClock, a shareware program that just pulls birthdays from the Mac address book and puts them into iCal. These calendars all now show as separate calendars in Outlook. I had to basically push them down to Outlook, rather than doing a straight merge, though, to get them to show up.

There's a default calendar in Outlook called "Calendar" that has now synced up the MobileMe (and hence my Mac and iPod). I never used the calendar in Outlook before, so this is just an empty calendar. There doesn't seem to be any obvious way to delete it in Outlook, or to tell the MobileMe control panel not to sync it up. Not a huge deal, but a little annoyance.

And repeating events seem to be treated a little differently in Outlook vs. iCal. After I pulled stuff into Outlook, then synced back to MobileMe, then synced my Mac, every repeating event on my calendars showed as changed. I'm hoping this is a one-time thing, and I'm not going to have to push & pull every repeating event at every sync.

I'm also a little worried that, when I go to http://www.me.com/calendar/ to check my calendar online, I just see "Loading Events", and nothing ever comes up. I think when something this has happened in the past, it would generally clear itself up overnight. Here's hoping. Looking around online, though, this may have something to do with the way Outlook messed with the repeating events. I may have to do some work to straighten this out.

My reason for setting up Outlook with MobileMe, by the way, is because I'm thinking about replacing my old Motorola cell phone with a BlackBerry in the not-too-distant future. If I do that, I'm going to want to do full contact & calendar sync with the BlackBerry, and it seems like the easiest way to do that might be through Outlook. It seems like it's possible to sync a BlackBerry directly with a Mac, but I figured it couldn't hurt to set up my PC with all my data either way.

Labels: Apple, GTD, software, Windows

I finally got around to installing an XP virtual machine under Virtual PC on my VIsta desktop PC. This is one of the last things I need to do before wiping out the XP install on that machine, which I'm currently running in dual-boot mode.

I discovered one odd thing while setting this up. If you install XP with SP1 under VPC on Vista, the VPC additions won't quite work right until you upgrade the virtual machine to SP2. Just a little hint, in case anyone else runs across this problem.

I'm currently letting the XP VM upgrade itself to SP3 via WIndows Update. Boy, that's taking a long time!

Labels: Windows

I just found out that PC Magazine is going to stop publishing their hard copy, and go "100% digital." I haven't picked up a copy of PC Mag in a while, but it's still sad to see it go. I had a subscription at one point a few years back, and it was one of the more useful magazines out there. Aside from continuing their web site, they will also continue to publish a digital version via Zinio. That's kind of disappointing, since I'm not a big fan of Zinio's reader. I'd really like to see them offer a Kindle version, but I haven't seen any indication that they might do that. Looking at the Kindle magazine list, there actually aren't any computer magazines in there at all. There are a bunch of computer-related blogs in the Kindle blog list, though. It is, of course, not hard to find tech news on the web, or on the Kindle, really, but it would be nice if even one general-audience computer magazine could survive in "dead tree" form.

Labels: Kindle, Windows

I'm still slowly working on switching over to Vista on my home desktop machine. I just ordered a cheap new video card that should be a bit more Vista-compatible than my old one. I also ordered 2 gigs of RAM, so I can bring my machine up to 4 GB. (And, yes, I know 32-bit Vista won't be able to use all of it.) I think this will leave me with a reasonably fast machine, capable of handling anything I'm likely to do with it.

Labels: hardware, Vista, Windows

Well, after thinking I had my SQL problem licked, it came back. I finally got a callback from a support guy at Microsoft, and he had me update statistics on all the tables involved. That fixed things, and everything has been working now for the last couple of days. I'm pretty sure I'd updated statistics on all these tables at least once since the original problem occurred, but maybe I didn't, or maybe I just needed to do it two or three times to get everything back to normal.

I've always had a maintenance plan that updates statistics on all my tables once a week, and I don't think I've ever had problems with statistics before.

I've been reading up on this whole statistics thing now, which I admit I hadn't paid much attention to, until this little debacle. Here's a blog entry by Kim Tripp that explains a few things about the auto-update mechanism, and another one by someone at Microsoft that explains a good bit about the way statistics work in SQL 2005.

Labels: SQL, Windows

After all the patching I did over the weekend, it seemed like everything was fine on my main SQL server. However, on Monday, we discovered that a couple of oddball SELECT statements weren't working anymore, returning the error "Internal Query Processor Error: The query processor could not produce a query plan. For more information, contact Customer Support Services."

To make a very long story short, I eventually figured out that I could get these queries working again by deleting all of last year's data from one of our bigger tables. The table in question had about 32 million rows in it. I cut it down to 13 million after getting rid of the 2007 data. The moral of this story, apparently, is that you shouldn't try to store 30 million rows in a single SQL Server table. I say this with tongue in cheek, since, obviously, there are other people out there with very large tables in SQL Server. Apparently, I can't be one of them, though.

