Woke up this morning, and Vista tells me that it has been notified that GMT has changed. And that is has to update all 1729 appointments in my Outlook calendar. I can't tell what's up, so it goes ahead and does it. Now EVERY SINGLE full-day appointment spans two days, from 11PM to 11PM. WTF? Of course, I'm using Exchange server, so every copy of the data is now wrong.
First off: Is there any explicable reason why Outlook, 10 years later, STILL uses appointments from 12AM to 12PM to signify full-day events? And why it gets so screwed up on time zone issues? (Try this for an experiment: Temporarily change your time zone. In Outlook, all full-day appointments are now shifted, and full-day events that take a single day now show up on two different dates. Switch back to the original time zone, and things are corrected. That's just stupid. Sorry. A full-day event is a full-day event, no matter what time zone I'm in.)
Second: Why on earth did Vista decide that its understanding of GMT was wrong, and that it had to change it?
Finally: Why am I still using this product that has continued to cause me fits of anger since its inception?
So now, most (but not ALL) appointments in Outlook are off by an hour. Plane flights. Conference schedules. And I don't know which ones are wrong. It's like Vista and Outlook have conspired to just shake all the appointments out of my calendar, and then put them back in whereever they like. Can I slit my wrists now?
UPDATE: Whew. Things are OK on the Vista machine. It's only on the notebook (running XP) where things are still messed up. But how is that a good thing? When I'm on the road, all the times are wrong? And I can't fix them on the laptop, or they'll get messed up on the Vista desktop. Gotta love it.
Vista isn't all bad news. Besides that fact that it looks pretty (shiny!), both Alt+Tab and and the new Windows+Tab functionality make life a lot easier than in Windows XP. I tend to run with tons of apps open concurrently, and my old habit was to use Alt+Tab to cycle through the apps until I found the one I want. Now, although it isn't terribly discoverable, you can press Alt+Tab (or Windows+Tab to get the fancy layered window layout), and select the item you want with your mouse! No need to tab through all the open apps. This saves me a ton of time, and I just tried it on a whim. And it worked! See, there are some nice new features in there.
If only I could get a VPN to work. If anyone knows the trick to making outbound VPN connections from Vista, I'd sure like to know what it is. Thanks!
Imagine that you've got a computer set up just the way you want it, but you now want to create a virtual machine that mimics the setup you've lovingly crafted. Using VMWare or Virtual PC, you've long been able to do this. Although Brian Randell has managed to tackle this task manually, it's never been fun (and if you have to deal with issues like OEM versions of Windows, the task gets even trickier).
I've been living with the Mac for a while, and using Parallels Desktop for Mac to run Windows flawlessly. The folks at Parallels have a free product named Parallels Transporter (it's tricky to find, so follow the link), which allows you to create a full virtual PC from your existing desktop. It also allows you to migrate a Microsoft or VMWare virtual hard drive into a Parallels VPC, in case you need to do that.)
Imagine the possibilities! You can do all your work on your main machine, and then when you need to go somewhere else and work, you can create a virtual version of the machine, copy the image to a portable drive (along with a copy of Parallels Workstation for PC or Parallels Desktop for Mac), and then work as if you were at your original computer.
I'd like to consider using this technology for backups. Using Parallels Transporter, you'd have a completely live backup of your main computer. Should something go wrong with the computer, you could boot up the image on a separate computer, and have your entire environment ready to go immediately.
VMWare also has a competitor, although I haven't tried it. It's in beta, and it's named VMWare Converter. Download it here, for now (this link will inevitably change, so will be broken at some point in the future). Give them a try, and see what you think. This is useful technology, and amazingly, it's free.
I like to like Windows. I like to like Microsoft products in general--that's how I make my living, right? I wish I could say I loved Vista. I do not. I really, really do not.
I've been installing Vista and getting the installation to be marginally stable since Saturday. It's now mid-day on Wednesday. I've worked on this all day, every day, since Saturday. As background, let me say that I've built my own computers, and installed Windows often (far too often) on them for 15 years, since the days of Windows 3.1. I'm pretty good at this, both in terms of the hardware, and the software (if I may say so myself). Not an expert by any means, but I have built a lot of computers over the years.
