Jamie's Random Musings on Video IM
Having spent a good part of the last year struggling with a variety of video chat and IM programs, I have decided to write a few things down and see what other people have to say about them.
Monday 31 March 2008, 10:17 AM
Vista SP1 - One Week Update
It has been a week since I installed Vista with Service Pack 1 (SP1) on this Fujitsu Lifebook S6510 laptop computer. I have said before that I like Vista, and I want it to be at least as good as XP on my laptop. I'm now pleased to say that I think it is so, and I am going to keep running it on my laptop. I think the fact that I have had Vista loaded twice before on this laptop, and both times decided that it wasn't stable enough or fast enough for me to use it rather than XP Professional, is evidence that I am not willing to just blindly accept Vista.
First, since installing Vista SP1 I have had no boot problems or failures, which I had at least twice with the original Vista installation. Not only that, but Vista seems to boot a bit faster than it did before SP1, and it certainly suspends and resumes faster than it did before.
Second, the general performance and "feel" of the laptop is quite a bit better than it was before SP1. There are no more of the long pauses that I saw previously, and I don't see the disk activity led on the laptop suddenly start flashing like crazy for no apparent reason.
Third, I haven't had any problems with applications or utilities, as I previously had. I haven't seen the dreaded "This program is not responding" window yet, which is very good news.
On the network side, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that Vista does not have the problem which I described recently with XP, where a static IP address on the wired ethernet interface interferes with routing on the wireless interface after a suspend/resume sequence. The bad news is that there is still some sort of intermittent problem with the wireless connection between the Lifebook and the Linksys WRT350N router. I wrote recently that I suspected this problem was caused by the Sierra Wireless AirCard, or the Swisscom software that came with it, but I have confirmed now that is not the case. The symptom is relatively simple; starting from a fresh boot of both the laptop and the router, the wirelss will always connect properly. If I then suspend/resume, reboot, or even just turn the laptop wireless off and back on, after some random number of disconnect/reconnect cycles, it will suddenly no longer be able to connect properly. The key word is "properly", Vista says that it has a "limited connection" to the network, but in fact nothing works. Once this happens, the only solution is to reboot the router - nothing I can do to the laptop or Vista will get a good connection again, but rebooting the router will always restore a good connection.
I contacted Linksys about this last Friday, and got a particularly unhelpful response of "sounds like a Vista problem to me". Sigh. So for the time being I am stuck with power-cycling the router from time to time. Ah well, where would we be if everything worked?
jw 31/3/2008
Thursday 27 March 2008, 11:00 AM
Video IM / VoIP - Where are we now?
I started this blog to talk about Video IM and related issues. While I have wandered here and there, I've always come back to that, because it is what I care about. I think it's time to take a fresh look at where we, as users, stand, and what the situation with the four major players is today.
- ooVoo is currently "leading the pack", in my opinion. The new release they made for windows at the beginning of February is really excellent. It is clean, simple, easy to install and even easier to use. It has very good one-to-one video chat, but goes far beyond that in allowing up to six-way video chat. In fact, you can have up to six participants of any kind in a chat, so you can have some on video, some audio-only via ooVoo, and you can even invite some via telephone dial-out! I have personally done all of those; I regularly have three-way video chats with my brothers, I've had others involved with audio-only ooVoo connections, and I've included a dial-out connection just to verify that it worked - and it did, very nicely. They recently released their Mac version, so their position is getting even better. As I mentioned before, they are currently running a promotion offering all phone dial-out calls to the U.S. and Canada for free, regardless of where you are calling from. The offer is good for up to 500 minutes of calls, and continues through the end of March, so you have one more weekend to take advantage of it, try out ooVoo if you aren't already using it, and talk to friends and family for free.
- SightSpeed is still in the same state that it was when I wrote about it last November. I've actually been holding off writing this summary, hoping that they would come out with a new release - I wanted to be fair, because all three of the others have made at least one new release since the beginning of the year. This is not intended as a knock on SightSpeed, their current version is quite good, and very stable, so I am sure that they are not under a lot of pressure to get out a new release. SightSpeed is the only other program which offers multi-way video connection, up to four-way, but only in their paid subscription version. They are the most business-friendly of the group, particularly in their account administration and billing functions.