I put a call in the Microsoft support this morning, but they never called me back. Maybe tomorrow. If they do call back, and I get a support guy who seems to be a bit less clueless than usual, maybe I'll try to see if we can figure out why my server chokes on this table. If I get the usual clueless support dude, I guess I'll just tell him I figured it out on my own while I was waiting for a callback. I wonder if I get my support incident credited back if I solve my own problem while I'm waiting for the callback?

Labels: SQL, Windows

I spent a bunch of time on Friday night bringing my various home machines up-to-date with patches and software updates. The impetus for that was largely this security hole in Windows, which seems to be the biggest vulnerability that's cropped up with Windows in quite a while.

I was also interested in updating my VMWare Fusion install to 2.0. Ars Technica has a good review of Fusion 2 up on their site. I did the upgrade, and it was pretty smooth, but I haven't had time to play around with it enough to tell if it will work any better on my old MacBook than the previous version.

I realized that I hadn't turned my Dell Vista laptop on in about a month, so there were plenty of patches and updates to run on that. And I hadn't started the virtual machine I have set up under Fusion in a while either, so there were a bunch of patches to install on that too.

On Saturday, I remotely applied a whole bunch of patches to our servers at work. The main goal was to get that Windows patch on all the servers, but I also had a bunch of other patching to do. I'm embarrassed to say that I'd never updated our main SQL 2005 server to SP2. That had been on my to-do list for about a year. And I had to apply a cumulative post-SP2 patch file to our HR/payroll SQL server, since our HR/payroll software vendor requires that I bring the server up to that level before I can apply their year-end update. It took about three hours to get all that done. Happily, nothing locked up at any point, so I didn't have to drive into the office just to power cycle a server. (And, yes, I know there are devices that would allow me to power cycle a machine remotely. But we can't buy any new equipment right now.)

I have one Windows 2000 server that's hanging up on one of the updates. I'll probably have to bring that one up to date in safe mode or something. I really don't know what's wrong with it, and I'd like to just get everything off it and moved to a WIndows 2003 machine, but I don't have the time right now.

I got some interesting errors on the two machines to which I applied SQL updates. There's a long thread on this problem here, at the Microsoft forum site. I haven't figured out if this error is actually going to be a problem or not. There's certainly a lot of confusing (and sometimes conflicting) advice out there on it.

I've been watching the Jets game today, and enjoying the newest Mac vs PC ads that Apple's been airing. The theme is basically how Microsoft is spending a bunch of money on advertising instead of fixing Vista. I have to say that I agree with that. This new security hole apparently exists in every version of Windows from Win 2000 to Vista and Win 2008 Server. There's an interesting blog entry about MS08-067 and the SDL, covering the failure of the SDL (Security Development Lifecycle) to catch this bug. To quote from the article: "I'll be blunt; our fuzz tests did not catch this and they should have." I can't help but think that a little bit of that Seinfeld cash might have caught this one earlier. I'm probably over-simplifying. These things are really complex, and a lot of stuff can go wrong that no pile of cash can fix.

Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to the Giants game this afternoon. It should be a good one. Well, this was a really long (and probably boring) blog entry, but I haven't written anything in a few weeks, so I was due for a long one. I've got a bunch more random thoughts in my head, but I'm going to resist the temptation to make this entry any longer!

Labels: Apple, software, Windows

I'm still trying to get Vista up and running on my desktop PC. I haven't lost access to the network lately, so that's a good sign. However, I'm now getting occasional messages saying that the "desktop window manager has stopped working". This doesn't cause any serious problems; the screen just blanks for a second, then everything's fine again. This seems to be happening right after I access my USB Zip drive, which is a little weird. A Google search isn't turning up much useful. Most reasonable suggestions related to this error point towards the video driver. I've got a fairly old, pre-Vista, video card, so maybe I should upgrade to a card that came out post-Vista, and that's likelier to have good Vista drivers.

Labels: Vista, Windows

I didn't touch my home desktop PC at all over the Labor Day weekend, so I didn't make any more progress on moving to Vista. I'm working on it now, though.

I just installed FolderShare, so I could have access to the shared library that I keep on all my computers. FolderShare works fine under Vista, as far as I can tell.

I've been having occasional problems with my network adapter not working under Vista. It started right after I installed Virtual PC. That may have something to do with it, or that may just be a coincidence. If I reboot the machine, that fixes the problem. It's only happened a couple of times so far, so I'll have to see if it becomes a real problem or not.

