Friday 3 July 2009, 3:20 PM
PreSales Canabalize Retailers' Opening Day Sales!
(My attempt at writing a tabloid headline.)
A Very Interesting Microsoft event just occurred. Microsoft is offering at a deep discount and through direct retail sale their FUTURE mainstay product. Since I deliberately avoid paying attention to Microsoft outside of office hours, I don't remember if they've ever done that before. Not quite a going-out-of-business sale but certainly one that ought to p.o. a number of the big computer manufacturers.
They aren't doing it in a small way either. Microsoft.com has the announcement taking up about a third of the top of the page. The expiration date of the deal though is only found in the small print on another page detailing pre-sales.
Win 7 Home at $49 US is a loss-leader for sure. It will cover the price to the OEMs, shipping & handling and their margin whatever it is. That is going to eat into Visaster sales between now and past Opening Day sales for DELL, HP etc. My guess is that Microsoft has already covered their backside with the major OEMs by offering to pay them part of the take of the pre-sales. I would suggest they do it as an apportioned measure of the opening week's worth of sales. (Since I'm offering free business advice! Ha!) By the end of the first week everybody will have forgotten the pre-sales.
Offering to hand out copies of Win7 to purchasers of new Visaster equipped systems is also part of this deal.
Why buy a new computer if you can put the deeply discounted Win 7 DVD on your old Visaster hardware? This deal though only appeals to power users, geeks and tech-savvy early adopters. (Was that redundant?)
Maybe they think they can generate some pre-opening chatter especially from the ones who down-loaded the RC.
I think Microsoft is running a little scared. They want to jazz the numbers with the pre-sales counts added to the numbers for the opening day stats like a movie opening up on a weekend. In fact Oct 22 is a Thursday, the traditional Movie Opening day in the US.
In some ways I feel like Microsoft is trying to do everything it can to erase the bad ju-ju they got with Visaster. Maybe this time they won't need to run those idiotic "Mojave" and Seinfeld ads! If we get lucky, maybe the ads will be even worse!
Tuesday 30 June 2009, 2:13 AM
Windows 7 on a Read-only Flash Drive?
Considering that the price of a 4GB USB flash drive has been as low as 5 dollars on close-out specials, financially it wouldn't make sense UNLESS Microsoft decides to go into the Flash RAM business. The full Win 7 Ultra install DVD is 3.9GB large. Even stripped down it will be better than 2 GB so 4GB sounds like the right size for the Win7 USB Flash drive.
The price per Win 7 Starter license I was seeing for netbooks was around $3 each license in volume. That would mean the price of USB flash drives need to be much lower than that to make it possible to do economically.
Then think about what it would take to make a mass assembly line operation to clone the image onto USB flash drives thousands or millions of times! I suppose you could use something like Ghost to make 128 copies at a time through a massively wicked USB "router". The time it would take to plug in and out all the USB flash drives would be tremendous!
Actually its been done sort of by SanDisk. They have a number of U3-based USB flash drives that have a "read-only" partition that plays like a CDR. When its up and running, the USB flash drive looks like 2 drives, a CDR and a HDD. It has some software on it that makes Windows XP Pro work better when it comes time to unmount the USB flash drive. Actually fairly nice.
I don't know how they are doing it. There is likely some sort of JTAG software interface hidden in "plain sight" connected to the USB signal pins. With special commands to special hidden registers, part of the drive is marked as read only.
If you delete the partitions you kill the U3 interface. If you are careful, the read-write partition can be formatted in NTFS and it coexists nicely with the U3 CD-ROM type partition.
I could see SanDisk turning out millions of Win7 USB flash disks on the U3 read-only "CDR"-like partition for Microsoft. But to do it for a price the netbook owners will be willing to pay, hmmm, I don't know about that.
I think most likely Microsoft is going to make the netbook owners that want it on their old netbooks eat the price. It probably won't be available in anything other than download ISO form. Buy your own USB drive. Buy the download on Shop Microsoft. Copy the image over to the Flash. Use an updated tool based on ufdprep.exe to prep the flash drive. It will have a file converter program that will open enough of the image to mount a bootstrap loader on the netbook and then mount and install the ISO onto the system hard drive or internal flash drive or SSD. (Sounds like a job for a really small install of Linux!)
Don't expect this function above to be available until late in the year until after the retailers get an idea how netbook sales with Win 7 pre-installed are doing. Microsoft will think of the USB based install to be a loss-leader, a way to get users hooked on Windows 7 so they'll buy it pre-installed on their next computer or as shrink-wrap for their old desktops or regular laptops. That's what the Win7 RC is by the way, a form of digital "crack" to get the neighborhood geeks all hooked. Call it Windows 7 Express!
