Jamie's Random Musings

Well, I don't get away with "glossing over" much of anything in this blog, do I? After my post about finally giving up on Vista and going back to XP Professional, I have had several requests for a more complete list of the problems that I had with Vista. So, here are all the gory details:

- USB 2 Controller hanging. As I said, this was the last straw. At irregular intervals, but certainly once or twice a day, any and all USB 2 devices would simply stop working. The only way to recover was to reboot, and even that couldn't be done cleanly because the laptop would hang in the final stages of shutdown or reboot, and had to be power-cycled. I have been running the laptop with XP Professional installed for a week now, and this has not happened a single time.

- Linksys WPC54GX4 Wireless-G CardBus Adapter with SRX400. I bought this less than six months before Vista was released. It was basically the last 802.11g "Boosted" adapter Linksys made before going to 802.11n. Apparently Linksys decided that they didn't sell enough of them to justify adapting the drivers to Vista and getting them certified. After waiting several months, I was finally told by Linksys that they will never provide Vista drivers for that adapter. I asked what the alternative was, and they said "buy a new adapter". Period. No compensation, no trade-in, no work-around. So I bought a new adapter. Not a Linksys.

- Canon BJC-55 printer. Ok, so I'm old, but I love this printer. In fact, there are drivers for the printer included in Vista, but I also have a scan head that can be installed in place of the print head, and then it becomes a reasonably nice traveling scanner. Canon has said there will be no Vista support for the IS-12 scanner cartridge. Too bad.

- HP Scanjet 4670 Vertical See-through scanner. After waiting for a long time while the HP web page said "coming soon", they finally released a "Basic Feature Driver", accompanied by this note:

We are sorry to inform you that a full feature driver for Windows Vista or Windows XP Professional x64 Edition will not be available for your HP product in the future

They went on to say that I could upgrade to a product that was fully compatible with Vista. So I bought a new scanner. Not from HP.

- Lexmark Optra E240 laser printer. This actually works ok with Vista, but the driver from Lexmark for XP was much nicer than either the Vista generic driver or the Lexmark Universal driver for Vista.

- Lantronix Device Installer. This is a utility program that I use for my work. When I first inquired about a Vista-compatible version, they said it would be out "sometime in the summer". When I inquired again in October if they meant "summer" in the Northern or Southern hemisphere, they said it would be out in mid-November. It's still not out.

- Vista "Add New Hardware" Wizard. This was a particularly nasty bug, which as far as I can tell from the discussions on MSDN affects many but not all Vista systems. Basically, Vista loses the ability to find device drivers for standard or previously installed devices. It showed up for me when I plugged my Pentax digital camera into a different USB port than it had previously been in. After a good deal of thrashing around, Vista reported that it couldn't find the drivers for my new device. The work-around reported on MSDN is to make a copy of the Windows INF directory, and then point the wizard at that. It will then find the previously installed driver, which it should have found to begin with, without all the extra thrashing. However, as noted in the following problems, this seemed not to work in all cases.

- Philips SPC650NC webcam. This initially installed without problem. But as can be seen from my other blog postings, I do a lot of work and experimentation with a variety of cameras. At some point the driver for this camera got removed, and when I tried to install it again it reported that it couldn't find a required file. I suspect this is related to the "New Hardware Wizard" bug above, but I couldn't get around it. I had extensive contact with Philips Technical Support, and they couldn't figure it out either, but they said it was being reported with increasing frequency.

- 6DEF Video Driver. This is a multiple-input multiple-output video stream processor, part of which installs as a device driver. It would not install on my Vista system, despite the best efforts of their support team and one of the developers of the program. In fact, this went through two stages; initially, from the error it was producing, I strongly suspect that the problem was related to the "New Hardware Wizard" problem above. But even after I reinstalled Vista, and that problem was fixed, the installation procedure worked but it still would not function properly on my laptop.