I'm trying to get started porting my Delphi comic book database application to C#. I mentioned this in a previous post. The Delphi app requires BDE, which I'm not keen on trying to install under Vista, though apparently, it's possible. I'm thinking about using SQL Server Compact for my database. I don't need anything fancy for this, nor do I need multi-user access to the data. Of course, there's nothing wrong with SQL Express either.

Labels: Vista, Windows

I'm nearly done moving all my stuff over to the Vista install on my desktop machine. I de-authorized iTunes under XP, so I can use it under Vista. I moved my OneNote files over. Almost all of my key programs are installed and working now.

I'm installing Visual Studio 2008 right now. I haven't used VS 2008 before, so hopefully I can spend some time playing around with it now. I don't think I'm going to bother installing any older versions of VS. I don't really have any independent projects in .Net 1.1 or 2.0 that I need to worry about supporting.

I have Delphi 4 on my XP drive, and I have one fairly important program written in it: the database program that I use to manage my comic book collection. This is a program that I first wrote in BASIC on the Commodore 64, and have ported (or rewritten) several times. It's probably time to rewrite it again, this time as a Windows Forms app in C#, maybe. I'll have to see if I can even get the existing Delphi program running under Vista. I never really made an installer for it, and I think I may have used a weird library or two.

I think rewriting an old Delphi app in C# is particularly apropos, since I'll basically be following Anders Hejlsberg from Borland to Microsoft. I considered upgrading the project from Delphi 4 to the newest version of Delphi, but I don't see much point in spending time on that right now, since Delphi programming doesn't seem to be a marketable skill anymore. And the new version of Delphi costs a minimum of $400, whereas I got a free copy of VS 2008 from Microsoft when I went to the launch event a few months back.

Labels: programming, Vista, Windows

I think I've hit the point of no return on my desktop Vista install now. I've moved over my Quicken data file. It's working OK, so I guess I'm going to start moving over other key stuff, like my Outlook data file, and my OneNote files.

I'm experimenting right now with mapping a drive to my MobileMe iDisk, and backing up my Quicken files to it. It works, but it's pretty slow. Under XP, I'd been backing up Quicken to a Zip disk, which just seems so out of date now. There's really nothing wrong with doing that, but I'm probably the last guy on earth still using Zip disks. Given how slow the iDisk backup is, though, maybe I'll stick with the Zip disks for a while.

Labels: Vista, Windows

As I mentioned about a week back, one of the two drives in my home desktop machine died recently. Luckily, it wasn't my main drive. I have now removed the dead drive, added a new 500 GB SATA drive, and installed Vista on it. So, now I have my old XP install on my old 250 GB drive, and the new Vista install on the 500 GB drive. I'm gradually migrating my apps and data over to the Vista install. When I'm done, I plan to wipe out the XP install and use the 250 GB drive for backups.

So far, it's working well. I've got a fair number of key apps installed and working. Vista actually seems to be snappier than XP at this point. That may just be because I haven't installed a few key apps that are probably going to bog the system down a bit. Well, hopefully, it'll remain usable, regardless.

Labels: Vista, Windows

At work, I generally get a new desktop machine every two years. We lease computers from Dell, so it doesn't really cost anything to return my machine at the end of each two-year lease and trade it in for a new one. My lease is up at the end of this month, so I just got a new machine in. Usually, when I get a new machine, there are a few big differences from the last one. This time, not so much. I've got more hard drive space, but that's really the only major difference. The processor is about the same speed. I've got twice the RAM (from 2GB to 4GB), but I don't think the difference there will be especially noticeable. And I'm sticking with Windows XP, so there's no OS update to worry about and/or enjoy. When I configured this machine at Dell's site, Windows XP was still the default OS choice in the drop-down. The machine does ship with Vista Business on a DVD in the box, but it's got XP installed. I'm not sticking with XP purely out of laziness or anything like that. We're using a number of applications that aren't supported under Vista. And I just can't see any real advantage to moving over to Vista yet.

On another front, I tried installing Lotus Notes 8 on the new machine. It worked, but it was pretty slow. It's got a few interesting new features, and I'd really love to be able to move everyone from Notes 7 to 8, but if I can't get it running well on a machine with 4 GB of RAM, it's going to be intolerable on some of our lower-end machines. I uninstalled it and went back to Notes 7.

The point of this story is basically that I'm somewhat disappointed with the progress we've made in the computer industry over the last couple of years. Major new software releases, such as Vista, Notes 8, Office 2007, and so on, are interesting but not compelling. And they're usually bloated and slow on even high-end hardware. And the hardware itself doesn't seem to have progressed much, expect in a few areas. Processor technology in particular doesn't seem to have changed much over the last two years.