- The Gizmo Project, now "rebranded" as Gizmo5, is perhaps the most interesting, and most frustrating, of the bunch. It is available on the widest range of interesting/useful hardware by far; they have versions for Windows, Mac and Linux, and a variety of Mobile and Nokia Tablet devices. If you need a program to cover a lot of different platforms, Gizmo5 is definitely worth trying. Unfortunately, I find the Windows version to be considerably less stable than ooVoo or SightSpeed. When it works, it is good - but I've had it hang or crash on me on numerous occasions, and there seems to be some situation it can get into where everything appears normal, and text chat works fine, but you can't make any incoming or outgoing calls - incoming calls seem to ring for the person making the call, but nothing happens on my computer, and outgoing calls even to their "echo test" ring for me, but never get answered. Gizmo has made tremendous strides in their last couple of releases, and I assume that will continue, and these sorts of problems will be worked out in the next couple of releases.
- Skype. Sigh. What can I say? They should be the best, and in my opinion they are the worst. Why? Because the program has gotten substantially worse with each new release for at least the past year, and because to go along with their progressively more buggy program, they have the worst "Customer Support" in the history of mankind. I know that a lot of people have Skype installed, and it works for them, and that's fine, I'm really pleased. But I also know, from personal experience and from reading the Skype User Forums, that there are huge numbers of people who have tremendous problems with Skype, and are often unable to get it working at all. I personally have had Skype cause BSOD crashes of my laptop (NONE of the other three have ever done this), the video has frozen, it has mysteriously changed the audio settings on my laptop, and Skype itself has frozen or crashed both on startup and in mid-call. With the latest version their "presence reporting" system - the indication they give you of whether your contacts are online or not - has become so unreliable that it is totally unusable. I no longer even bother loading Skype on my main laptop, first because it is not worth the trouble, but also because I am not willing to risk what it might do to it. As I mentioned above, both ooVoo and Gizmo have made excellent progress with their recent releases; Skype is moving steadily in the other direction with their releases. The most common "solution" recommended by the "experts" on the Skype User Forum for the past few months is "go back to some previous version of Skype" - never mind that the last two releases were made to fix serious security problems, and the one before that was to fix a major performance problem that had been caused by Skype development carelessly "forgetting" to remove some testing code.
I suppose the best summary and closing for this would be to say what I am actually using now. For most video calls I use ooVoo, because the quality is good, and I am always able to add more participants when I want to. For text chat I use Gizmo because I like the user interface a lot better, its availability on so many platforms means that I can reach a lot more of my friends, and I am also able to use it for my MSN Live and Yahoo accounts. I use SightSpeed for dial-out to everywhere except the U.S. and Canada at moment, because of the ooVoo free promotion. I don't use Skype for anything other than testing; if those tests should ever indicate that they are actually making progress in getting it working properly, and consistently, I may load it on my main laptop and start using it again.
Monday 24 March 2008, 11:37 AM
Vista SP1 - Now Installed and Running
Ok, in large part due to some good advice from David Long, I now have Vista SP1 installed on my Fujitsu Lifebook S6510, and after two days it is still running with no problems. I have learned several things along the way:
- Based on what Ed Bott said in his ZDNet blog, I expected Windows Update to show SP1 as an optional update, although not offer it to me automatically quite yet. That turned out not to be the case, so based on what David Long said, both in his own blog and in a comment to my previous blog entry, I downloaded the full SP1 update and installed it that way. I believe that it would have also worked by just starting the Update Installation as David describes in his blog, but by the time I read that, I had already downloaded the full SP1 file, so that's the way I went ahead and installed it.
- Installation went very smoothly, and only took about an hour. Of course that was installing from the file that I had already downloaded, and it would have taken a bit longer if it had been downloading what it needed as it went.
- I believe that I have determined that the problem I had previously mentioned with Wireless-N connection to my Linksys WRT350N router is in fact neither a Vista nor a Linksys problem, it looks like it is caused by the Swisscom Unlimited Data Manager software that comes with the Sierra Wireless AirCard. I had no problem with wireless connection for the first two days after installing SP1, then I installed the UDM software, and suddenly got the wireless connection problem again. After removing the "Sesam" handover protocol from the wireless connection, and rebooting the router, it now seems to be working correctly again.
- I finally got the latest Intel 965 graphic drivers to install under Vista. I had been trying to use either the Intel "setup" program, or the Vista driver update search, and neither would work - they both complained that the driver wasn't certified for this configuration. When I went into manual driver update, and pointed it specifically at the INF file for the latest release, it installed.