- Swisscom Unlimited Data Manager. This is the software for the Swisscom (Option) 5-in-1 WLAN/HSDPA/UMTS/EDGE/GPRS cellular data card. It developed some sort of problem, either with the "New Hardware Wizard" bug or with the Cisco VPN Client software.

- SigmaTel audio driver. I mentioned in my blog entry about installing SightSpeed that the audio was very choppy. This was not the only problem I had with it, there were various other strange audio problems from time to time. The SigmaTel drivers available from Fujitsu were from 2005, and I couldn't find any newer ones which would install on my laptop. It's pretty obvious that drivers that old were not made for Vista, so perhaps that was the problem. I'll never know.

None of these problems were really enough by itself to justify going back to XP. But the cumulative effect was more than enough. After a week running XP Professional on this notebook again, I can honestly say that I am much happier with it - I am now able to just use it for what I need.

jw 30/11/2007

Time for some of the technical details about ooVoo that I didn't want to include in the first impressions blog entry, or I wanted a bit more time to research and test before discussing.

First, the best things about ooVoo:

- It is really easy to download and install. Yes, I know that I said this in the first posting about it, but I can't emphasize that enough. It's really, really easy, and the majority of the time it just works.

- The appearance, "look and feel", "user interface", however you want to term it, is very pleasant, and also quite simple. Buttons are large and colorful, and the graphics on them and pop-up tips for them make it very obvious what they are for.

- The six-way video conference capability is amazing. If you've got the bandwidth and processing power to handle it, and you need or want this capability, this can be the "killer" reason to go with ooVoo. But that is a big IF - it takes a LOT of bandwidth, and a LOT of processing power for every additional participant in a video call.

Next, of course, the worst things about ooVoo:

- There is no "technical data" or "debug info" available that I can find, so I can't be sure what video resolution and frame rate it sends. On my test systems it looks like 320x240 and certainly not more than 15 FPS, probably less - it is very prone to smearing and ghosting. I spent quite a while searching their web page, FAQs and User Forums for information on this, but couldn't find anything.

- There doesn't seem to be an option to start an audio-only call. If you have a webcam ooVoo will try to use it, you can't even go into the ooVoo camera settings and tell it to disable the outgoing video. Your only alternatives are to unplug the camera before you start the call, or let the call connect and then click "stop camera". If you're on a low-speed connection, such as a dial-up when you are traveling, it can be very painful to even try to let the call connect and start before you get the chance to click "stop camera".

Those are the major points. There are plenty of smaller things that I have jotted down as I went along...

The main ooVoo window appearance can be modified in some very interesting ways. First, there are three ways to view your contact list - "thumbnail", with a large picture, "icon", with a small picture, and "name", with no picture at all. That's pretty nice, especially if you have more than a few contacts, but it gets even better. They also have a "favorites bar" mode, which gets rid of everything in the main window except the contacts, your status, and the history buttons. What a good idea! Unfortunately the contacts are always shown in what looks like "thumbnail" view, even if you have selected a different view in the main window, and the "favorites bar" is always on top of any other windows, which gets irritating very fast, but I assume that things like this will be improved over time, or maybe I am just overlooking some other setting.

The options and controls available in the ooVoo "settings" are not as extensive or sophisticated as in other programs. This might be a good thing in most cases, because it decreases the complexity and reduces the chance of an inexperienced user inadvertently changing something that stops ooVoo from working. But if you have some special case or more complicated situation, those advanced controls are useful. For example, I couldn't find a way to tell ooVoo to automatically answer incoming calls. That is something I use a lot, because I do so much testing between two of my own computers; but I don't know how often it gets used in more "normal" situations, and actually I have to admit that it can take you by surprise. Last weekend I was doing some testing with SightSpeed, and had stopped to make a few notes. My brother called me, and before I even realized what was happening SightSpeed had answered the call and opened up two-way video with him!

When you are in a video call, the controls are once again nice and clear and simple. There are very obvious buttons to stop the camera or mute the microphone or speakers, and drop-down menus to select from different devices for any of these. There are also buttons to send a file, send a text chat message, terminate the call, take a snapshot or invite other contacts to join the video conversation.