Well, that's my two cents. I'm still glad I'm getting a new machine!

Labels: hardware, Windows

I've got two hard drives in my main desktop computer: a 250 GB drive that I've got all my stuff on, and an old 100 GB drive that I occasionally use for backups, or experimenting with Linux, or what have you. I turned the computer on last night, and heard an ominous clicking sound coming from one of the drives. Luckily, it was the 100 GB drive, which didn't currently contain anything important. I could really just throw that drive away and be done with it, but I decided that this was a good opportunity to do some upgrading. I just bought a new 500 GB drive from Newegg for $70. I'm going to use that as my main drive, move the 250 GB drive over to secondary use, and toss the bad 100 GB drive.

I think I'll probably use this opportunity to do a fresh Vista install on the new drive, and just reinstall all my apps. I'm still running XP on the machine, largely because I've been afraid to try an in-place upgrade to Vista, and there was no obvious quick and safe way to do a clean install without having another big drive handy.

I'm still a little worried about putting Vista on this machine. The Vista upgrade advisor indicates that it'll be OK, and I actually did a test install of Vista on the 100 GB drive a while back, and it did work. My motherboard and video card predate Vista, though, and there were a couple of slightly questionable things that came up when I did that test install. I really don't want to go out and buy a new mobo and processor right now, if I can avoid it. I might upgrade the RAM in the machine from 2GB to 3GB, though. And a newer video card wouldn't be out of the question, though I'm not sure that would help much.

Labels: hardware, Windows

I went to a Microsoft Heroes Happen Here event today in Edison. I had registered for the NYC event that happened about a month ago, but things came up at work, and I couldn't make it. Stuff came up at work today too, so I had to skip the developer stuff in the afternoon. The morning track basically covered Windows 2008. It was pretty interesting, and I did learn some new stuff. They gave out a software bundle that included Vista Ultimate, VS.NET 2008, and a few other things. Honestly, the bundle o' stuff is one of the main reasons I went to this event.

I've put off installing Vista on my main desktop machine at home, for a variety of reasons. Now that I have a free copy of Vista Ultimate with SP1, though, I decided to give it a shot. I'm not doing an upgrade install, though. I'm still afraid to try that. Instead, I'm wiping out my Ubuntu install, and putting Vista on my second drive. I'll have XP on my 250 GB main drive, and Vista on my 100 GB secondary drive. I'm hoping that dual-boot between XP and Vista works out OK. I'm running the install right now; it's been going for about 20 minutes. I think it's almost done.

I also registered for the ASP.NET MVC Firestarter event in NYC that's coming up this weekend. It's always a little hard to talk myself into spending a whole day indoors on a sunny Saturday, in a Microsoft office, but I really need to keep up with some of this stuff. And I think it'll be kind of fun.

Labels: programming, Windows

Here's an article that talks about Changes to Remote Administration in Windows Server 2008. It turns out that XP SP 3 moves you to RDC 6.1, so the /console switch to mstsc.exe doesn't work anymore. You need to use /admin. And the "remote desktops" tool in the Windows Server 2003 Administration Tools Pack hasn't been updated for this. So, the tool I've been using to remote into all my servers doesn't work right anymore! I've worked around this by creating individual .rdp files for each of my servers, and putting them in one directory, but that was a bit of a pain. There's been some talk about this issue here, since it affects the freeware Terminals tool also. I'm just posting about this, as it's something to watch out for if you're applying SP3 to a machine.

Labels: Windows

I installed XP SP 3 on my home desktop machine today, and Vista SP 1 on my laptop. I needed to do the fix I mentioned in yesterday's post to get the XP SP 3 install to run, but it was smooth sailing after I did that. The Vista SP 1 install on the laptop went fine, no hitches. Both installs took about an hour. (In both cases, I was running the install off a CD/DVD burned from an ISO aquired via MSDN.)

I don't expect much from the XP service pack; it's mostly just a rollup of fixes I probably already had on my machine. I'm hoping that the Vista SP, on the other hand, might improve speed & reliability a bit. I guess we'll see!

Labels: Windows

I downloaded Windows XP SP 3 from MSDN yesterday and installed it on a few machines at work, no problems. I tried installing it on my home desktop machine today, and got an error partway through the install. The SP removed itself cleanly, from what I can tell, so no harm done. Poking around on the internet, I think this article may provide an answer to my problem. I haven't tried it yet, though. Maybe tomorrow.

Labels: Windows

I've been using WinKey to manage system-wide keyboard macros on my Windows XP machines for awhile now. WinKey is a nice little program that simply allows you to launch programs by pressing a key combo involving the Windows key. I use Win-X to launch Firefox, for instance. I've had this running on all my home and work computers for the last several years, so I've really got these macros hard-wired into my brain at this point.