Its prettier than XP Pro but not faster. It is definitely better than Vista on substantial hardware, like a dual core CPU with 4 GB of RAM.
I have no clue how well it will work stripped down enough to work on a netbook. I've already had my taste of "Windows-7-crack". Would I buy it?
No.
Thursday 18 June 2009, 6:54 AM
Bizarre Windows 7 Downgrade/Upgrade Policies Coming
Over at the ZDNet U.S. site, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes has posted about what will apparently be a new low in bizarre downgrade/upgrade policies involving Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP. It sounds like Microsoft has outdone themselves this time - check the link for details. This is like watching a train wreck in progress. I wonder if this insane "Downgrade/Upgrade" policy will even survive until the release of Win7... or put another way, how long will it be before Microsoft starts back-pedaling, and extending the cutoff date for XP "downgrades"?
My take on it is this. Besides their obvious determination to stamp out the XP holdouts, this new policy might actually coax some corporate installations to change to Vista. That would then artificially inflate the overall sales numbers for Vista (similar to selling Vista Business with an XP "downgrade" included, then booking the sale as Vista regardless of which version the customer actually uses), and thus makes Vista look like a bit less of a disaster in the end.
Here's my question. While it is obvious why users might want to keep the right to run XP, even though they are forced to buy Win7, who in the world is going to buy Win7, which honestly is nothing more than Vista with Lipstick (I'm thinking of copyrighting that...) and then downgrade to the original Vista (without Lipstick), or as someone here for whom I have great respect terms it very appropriately, "Vistaster"?
jw
Friday 5 June 2009, 11:28 AM
How to Install Python on Vista?
-> Python cannot run if u install it like u installed in Xp
-> To install Python U have to enable "Hidden Administrator Account" in Vista. this can be done by:
->Run The Elevated Command Prompt.
-> In That Enter the following command:
Net user administrator /active:yes
-> Now Administrator Account is displayed in the welcome
screen.
-> Login into administrator account and run the python setup.
-> Install it for all Users.
-> After The installation over start "IDLE (Python GUI)" and enjoy.
Tuesday 2 June 2009, 1:17 AM
Windows 7 RC Cracker Jack Surprise.
Windows 7 RC surprised me today with some computational behavior that was totally unexpected. You know sometimes I really hate giving bananas to the code monkeys at Redmond. But when the monkeys do it right, you gotta give them the whole bunch.
I was doing about three things at once as usual. I've been building/debugging a special Windows XP Embedded image that depends on a bunch of code and requires a lot of time consuming processes that leave me with my hands and mind free simultaneously for chunks of time. The old adage about free hands and the devil etc., in any case I was also punching at the Windows 7 RC installed on a DELL 755. It has 2GB of RAM, a Celeron CPU running about 2.2GHz. Not an especially impressive system but typical of our rental fleet.
I had installed Win7RC on it a week or two ago. I knew what the answer would be but I tried using Intel's VT reporting utility on the Celeron. I wasn't surprised when it reported that the Celeron was non-VT. Duh. (I only did it because every now and then I have found surprises inside the box. Like a Pentium Core2 Duo mounted inside a DELL that had a Celeron sticker on the outside. A real Cracker Jack surprise.)
I installed Sun's virtual box software on the Celeron running Win7RC. Everything was going great. It installed fine, then it was time to install Windows XP Pro SP3 in the VM. It got all the way to “6” minutes left to install. A message popped up on the screen telling me I had run out of hard drive space! What? I was installing XP Pro onto an “expando-matic” virtual drive. Well after looking at it for a minute or two, I realized I had run out of REAL hard drive space on the C drive. I had 64 Megabytes of empty space left (that didn't used to sound like a tiny drive space).
One of the really annoying things with Sun's Virtual Box is that it likes to install the first time into the User's profile, usually on C. I didn't even think about that. I had the REAL drive partitioned into 2 sections, C was 25GB and D was 55GB. What to do?
I put the VM into pause mode and closed the virtual box application. Wiped all the junk off the D drive I didn't need, all of it except the DELL drivers folder. I discovered that installing the Win 7 RC on top of the Win Beta left this big folder on C named Windows.old. Well I didn't need that. That saved me about 6 GB or so of space. I'm not really sure because I never could get Win7 to finish indexing the damn thing, no swap space.
I started deleting folders from inside the Windows.old folder piece-meal since it turns out the idiotic index service sits there and tries to keep track of all the folders being deleted. Once I got enough room to copy the DELL driver folder to C, with some spare room, I did it.