For this event, I reused an existing motherboard (Intel 955XBK, pretty reliable, with full support for 64EMT, so it's relatively new), a P4 3.0 GHz chip, 4GB memory, and a reasonably new 250GB SATA drive. I used the 1GB ethernet built into the motherboard, and counted on using the USB, FireWire 400 and FireWire 800 ports built into the motherboard as well (these all worked fine in Windows XP, and Windows XP 64, which I tried before I started down the Vista path).
Given that I'm embarking on courseware that will benefit from the Vista "look", I decided to attempt to install Vista Ultimate (the released version). And that's when the problems started. (Amazingly, Vista did recognize the Intel RAID that's built into the motherboard, so I didn't have to play the F6 shuffle as I booted up the installation.) I formatted the 250GB drive, partitioned it into 80 and 170 GB partitions (more or less), and at this point, Vista tells me (rephrased, I don't remember the exact message) "Vista is unable to find a suitable partition on which to install." WTF? Here we sit with two very nice, suitable partitions, yet it won't install.
Google to the rescue: it turns out that Vista won't install on a drive unless it's the first drive listed in the BIOS boot order. I'm not sure if that's quite true, but making the drive the first drive in the boot order after a reboot certainly fixed the problem. Perhaps this is mentioned in the documentation somewhere, and I had only to RTFM, but I generally make the DVD drive the first drive in the boot order, so I can always boot from DVD if necessary. And there's an hour of my life I'll never get back, when Vista could have told me what the problem was and how to fix it.
Once installed, the network connection was totally flaky. Vista found drivers for the mobo's ethernet, and it seemed to work, but every now and then, would simply lose its connection. Or, even better, not a single download from the Internet ever completed. It would start, fast and furious, and then just time out. I could go to my WinXP laptop and download the same file, but it just wouldn't work on Vista.
A friend suggested replacing the NIC ("cut the deck in half", as it were), so I did. And amazingly, the explicit NIC card works fine. Completely solved the problem. But really, the NIC built into the motherboard should have either worked, or not, right? I've never had an intermittent failure problem like that with XP.
The USB 2.0 external drive I have used for years has become incredibly flaky under Vista. Sometimes Vista is unable to write to the drive. Once it fails (calculating the time it's going to take to copy the file, ad nauseum), the drive is corrupt and I have to reformat and rebuild it. I've done this three times now. The drive works flawlessly with WinXP, on the laptop, but Vista simply can't interact with it in a reliable fashion.
WinXP provided full support for the built-in 1394a and 1394b (FireWire 400 and 800) ports on the motherboard. Vista? Not so much. Can't mount a drive on either.
Media Center seems to work relatively well, although I find the new UI difficult to master. Took me a long time to figure out that the menus are "2-dimensional", and using the keyboard, how to control exactly which item I wanted selected.
Software installation has gone better than hardware, although I'm constantly running into little things that don't work right, as expected, or as promised. IE 7 continues to misfire, failing to load pages on Vista that load fine in IE 7 on XP. I thought, before I lived with it, that UAC (User Access Control) was a great idea. Perhaps it is, once you have a stable, and unchanging, machine. As I installed stuff, it just plain drove me nuts. I finally just turned it off, as I guess almost anyone reading this missive will, as well. So much for security!
I'm writing this the week before Vista goes live, publicly. I can't even imagine how much wailing and gnashing of teeth there's going to be when the public gets this. I just imagine my father going down to CompUSA, picking up and upgrade, and attempting to survive it. (Believe me, he's not going to do that. He's smarter than that.)
Maybe you'll be able to take an existing computer and get Vista fully up and running as a development machine easier than I did. After five days at this, I'm just about ready to work. I've got Office 2007, VS 2005 (SP1 + the beta Vista patch), Quicken 2006, Quickbooks 2007, iTunes 7.0.2 and more, all running (for the moment). But should it take 5 days?
For me, this has been a terrible, terrible experience. All my friends are tired of hearing me whine about it. I'm glad to be done, and I'm sure the next time I do it, it will go easier. I'm sure many people will tell me that I'm just an idiot, and that Vista is a simple install. (I didn't even attempt an upgrade...) I'll just smile.