Unfortunately, WinKey doesn't work on Vista (at least *I* can't get it working), and is no longer being developed or supported by Copernic, the company that (at one point) wound up with the rights to it. (They didn't develop it originally, but I don't remember who did.)

I recently came across a program called AutoHotKey, which is a fairly powerful scripting environment for Windows keystroke macros and general automation. It *does* indeed work on Vista, and is being actively developed. And it's open source! You do need to read at least a little bit of the documentation to get it to do what you want, but it's not hard to figure out. For instance, this command:
#x::Run C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe
maps Win-x to launch Firefox.
And you can send keystrokes to the active window quite easily, so, for instance, this little script:
#+T::
FormatTime, CurrentDateTime,, MM/dd/yyyy h:mm tt
SendInput %CurrentDateTime%
return
pastes the current date and time into whatever app you're currently using when you press Win-Shift-T.
You can just put all your little macros together in one text file, and put a shortcut to it in your StartUp group, and off you go. Neat!

I've been thinking about keyboard macros on the Mac, too. David Pogue did a column on PC and Mac macro programs a couple of weeks ago. There are a few interesting options on the Mac, but I haven't had time to try any of them out yet.

Labels: software, Windows

I finally got around to installing Office 2007 on my desktop computer today, only about 7 months after I bought it. I installed it on my Vista laptop a while ago, but I just hadn't gotten around to doing it on the desktop XP machine. It seems to have upgraded Outlook fine, without screwing up my mail file in any way. I guess that's the thing I was most afraid of: losing all my e-mail. And it doesn't seem to be significantly slower than Outlook 2003, which is something else I was afraid of.

Labels: software, Windows

I finally finished entering all my passwords into KeePass. I previously blogged about this here and here. So it looks like it took me a little over a month to get this done.

I see that the author of KeePass is working on a 2.0 version, rewriting it in .NET/C#. That's pretty interesting; I'm curious to see if anyone will create a usable Mac version (running under Mono). Some of the features he's including in 2.0 sound good too.

Now, I just need to come up with a viable way of keeping the database in sync between my PC and Mac. I may try doing it with FolderShare. I'm using that on my work PC and home PC right now, to keep some files in sync between the two, but not on my Mac. There may also be a way to keep the file in sync with .Mac; the challenge on that would be automating it on the Windows side, I think.

Labels: software, Windows

I entered some more stuff into KeePass tonight. I'm up to the letter "B" now. Hoo boy, do I have a way to go. In looking through my Vault database, I realize now that I've been using Vault at least since 1999, which certainly explains why there's so much stuff in there. In all that time, I've never had a problem with Vault's database getting corrupted or anything like that. Oh, and I've always been able to run the program just by taking my c:\vault directory from one machine to another. Nice and easy.

I'm almost talking myself into keeping it, but I need to remember that it does absolutely no encryption and isn't cross-platform. Of course, now that I think about it, I haven't tried KeePass on the Vista laptop yet. I should probably make sure it works under Vista before I enter too much stuff in there!

Labels: software, Windows

I was going to try copying all my passwords from Vault to KeePass tonight. I really like Vault, but it uses an unencrypted database, and it's not cross-platform. KeePass runs on both PC and Mac (via KeePassX), and uses good encryption. Unfortunately, I just figured out that I have a little over 200 passwords in my Vault file. It's going to take quite a while to do all that copying and pasting. Vault isn't really structured like KeePass either, so there's no easy way I could cobble together an export/import program. I have to decide whether or not I want to bite the bullet on this right now, or wait. I guess it'll only get worse if I wait, right?

Labels: software, Windows

Well, I tried to burn some files to CD-R on my Vista laptop for the first time. I didn't look too closely at what I was doing on the first CD; I just accepted the defaults. It looks like Vista now defaults to burning a "live" CD in, apparently, UDF format. On the second CD, I looked more closely at what I was doing, and noticed the UDF thing. The instructions seemed to indicate that the CDs would be readable under XP, though, so I went ahead with the burn. When I tried the CDs on XP, though, they appeared to be blank. I tried them on the Mac, just for yuks, and they were totally unreadable. I did some digging, and I figured out that I can read them under XP if I have a proper UDF reader installed. Here's a Microsoft KB article on the subject. Digging a little deeper, it looks like maybe Vista uses a newer version of UDF that's incompatible with the UDF reading capabilities built into XP? After reading up a little more, I figured out that the latest Nero InCD would probably read the discs. I'd been meaning to upgrade my Nero install from 7.0 to 7.7 anyway, so I went ahead and did that, and made sure to install InCD. I can now read the discs. I wish Vista had made it clear that the discs wouldn't necessarily be readable under a normal XP install though.