Then the original driver folder on D gets deleted. I go into Drive Manager via MMC and delete the D partition. Click on C and use the extend (or the REAL expando-matic) command in Drive Manager to make the C drive about 20 GB bigger. Finished deleting all the crap folders in Windows.old and then re-established the D drive.
Started Virtual Box. Un-paused the installation of Windows XP Pro SP3. Viola!!! It finished without burping or crashing. Everything was back to where it was supposed to be! Freaking amazing.
Now why am I giving the monkeys bananas? Windows 7 RC did NOT crash once during the entire procedure, it did not require I turn it off, it only “whited-out” Explorer once for about 3 or 4 minutes and it came back all by itself. It dealt with the lack of swap space, it dealt with the lack of hard drive space and it kept running. XP Pro would have crashed. Vista would have come to a complete dead stop with no apparent reason. It operates almost as stable as Debian Linux 4.0.
I am impressed with Windows 7 RC.
Tuesday 26 May 2009, 4:50 AM
Windows 7 Search-Run
Back in the days when Windows had a project name of “Longhorn”, one of its potential features was a relational database driving the file system, i.e. SQL Server running the command line or “find” window. The complete implementation was tossed out to get Visaster out to manufacturing sooner. Visaster ended up with a neutered search-run window and Windows 7 RC continues it. So at least in Texas, the Windows “Longhorn” refers to the cheese, not the legendary breed of cattle.
Although combining search with command-line execution of a program on fast and powerful hardware might be more time-efficient for the user on high performance hardware, its an overall performance killer on slower or less capable hardware. The performance advantage to users is minimal even on high performance hardware. Considering that the search to index the programs and files has to be done on some sort of schedule to maintain index relevance, the performance hit is on-going and directly related to the index schedule and the power profile in use.
Assuming the user is intelligent enough to only record new files on an alternate drive removed from the index service; that the \User profiles folder for all users has been moved to the same non-indexed alternate drive; that writes to the boot/system C drive are kept to a minimum; otherwise indexes are going to be running constantly. This would have a tendency to drain laptop and net-book batteries for very little gain.
Only desktop installation tests have been performed so far. The best performance enhancement for a Windows 7 desktop system with a load of applications is to leave it turned on at night. The Index Service seems to need the extra time to get caught-up if the system is in constant use. Hopefully the power profiles for laptop operation are very aggressive and limits index behavior rigorously.
Another issue is that using the search-run window to run programs may not make it obvious to the user using Visaster or Windows 7 where the executable is actually located or what version of the program ends up running. Obviously this is not a problem when the executable is unique with a unique filename. If a developer is working on a program and wants to run it outside of the IDE, the “search” function will find multiple versions of the program and offer up and run the last version. That might not be the desired version. Some earlier version or in a different fork might be the desired target. The developer ends up either typing the entire path or uses Explorer to start the program.
It is possible in Windows 7 to execute unknowingly a program residing on a remote drive share. Assuming that you have log-on and execute privileges on the share, it doesn't matter where the program is stored. Outside of experiencing a possible slow-down while it is copied to the system RAM, and then is run, the user may not be aware that a remote program is running. However this is an especially annoying problem when drive-mapping is done as part of group policy. Unless the user has the rights to delete a mapped drive, the index service will find the executable on the mapped drive sometimes in preference to a local copy.
This is not really anything new except that in XP Pro and previous Windows versions the path had to be explicit either through an Explorer window with a left click or a fully delineated path at a command prompt.
Using the Search window as the Run applet also ends up dropping performance due to the number of support programs that need to be running. Obviously the Index Service has to be running. On older hardware, running the Index service is a sure way to provoke users into complaining about their systems. This has been recently compounded by Windows Updates pushing Windows Search version 4.0.
Application Compatibility services, and/or “side-by-side” assemblies are needed to keep the DLL-hell from returning. Depending on the application mix running on the computer while running in “side-by-side” mode it is possible to have 4 or 5 of the “same” DLL loaded. The obvious differences between the libraries only being version number or release date.
As an illustration, Windows programmers need to get out of the habit of naming the installation program for their application setup.exe. A search-run for setup.exe is practically useless on any Visaster or Windows 7 computer with more than 2 or 3 applications on it.
DotNet applications seem to get through the version chaos fairly well. One VS2005 application had to be re-compiled while running Windows 7 to fix a subtle glitch in one program. However anything using older DLL's or ActiveX components end up getting a “wrapper” if its anything faintly “legacy”. That would include dotNet 2.0 and earlier and anything done in earlier versions of Visual Studio. This wrapper behavior seems to be started up even if the appropriate runtime is installed on the system.