The "Video Conversation" window shows both your outgoing video and the incoming video in equal sized windows. I thought it was very nice, and a bit surprising, that if you resized the "Video Conversation" window, both of the windows within it were proportionally resized as well. However, there were a few things about the video display that I thought were missing. I couldn't find a way to tell ooVoo to remove the outgoing video preview. I could do it indirectly, by telling it to enlarge the incoming video window, so it fills the Video Conversation window, but what I was after was just the opposite - remove the outgoing preview, and then make the Video Conversation window that much smaller. I also couldn't find a way to have ooVoo show only the incoming video on the full screen. Even if you click "enlarge video window" on the incoming video, and then expand the enclosing Video Conversation window to full screen, the actual incoming video is still considerably less than the size of the entire display. Of course, with the video resolution ooVoo is sending right now I probably wouldn't want to see the video full screen anyway, but that is likely to change.

By default, ooVoo shows the video windows in "3D mode", which simply means that the incoming and outgoing video windows appear to be slightly angled to each other. It does make for a bit more "fancy" appearance, but turning it off actually allows the video windows to be a bit larger inside the Video Conversation window. I'm still undecided on this feature, because it seems rather trivial to me, but whenever I turn it off, I am surprised at how "flat" the video looks.

I was rather disappointed in the overall audio/video performance of ooVoo. It seemed that there was always a noticeable "lag" in the video, even when I was connecting between two PCs that were sitting side by side on my desk. When I was talking to my brother, who is on the other side of the world and has a rather low speed ADSL connection, the lag was very noticeable, and actually got so bad that it made carrying on a conversation pretty difficult.

The funny part, though, was when I tried a three-way video call, with three PCs in different rooms. The slowest of the three, a Pentium-M 1.6 GHz, could barely keep up; in fact the lag to and from that system was so bad that I could get up from the room where that one was located and walk to the next room, sit down and then watch myself get up and walk away on the video coming from that PC - and then get up and walk back to the slow system, sit down and watch myself walk back into the room! Now, a 1.6 GHz Pentium isn't a great system, but it's not chopped liver, either, so this seems like pretty extreme lag to me. The fastest of the three was a Pentium 3.0 GHz, and it had no trouble at all keeping up, so I will say again, if you are thinking of using ooVoo for video conferencing with more than two participants, make sure that each of the participants has the processing power and the bandwidth to support it. Otherwise, actually carrying on a useful conversation is likely to be very difficult.

So, there you have it. I'm still impressed with the simplicity of ooVoo, and the fact that "it just works". I would certainly recommend it for casual or inexperienced users. I think that experienced users who like to have a lot of control over their audio and video conversations would feel uncomfortably limited or restricted pretty quickly.

jw 28/11/2007

With my laptop now running Windows XP Professional very nicely, and Windows Vista Home Premium relegated to its box on the shelf, I am now ready to continue on my original path - installing and testing the next video calling candidate, ooVoo. I am attempting to evaluate each of these programs on its own merits, without too much cross-comparison in the initial reviews because I don't want this to turn into "XXX is better than YYY", or "gee I wish YYY had such-and-such like XXX does", quite yet. My intention is for the first appraisal to simply give an idea of what it is like to download, install, configure and use the program, I will get around to a comparison of the various programs in a later posting.

The good news about ooVoo is that it doesn't get much simpler than this! The download file is relatively small (about 8 MB), during the installation it only asks you one question, to confirm the installation path. If you have a broadband internet connection, which you probably do if you are trying to use a video call program, you can have the whole thing downloaded, installed and running in less than five minutes. The bad news is, this is only for PCs running Windows 2000, XP or Vista. They say that they will have a Mac version "real soon now", and apparently a Linux version sometime after that.