Labels: Windows

Just for yuks, I re-ran the Vista Upgrade Advisor on my desktop machine. It seems that a few of the issues that were present the last time I ran it have been straightened out. And those that the advisor still listed are probably correctable. There are drivers for my scanner and audio card now. And there are new versions of Nero and Retrospect, which are really the only incompatible software packages on my system.

This leaves me in the frightening position of being able to upgrade this box to Vista, if I really want to. I wasn't planning on upgrading this thing to Vista any time soon, but now I'm tempted. Especially since I just did a full backup. I really think I need to resist the urge for another few months though. I've got the new laptop to use to learn Vista, and there's really no reason I need it on the desktop. I can wait for other people to work through some more of the oddball problems out there.

Labels: Windows

Well, the sun is setting, and the backup of my main desktop machine is done, with no errors. I'm creating a disaster recovery ISO through Retrospect right now. Basically, Retrospect has a process that reads your Windows install CD and creates a new CD image that re-installs Windows and restores your backup. I've had to use this once before (on my machine at work, after a hard drive crash) and it works pretty well.

The one weird thing that gave me trouble today is that Retrospect was having trouble reading my Windows CD. After going through a number of things to figure out why that might be, I wound up just copying the CD to my hard drive first, then letting Retrospect read from the hard drive. My best guess as to why Retrospect can't read from the CD drive would be that it's loading some special drivers to make backups go faster, and that's screwing up the regular CD drivers.

I've also finished setting up the old Gateway laptop. I reinstalled Windows XP, loaded all the Gateway drivers and software, upgraded to SP2, installed 73 patches, then went back and installed IE 7 and WMP 11. It's in a pretty good state right now, though I don't have any anti-virus software on there. There's a trial version of Norton Anti-Virus 2003 on one of the Gateway CDs, but I don't think I want to install that. Maybe I'll install the 90-day trial version of OneCare, or maybe the free Avast or AVG. Or maybe I'll let the next guy worry about that.

Labels: Windows

Even after installing Windows XP SP 2 from CD on my old laptop, there are still 73 patches out there on Windows Update. I tried looking at AutoPatcher, by the way, but I had some trouble getting a download started from their BitTorrent tracker, so I gave up and went back to Windows Update.

Labels: Windows

Right now, I'm running a full backup of my desktop PC to my new 500 GB external drive. I'm also working on wiping my old Gateway and reinstalling Windows XP on it, so I can hand it off to a friend who has some use for it. And I'm also installing various things on my new Vista laptop. So I'm jumping around from machine to machine, checking on stuff, pressing "OK" a lot, and stuff like that.

On the Vista laptop, I've spent several hours trying to get Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server Express set up. Everything seems to be working now, but it sure takes a long time to get that all set up. First, you have to install the original VS 2005 package from DVD. That takes a while. Then, you have to install SP 1. That can take quite a while: several hours. There's a good explanation for this lengthy install here, and apparently Vista adds even more of a complication to this, so it takes even longer under Vista vs. XP.

After SP1, you need to install the Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista Beta. I'm a little alarmed that this is still a beta; you'd think that one of Microsoft's first priorities would be getting a good solid development environment running on Vista.

And, if you want to bring SQL Express up to date, you need to install SQL 2005 Service Pack 2. I'm not 100% if I had to do both of these, but I installed "SQL Server 2005 Express Edition with Advanced Services" and "SQL Server 2005 Express Edition Toolkit". Then, I went back and installed the latest Books Online files.

So, all that took about four hours. Call me crazy, but that really seems like too long just to set up your development environment. Back in the old days, it'd take maybe 5 minutes to install, say, Clipper 5.2 or Turbo Pascal. I guess this is progress, but it doesn't feel like it!

Labels: hardware, programming, Windows

I hooked up my new 500 GB external drive to my desktop computer today, so I'll be ready to try a full backup tomorrow. I'm probably going to take my old 100 GB drive and use it to do full backups on the new Vista laptop and my old iBook. I'm not sure if I really want to keep that drive though; I don't really have any place to keep it. (I'm just running out of room in my apartment!)

I also figured out that the DVDs I used to backup my Vista laptop at work yesterday were probably DVD+R (rather than DVD-R), which may explain why they worked while my DVD-R media wouldn't. Maybe the drive just doesn't work well with DVD-R? I've seen reference to the idea that DVD+R is more reliable, but that was on Wikipedia, so who knows it that's accurate.