If your company has a legacy Windows application that is a profit-maker for your company, convert it to dotNet 3.5 as soon as possible. Considering the issues Windows Updates had with the various dotNet version 1.1 run-times, dotNet 2.0 run-time support may have similar events in the future.
Friday 22 May 2009, 3:02 PM
Windows Vista Service Pack 2 On the Block
Since Windows Vista is released in the market for home and business world, Windows Vista was not able to capture the market due to some of the some of the disadvantages/ Drawbacks associated with this...
1. Requirements Are High
Windows Vista consumes a lot more resources than its predecessor Windows XP. For vista Aero to work, you need to invest something more than what you would have expected to invest before. The graphics card requirement is quite high. The graphics card must be of DirectX 10 supported. The required minimum graphics memory on the graphics card is 128 MB. For better performance, graphics memory must be of 256 MB. The minimum hard disk space required is 20 GB for installation of Windows Vista. Processor speed is also expected to be high for Aero to work smoothly without causing any hiccups. The memory requirement for Windows Vista system is high. The system will work smoothly when one has got RAM of about 2 GB installed. Totally, I would like to say that, Windows vista eats up lot of resources, than its predecessor, the Windows XP.
2. Issue with the Drivers compatibility :
One of the common issue with the windows vista is that the ,device drivers compatible for windows vista are not released by all the manufactures of the hardwares ,so many of the device such as graphics card and webcam had compatilbility issue with the windows , before purchasing any new device we need to check out for Vista compatible or Vista ready logo, which is put up on the device.
3. Regarding price :
The price for Windows Vista editions are also high. Ordinary users cannot thus, have a look into all the features of Vista, which is only available in the Ultimate Edition. Microsoft seems to be not so interested in country wise markets. The prices are set according to the US market. However these prices are on higher side for developing asian countries. Microsoft should set the price of Vista as per the market.
Even after the release of SP1 for the winodws vista all these drawbacks are not removed compatibility , one of the major concern for the windows vista user is regarding drivers compatibility , many of the drivers for the devices are not compatibile for the Windows Vista.
And now one more effort from Microsoft removing all these issues , Microsoft is ready to release SP2 for windows vista ,On Wednesday, Microsoft announced that Windows VistaSP2 is RTM (Released to Manufacturing), which means Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Windows Vista will soon be available for download.
While Vista SP1 was a comprehensive updates that fixed the now well-known performance- and device-driver compatibility issues that early Vista users faced, Vista SP2 fine-tunes performance and adds support for new types of hardware and emerging standards.
We can download SP 2 from Windows Update and If you have SP1 already you'll only have to download 43MB of files (60MB for 64-bit); the full installer is anywhere from 302MB to 622MB depending on the languages and whether it's 64-bit).
You'll get some of that space back; the Service Pack Clean-up tool removes files from RTM and SP1 that SP2 replaces. Expect to have to install an update and reboot first; this update installs a servicing stack that makes the SP2 installation faster and handles removing updates and optional features once it is installed. If you tried the beta of SP2, you have to uninstall it first to get the release version.
This speeds up both indexing and search, it indexes shared folders and (if you want) encrypted files and it's more reliable (Microsoft says it fixes over 85 per cent of reported crashes), but you can download it separately.
Some of the key features of the windows vista SP2 are .
1 Windows Search 4.0 for faster and improved relevancy in searches
2 Bluetooth 2.1 Feature Pack supporting the most recent specification for Bluetooth Technology
3 Ability to record data on to Blu-Ray media natively in Windows Vista
4 Adds Windows Connect Now (WCN) to simplify Wi-Fi Configuration
5 Windows Vista SP2 enables the exFAT file system to support UTC timestamps, which allows correct file synchronization across time zones.
But its a big question mark on use of windows vista Sp2 , after the release of windows 7 having some of the enhanced features .
Friday 15 May 2009, 1:26 PM
Vista is #1 (of the Ten Biggest Failures of the Last Decade)
Just read an interesting article listing the Ten Biggest Failures of the Last Decade. How nice to see that Vista is #1 at something!
I wonder if Microsoft will have two of the top ten spots a year or so from now, when Windows 7 has been out for a while?
jw 15/5/2009
Friday 8 May 2009, 2:33 AM
Evaluating the latest MicroSoft Cash Cow
I downloaded the Windows 7 Ultimate RC DVD ISO onto my wife's computer. Then I realized that her computer doesn't have a DVD burner. Bummer. Copied it onto a USB flash drive. I went to work and burned a few DVDs. Didn't have the urge to say “argh!” or go out and buy a parrot but it was fun anyway when I discovered that Agua (or Aqua) seems to still be the desktop theme. Sunlight was again streaming down through the water so Microsoft still has us using gills and fins. The Beta (Siamese fighting fish) was still the default desktop background!