The way ooVoo handles webcams is also very simple, with basically the same advantages and disadvantages. They will take video from nearly any USB-connected video camera, and that's it. That means they don't try to dictate camera manufacturers or capabilities to you; if you have a crummy webcam, you'll get a crummy picture, but at least you'll get something. If you have a really good webcam, well, you'll get a decent picture, but probably not as good as your camera is capable of. If you have a FireWire connected camera, such as a DV camcorder or a professional camera, you're out of luck... As for video quality, I couldn't find anything in the ooVoo documentation, help, web page or user forums about the video resolution or frame rate. My best guess, from what I have seen so far, is that they do 320x240 resolution at no more than 15 frames per second, and it goes down from there, based on the capability of your camera, your computer and the bandwidth of your internet connection. That's a long way from "High Quality Video", which seems to be the current buzzword, but as I said, my take on ooVoo is that it is quick and simple, and if that's what you want you can't get fancy and complicated with video.

But ooVoo has one killer advantage - you can have a video chat with up to six participants (yourself and five others), if your computer and your internet bandwidth are up to it! That is a BIG "if", because it takes a lot of bandwidth to handle that much video data, and a lot of processing power to display it on your screen. I have had a three-way video call going already, and it is really quite impressive.

The ooVoo user interface is also very simple, with big, colorful buttons containing obvious graphics for their function. I was a bit surprised to find that there is no "test call" available, not even audio only, so once I got it set up on my laptop, I was left wondering if it was correct and would actually work. I found a note on the ooVoo FAQ titled "I've installed ooVoo but have no one to talk to, what should I do?", but the answer was "add a friend to your contact list, or invite s friend to install ooVoo". Duh.

Once you have someone to call, ooVoo is again "quick and easy". Obvious buttons at the bottom of the ooVoo window let you start a call or a text chat, and once you are in a call there are equally obvious buttons and menus to control the camera, microphone and speakers.

I was also quite pleased to see that the video windows, both incoming and outgoing, are automatically resized when you resize the larger window enclosing them, whether you stretch it or make it full-screen. Also, each individual video window can be enlarged to fill the enclosing window - this can be very nice for incoming video, but I'm having a hard time figuring out why I might want to see myself in the outgoing video window that large. On the other hand, I couldn't find the opposite function - do away with outgoing video preview entirely. I suppose it might be there somewhere, and I just haven't found it yet.

The biggest thing that seems to be missing in ooVoo is calls to (or from) ordinary phones. It is strictly computer-to-computer calling, at least right now. Again, they say that this will be added soon, but it's not a big issue to me, at least right now.

I'll post more "tech talk" on ooVoo in the next couple of days. For now, I would summarize by saying that if I needed to set up the simplest possible video communication program for someone, this is probably the one I would choose.

jw 27/11/2207

I had planned on getting ooVoo installed, and making a first report about it this morning. Those plans got put on hold when my frustration level with Vista on this laptop finally reached the point that I gave up and made a tactical retreat to Windows XP Professional.

I have been running Vista since the first week after its public release, with varying degrees of success. Although this Fujitsu-Siemens laptop came preloaded with XP Professional, it is listed as "Vista Ready" on their web page, so I bought Vista Home Premium and a new 100 Gb disk, and loaded it from scratch - keeping the original disk in reserve, so I could go back to XP in emergencies. That turned out to be a very good thing, as especially in the first few months the "emergencies" were the rule.

The reason I have now finally decided to go back to XP permanently was one very large problem, and number of smaller problems and irritations, a significant number of peripherals which are not supported and never will be, and even more peripherals which are only minimally supported on Vista. Here are the details.

- The largest problem was that the USB 2 controller on this laptop would occasionally just freeze. Since I have most of my peripherals connected through two USB 2 hubs, when that controller froze, nearly everything else did as well. Even worse, when it froze it was so bad that I couldn't even shut down or restart the laptop, it would hang somewhere late in the shutdown and I had to use the power switch to turn it off. I've had enough experience with corrupted file systems over the years for that to make me very nervous.