If I can manage to get my full backup(s) done tomorrow, then I can finally get around to installing Office 2007 on both my desktop and laptop. Maybe I can get some of the other installs I need to do on the laptop done too. Of course, I'd really like to get out of the apartment for a little while this weekend!

Labels: hardware, Windows

I tried the Windows Complete PC Backup again from work today, and it worked fine! The only difference is that I used DVDs from work instead of the ones I have at home. So, it's looking like this was just a media issue. Weird. The DVDs I'm using at home are name-brand DVD-Rs that are supposed to be fine up to 16x. (The burner in my laptop is 8x.) The DVDs in work are no-name DVDs, and I'm not even sure if they're DVD-R or DVD+R. Well, either way, I now have a complete hard drive backup (hopefully).

Meanwhile, I just installed LoJack for Laptops, which was included as part of the service bundle I got from Dell. I have no idea if I'll ever need it, nor do I know if it'll do any good if the laptop *is* stolen. Seems like an interesting idea, though.

And I signed up for some stuff at LearnDell.com that was also included with my service bundle. I don't know yet if Dell's online training is any good, but maybe I'll try to work my way through some of it and find out if it's worth it.

Labels: Windows

My new Dell Inspiron laptop with Vista showed up at work yesterday. I haven't gotten a chance to do much with it, since I was really tired yesterday and went to bed at 9:30. I did, however, complete some of the usual "new computer" chores: uninstalling some of the pointless crapware that's loaded on the machine, applying various updates, and so on. I've now got the machine in a state where I'd like to make myself an image of the drive, so I'll have a relatively clean image to fall back on if need be.

I'm trying out Windows Complete PC Backup. This should work pretty much the same way Ghost or Acronis work, and create a complete image backup of the machine. Alas, every time I try this (backing up to DVD), I get an I/O error on the first disc. I've run across some advice on the internet to kill any system restore points, then try it again. I guess I'll give that a try. I called Dell support on this, just to see if they knew anything. After an hour-long call, all they could really do is advise that I keep an eye on Windows Updates and hope that this is a problem that Microsoft will fix. Not really useful advice, huh?

I'm a little bit paranoid that some of the Sonic/Roxio stuff that Dell preinstalls is messing up the DVD drive, but I don't know enough to really have a clue if that's the case. I guess I'll play around with it some more, and see if I can figure it out. The only problem here is that I burn a coaster every time a backup fails. While DVD-R prices have fallen a lot, I still don't like tossing them in the trash.

Labels: Windows

Everything's complicated. I wanted to do a complete hard drive backup on my desktop PC before upgrading to Office 2007. I've got a 250 GB hard drive in that machine, and I'm using about 200 GB on it. I've got an extra internal 100 GB HD, and an external 120 GB HD, so I should be able to get the backup done across those two devices without too much grief. But no. I burned up a bunch of time yesterday getting about halfway through the backup, then watching it blow up when it ran out of room on the internal drive. I've done this backup before with Retrospect, but it just isn't working now. After tweaking a few things, I think I've got it right, and I start another backup. I'm puttering around doing other stuff in the apartment while this is going on; at some point, I decide to turn on the TV and check the weather. Boom. Turning on the TV causes a momentary surge (or sag, or something) that causes the computer to reboot. End of backup.

I've got a new UPS on order that should prevent this sort of power thing from happening again. And I picked up a 500 GB external drive at Best Buy today that should allow me to get the whole backup on one drive. (Then, I can maybe use the secondary internal drive for automated backups of key files. Wouldn't that be nice?)

Labels: hardware, Windows

I just picked up an upgrade copy of Microsoft Office 2007 Professional from Costco. I also picked up a copy of the Home and Student version. That may seem kind of weird, but Office Professional doesn't include OneNote, while the Home and Student version does. Costco doesn't carry the standalone version of OneNote, and it didn't seem like the H&S box would cost all that much more than OneNote anyway. Now that I'm looking into it a bit more, I see that Amazon has OneNote Home and Student 2007 for $54. I should probably look into returning the Office H&S version, or maybe selling it or giving it to someone at work.

The previous version of MS Office Pro allowed you to install it on both a desktop and laptop, and it looks like that's OK with the new version too. You can pull up all of Microsoft's license agreements here. The Office Pro agreement has this wording in it:

INSTALLATION AND USE RIGHTS. Before you use the software under a license, you must assign that license to one device. That device is the "licensed device." A hardware partition or blade is considered to be a separate device.
a. Licensed Device. You may install and use one copy of the software on the licensed device.
b. Portable Device. You may install another copy on a portable device for use by the single primary user of the licensed device.

So that's pretty straightforward. The H&S version is a little different:

You may install one copy of the software on three licensed devices in your household for use by people who reside there. The software is not licensed for use in any commercial, non-profit, or revenue-generating business activities.