At the beginning there was a screen indicating that it was possible to do an “upgrade” of the Windows 7 Beta install that I had let lapse or time-out after the 30 day grace period. I didn't think that was such a good idea. There is a selection button labeled as “Advanced” that is actually a program dialog much like Ubuntu gparted but not as pretty. The existing partitions can be managed somewhat. You're given options to install the new OS. You're allowed to delete partitions, set sizes (and resize – new for Windows) and types (extended or primary), or to install on certain partitions already running a compatible OS, meaning something windows (and probably Visaster or Win7).
Note to Microsoft: Make the advanced partitioning dialog selection button a little more obvious please. Think about it this way. People in this day and time that are willing to buy your software as shrink-wrap and not already installed on a computer, are probably astute enough to want some control over where the OS gets plopped down on the drive. I work with your stuff 5 days a week and I almost missed it. (Linux gets the weekends.)
If you have been running the Windows 7 Beta, it looks much the same. I'll be investigating it in more detail. The real test is how it works with real applications installed on it like OpenOffice.org, FireFox3 and some other essential non-MS programs. I plan on installing those tomorrow.
I did find a background picture I just had to use. One of the sample pictures was of three penguins all standing, one has his back to the camera but they look like they're clustered around a water cooler, talking. I had to laugh, it was too funny. So it got set as the desktop background. Somebody at Microsoft has a sense of humor, there may be hope for them yet.
The install only took about 45 minutes on a DELL 755. The install dialog required six items; user name, password, computer name, time zone, UTC on the RTC or not and the notorious 25 character CD install key. Other than that it was hands off. System came up running with no issues, no extra driver installs or no OEM crapware. I had it connected to the Internet and it called home to momma and activated itself. So it was just a little harder than the Ubuntu 9.04 install which is as close to totally hands-off as it can be.
The idiot “gadgets” are still hiding quietly and not obvious on the desktop. I just know that somebody is going to figure out a way to hack something together as malware and offer it as a gadget to Users.
The are three things at this point I am interested In looking at in Windows 7: the Windows XP Pro virtual-box, the OS restore capability and the networking inter-connectivity with XP Pro systems. I have seen some weird things happen when attempting to connect to shares on an XP workstation from the Visaster box at work. Sometimes Visaster acts like the XP system is just not there. The restore capability has possibilities for our business. The networking issues need to be resolved and Windows 7 might be easier to make work right than Visaster.
Saturday 2 May 2009, 3:19 AM
Vista, a Denial of Access Attack?
Logged onto the Visaster desktop at my office this morning. After a couple of minutes of reading email, I notice that the Windows Update icon is trying to get my attention. Open up the window and WOW! 508 MB in a bunch of updates, mostly MS Office 2007. Largest Windows Update download in one lump I can remember. Turns out it was MS Office SP2.
I sent an email to the IT director warning him about the bandwidth hit the office network was going to get. We have probably 100 desktops all running MS Office 2007 on them. After joking about my email to him about it, a few minutes later, the IT guy gets on his system. Same sort of scenario, but he gets 385 MB in updates listed and his update is Vista SP2. So I laugh right back at him. Visaster on my desktop is running SP1 so I expect to get the next Windows update dump on Monday.
The total download pending and otherwise is practically 900 MB, enough for a partial DVD image. Assuming that Microsoft shoved that entire update through the pipe to my desktop, the hundred other desktops in our office. The thousands, maybe the hundreds of thousands just in Houston alone. The millions of desktops in the US.
Then I think: “Imagine being at the end of a dial-up connection and having all that to download!” No way! Even a standard speed DSL connection would be maxed-out for quite a while.
Microsoft expects a lot of its customers.
Assume for a few seconds that you have an ISP account on high-speed DSL or cable that bills by the gigabyte-per-month or that you have an account that limits the amount of downloaded traffic. Downloading updates from Microsoft starts getting expensive. I wonder if anybody has done an analysis of the networking load on the entire Internet solely caused by Microsoft updates, especially on Patch Tuesdays? What do you call an Internet-wide Denial of Access? A IDOA?
If you're a Windows customer with what now seems like a fairly slow or restrictive ISP connection, are you going to WANT to download Windows Updates and either max out your download limit or your connection time?
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