- Another very irritating problem was a Vista bug that my laptop acquired related to installing drivers for new hardware. A typical symptom is that you plug in a USB disk driver which you have used before, and should be no problem, but this time you plug it into a different USB port than previous times. Vista should recognize it as a know device, and load the drivers for it on that port, but somehow it doesn't find them, and ends up telling you that it can't find the drivers for a "generic disk". There has been extensive discussion of this on the Microsoft Developers Network, and there is a slightly tedious workaround, but even that doesn't always work.

- At the top of the list of unsupported peripherals is my Linksys WPC54GX4 CardBus wireless network adapter. I just bought this, and a lot of other Linksys SRX400 wireless equipment, less than 6 months before Vista was released. I was surprised when there was no Vista driver available for it at the beginning, but I was flabbergasted and furious when Linksys finally admitted a few months later that there would never be one.

- Typical on the list of partially supported peripheral is my Canon BJC-55 printer. There is a native Vista driver for the printer itself, but I also have the IS-12 scan head for it, so I can use it as a scanner when traveling as well, and this is another item that is not supported and never will be on Vista.

- Another item on the partially supported list is my HP Scanjet 4670. They finally came out with a "basic feature driver" which makes it work with the Window Photo Gallery on Vista, but none of the other scanning or document management software which originally came with the scanner will work with Vista.

- There are various software packages and applications which still don't work on Vista, some of which never will. The most irritating of these for me is the Lantronix Device Installer, which I need to use for my work. The lack of this one program meant that I had to keep a second computer in my office running XP.

- Finally, there are some things which work, but just aren't quite right on Vista in one way or another. The best example of this is SightSpeed, with the "choppy audio" problem that I wrote about last week. Running under XP on the same laptop, the SightSpeed audio is just fine.

There are more examples in every one of these categories, as well. Add all of this together, throw in the fact that I was getting very tired of having the second computer in my way all the time, and the balky USB 2 controller became the straw that broke the camel's back. I probably could have put up with it, there was at least one way that I could have worked around it, but I finally said that I have to give up, at least on this laptop, and stay with XP.

So, I spent my weekend reloading Windows XP Professional from scratch. After a couple of false starts, and some digging around on the web to find the latest drivers, it is up and running just fine now, much smoother and more stable than Vista had ever been on this laptop. No freezing USB controller, no BSOD's, no unexpected reboots when it should have just been waking up from sleep mode, and the audio in SightSpeed is just fine. Now I am ready to continue with loading and testing various video chat and IM programs, so I should have a report on ooVoo in the next day or two.

jw 26/11/2007

I have received several public and private requests for more technical information about my first experiences with SightSpeed. Some wanted the gory details about the problems I had, as well. I did feel as if I glossed over some things that I wanted to talk about a bit more, for lack of time and space, so here we go again. Please keep in mind, I have only been working with SightSpeed for a few days, so this is still going to be very incomplete in terms of what SightSpeed can and can't do, and I'm undoubtedly going to be wrong about some of the things that I say, but it won't be the first or the last time for that.

First, the helpful comment posted by Peter Csathy, CEO of SightSpeed, was of course correct. Once into a video call, you can switch to "video only view", and the video window can then be stretched to give you the larger view that I said I wanted. This is very nice indeed, and so obvious it had completely escaped me - I suppose that I had become conditioned by Skype's "fixed size video in a window", so resizing the window didn't occur to me.

Next, also in response to a private query, let me explain just a bit more of what I know about video resolution. The resolution that I mention writing about these video chat programs is what is actually sent between the two computers, it is not necessarily (or generally) the resolution that you see on the screen. The initial SightSpeed video window is considerably smaller than 320x240, so the incoming video is "scaled" to fit in that window; if you resize the video only window, you may increase it to exactly 320x240 (if you are very good or very lucky), in which case you see exactly the video that is being sent, or you may make it larger than that, in which case the incoming video is scaled up to fill the window. In the extreme case, "full screen video" actually takes over your entire display and scales the incoming video to fill it. Most PC displays today are in the range from 1024x768 up to 1600x1200 (or even more), and believe me, 320x240 video scaled up to fill a screen that size is not a pretty sight!