Kind of interesting. I really wish they would just include OneNote with the Professional version, though. That would have made things a bit easier.

On another topic, Microsoft has come up with the weirdest possible retail packaging for Office 2007. It comes in a hard plastic case that's rounded at the upper right corner, and hinged at the lower right corner. The inner section basically pivots out on that hinge. The CDs are stuck on a hub on the outside of this inner section, and the manual is inside it. (The H&S version doesn't come with a real manual, by the way, while the Pro version includes a "getting started" guide that's a little under 200 pages.) The product key is printed on a sticker that's affixed to the back side of the inner section. The end result of all this is that you've got a plastic box that you can't collapse, nor can you easily toss it out without losing your product key. If you want to get rid of the box, you need to find a separate CD jewel case to keep the CDs in, and you need to either photocopy or carefully peel off the product key sticker. I guess Microsoft does this kind of thing to make the retail box stand out on the shelf, but it's really just a big waste of plastic. Oh well.

I'm not sure if there are any good books out for Office 2007 yet. There's a free e-book that you can download from Microsoft at their Office 2007 Learning Portal. It looks there are links to some other useful stuff at that page too.

Labels: Windows

After going through a lot of grief at work, making sure all our systems would deal with the DST change OK, it just occured to me to check and see if my old Toshiba Pocket PC would change on the appropriate date. It took a bit of searching, but I finally found this page, which would seem to indicate that the Pocket PC will take the settings from my desktop PC when I sync. If that's correct, then cool. (You also have to manually switch to a different time zone, then back to your own, to force the device to load the new settings. Weird, but OK.)

In poking around, I also found that there's a new version of ActiveSync (4.5) out. I installed it, and it seems to work OK. Not spectacularly different from the old version that I was using (3.5).

There's some more info on the DST fix here and here.

Labels: Windows

I just ordered myself a new Dell Inspiron E1505. I got a pretty good deal on it through Dell's EPP (employee purchase program) site. (I have access to that through work, since we do a lot of business with Dell.) I got it with Vista Ultimate installed. I still can't say that I'm really enthusiastic about Vista, but I do think that I'll need to learn it, just for the sake of keeping my skills current, if for no other reason.

I need to pick up a book on Vista too, either Brian Livingston's Vista Secrets or David Pogue's Missing Manual, I think. I probably still have Livingston's original Windows Secrets, for Windows 3.1, floating around here somewhere; I remember that being a really good book. And I have a couple of Pogue's Mac OS X Missing Manual books, and those are pretty good too.

I should try and get myself a copy of Office 2007 too, so I can learn that. I might pick up the upgrade package from CostCo, or wherever else I can find it discounted to a semi-reasonable level.

Really, Microsoft is just getting out of hand with pricing. They do have the "Home and Student" version of Office now, and that's relatively affordable, but it doesn't include Access or Outlook, so that's a bit of a deal breaker for me, at least. And Vista pricing is a joke, if you're buying it off the shelf.

Meanwhile, I'm still getting over my cold. I feel a lot better today, but I'm still feeling a bit weird. As long as I'm back to normal by WonderCon, I'm good.

Labels: hardware, Windows

I'm thinking about picking up a new laptop with Vista on it. I've been been looking at some of the oddball ones like the Toshiba Portege R400 or the Asus W5Fe. Those suckers are expensive, though. It's looking like the Toshiba A135-S4499 might be a good choice for me. It's only $1500, and has pretty much everything I need, including two 120 GB hard drives. There's a write-up on it in the NY Times today. I think it goes on sale February 20.

Labels: hardware, Windows

Newegg has a nice page on Windows Vista. I haven't decided yet if I'm going to upgrade my home desktop PC to Vista or not. I think it meets the required specs, but I'm not sure how well it'll work. If I can manage to supress my natural upgrading urge for a few months, that would probably be best. By April, there will probably be some decent new video cards that are definitely Vista compatible, and maybe they'll even have stable drivers by then. I have a pretty decent AMD processor in my machine, but it's not dual core, so that might be a problem. I really don't want to go out and buy a new motherboard and processor any time soon. And I really don't want to buy a completely new machine either.

Labels: Windows

For some reason, installing my new keyboard today got me started looking at certain things on my PC and applying some upgrades. First, I upgraded the drivers for my video card, since I discovered that I'd been getting some weird messages in the event log related to my video card. Then, I remembered that I hadn't gotten around to installing SP1 for Visual Studio 2005, so I went ahead and did that too. Both of those things are pretty big installs, so that killed about four hours, between downloading and installing. Maybe I should consider doing a year-end backup tomorrow, too.

Labels: asp.net, Windows

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