- I figured out how to get the Lexmark driver for my E240 laser printer installed. I had to let Vista install the default Microsoft driver first, then select "run as Administrator" for Printers / E240 / Properties, and it would then let me select "New Driver", and point it at the Lexmark Universal PCL driver.
- I have updated various other drivers with much newer versions than are available on the Fujitsu support web page, including Realtek sound, AuthenTec fingerprint scanner, Intel 4965 AGN wireless, Intel TurboMemory, Marvell Yukon Gigabit Ethernet and Synaptics touchpad. I have no way of knowing if any or all of these drivers are contributing to Vista running better/faster/reliably, but I think it is a shame that so many of the drivers available from Fujitsu are so much older than what is currently available from the suppliers.
With all of this done, Vista is running noticeably better than it did before SP1. It boots faster, suspends and resumes much faster, and so far there have been no boot failures or crashes as I had before. The overall feel is better, but I can't put any specifics to what or why that is. One thing I did notice is that Vista still seems to have trouble figuring out how long it is going to take to copy large files. I copied all of my photographs from the XP disk to a Freecom USB drive, which took a bit less than 15 minutes. When I connected the Freecom disk to the Vista system and started copying them back, Vista said that it was going to take over 3 hours. It then jumped all over the place with its estimate of "time remaining", but in the end it actually took about 15 minutes - the same as on XP.
So, as things stand now, I am running Vista on this laptop again. I'm once again hopeful that it will be at least as good as XP has been - and my brothers are laughing at my eternal optimism. Obviously, I still have the XP disk ready to swap back in if something stupid happens.
jw 24/3/2008
Wednesday 19 March 2008, 8:38 PM
Vista SP1 - No Go for Me at the Moment
I have been waiting anxiously for the public release of Vista SP1. I had reloaded the Vista disk for my Lifebook S6510 a week or so ago, so that I would have a fresh load ready for update. Today it became available... and although I checked Microsoft Update today, it didn't show up as an optional update. So I was surprised when I read that it had been released. It didn't take much research to find out why...
I have read several times that SP1 was being held up because "certain uncommon drivers" caused problems with it. I had assumed, because they were said to be "uncommon", that I probably wouldn't have a problem because of that. I was wrong. I definitely have one of them, the AuthenTec fingerprint reader, with exactly the driver release that causes a problem. Apparently Windows Update is smart enough to find that out, and that is why it didn't offer me SP1.
I may also have two other problems, but it's not entirely clear to me yet. The list says Intel Graphic drivers between 7.14.10.1322 and 7.10.14.1403; my laptop has 7.14.10.1244, even older than the "problem" drivers, so what does that mean? Is it not compatible at all, or is it so old that it doesn't have whatever the problem with SP1 is? Also, the list says "Realtek AC'97 Audio", but the S6510 has "Realtek HD Audio", I suspect that is not the same, so perhaps it isn't a problem - but I still need to verify this.
The bottom line is, at least in my case, the "uncommon" drivers seem to be a lot more common than I expected. I've just had a chat with Fujitsu support, and they seemed to be totally in the dark about this. On one hand I find that odd, because SP1 hasn't taken anyone by surprise, and the list of offending drivers has been available for some time now. On the other hand, considering how unprepared many (most) OEMs were when Vista was originally released, this would appear to be nothing more than a continuation of that situation - but I had hoped after all the noise made about it, that it would have been better handled this time.
Wednesday 19 March 2008, 2:41 PM
ooVoo News - Mac Available and Free Calls Extended
Here's some very good news. The Mac version of ooVoo is now available for download from their web page (www.oovoo.com/download)! I don't have a Mac, unfortunately, so I can't try it out myself, but I know they have been working very hard on it, and doing a lot of testing before making this release, so I assume that it is the same high quality as the Windows version. I'd love to hear from any Mac users who try it.
Also, ooVoo has extended their "free telephone calls to the U.S. and Canada" offer, at least through the end of this month and up to a maximum of 500 minutes of calls. This offer is good regardless of where you are calling from, so it can be especially interesting for those who are calling from overseas. It is ridiculously easy to install ooVoo, and the call quality is good, so this is the perfect excuse to save some money and try out an excellent Video/Audio/Text/IM chat program, for either Windows or Mac!
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