Finally, from the comments, the "conservative approach" and the possibility of an "expert/pro" mode. This is an excellent point, and I think for many users an "expert" mode might be good. But this would have to be an addition, not at the expense of the clarity and conservatism SightSpeed has currently. I was answering technical questions in the Skype forums for some time, and I saw a never-ending stream of questions coming from users who were just confused or overwhelmed by the number of options and configuration settings they were presented with, or by some of the conclusions or actions that Skype would take based on those options.

I was also asked for details about the problems I ran into with SightSpeed. There were only two, and they both turned out not to be SightSpeed problems, or at least not directly. The first was the "choppy audio" problem. It was obvious with the first test call to the SightSpeed "fish tank" that the audio was not good. I assumed then that it was something with the bandwidth, and didn't think much about it until I got the first video call from my brother, and we could hardly understand each other. I then installed SightSpeed on my partner's computer, and was shocked when I tried the test call and the audio was just fine! Her PC is considerably less powerful than mine in pretty much every way (and she forbids me to upgrade it!), so obviously the problem was with my laptop. I worked on it some more, and made no headway. So I removed the Vista disk, and put in one that I had prepared with XP Pro / SP2. I installed SightSpeed, called the fish tank, and the audio was just fine. So obviously the problem is on my laptop, and only when it is running Vista. I wish that I could say that this is the only Vista-related problem that I have!

To me, the important thing about this problem is that it gave me an honest opportunity to check out both SightSpeed technical support and their User Forums. I sent a description of the problem to their technical support email, and got a reply within a few hours. It was obvious from the reply that the person had read and understood my problem, and they made several good suggestions to either try to fix the problem, or gather more information if it didn't get fixed. You can't ask for much more than that from technical support. I also posted a query to the SightSpeed user forums. As I have said before, I was involved in the Skype user forums for some time, and I have seen "the good, the bad and the ugly" there, believe me. There can be a lot of good advice passed around in a forum with competent users and moderators; there can be a lot of bad advice as well, some from people who mean well, but the worst of it is the "ugly" - advice that is incorrect, misleading, confusing or just plain irrelevant. I am pleased to be able to say that the responses I have received in the SightSpeed user forums have been consistently good, and I think that we are on the track to figuring it out, but it's not fixed yet.

The other problem was with firewalls - two problems, actually. The very first time that I ran SightSpeed on my laptop, it worked just fine and connected to the fish tank. The next time I started it up, it said that it couldn't connect to the SightSpeed servers. I use AVG Internet Security, including their Firewall, and it turned out that somehow it had gotten its knickers into a twist over SightSpeed. All I had to do was delete SightSpeed entry from the firewall program list, and the next time I started SightSpeed the AVG Firewall made a new rule, and it has been fine ever since. The second part of this problem is that when I am in my office, the company firewall apparently blocks SightSpeed from connecting also. The symptom is very similar to the previous problem. I'm pretty sure that I just need to find out what ports SightSpeed want to use (I've seen this mentioned in their support web pages), and ask our network administrator to open those ports. Whether he will do that or not is another question...

As usual, this has gone on far too long, and as usual, there is one more thing I would like to say. There has been quite a buzz recently about "High Quality Video" in the IM/chat market. SightSpeed will already do 640x480 resolution at 30 frames/sec, assuming that your camera, PC and communication bandwidth are up to it - and the latter is the key point. They want 1.5 Mb on both ends of the connection in order to do 640x480, and I suspect that kind of bandwidth is not very common yet. But at least they don't try to dictate what kind of camera or computer you have, if your equipment is up to the task, you will get it. I assume that we will see a convergence in the future, as typical bandwidth continues to rise, and SightSpeed continues to improve their video processing so that they require less bandwidth, and hopefully before too long the two ends will meet for a lot more people.

jw 22/11/2007