What follows is my first review of Windows Vista, following my recent purchase of a new laptop.   Yes, I am aware that Vista has been out for ages, I’m just slow on the uptake.   But first, a few important points worth getting out of the way at the outset:

1. This is a nerdy post.  I’m not even going to try hiding that.   Apologies to readers who are not even slightly interested in nerdy posts.  I promise to write something less nerdy next time.
2. I am primarily a Mac user, and I fully expect this to influence my opinions to a certain extent, despite my attempts to be unbiased.
3. I am using Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 on an HP laptop with a 2GHz dual-core AMD processor and 3GB RAM.

With that out of the way, let’s dive into what, for many people, is probably old news.  Vista has, after all, been around for some time now, despite its monumentally slow and cautious uptake (mainly due to the shocking support for old hardware and software).  It’s worth putting it all in context though, and consider what other products Microsoft brought out before and what their competitors have been doing.

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Yes, I’ve bought myself a laptop.  A brand new laptop, no less.  Running Vista.  Am I mad?  Well, no more than usual, it seems.  Because despite the overwhelming evidence supporting the idea that I was just jealous because two of my friends had also bought new computers recently (and my wife has a better mobile phone than I do), I have a sound and reasonable reason for needing a laptop.

I’ve not actually owned a laptop since my first year at uni, which was when I bought my very first computer – a bottom of the range Novatech notebook with a 366MHz AMD processor, 32MB RAM, Windows 95, and very little besides.  It was £600 too, which on reflection wasn’t actually the bargain I thought it was at the time.  Still, I got a good year of use out of it, getting it to do all sorts of things it wasn’t supposed to be capable of, like running all sorts of Windows 98 programs and running a skinning addon that made it look like Windows XP (which was very new at the time).  Since then I’ve only had desktops, and most have been Macs.

This new laptop (which I’m writing this blog post on, sat in my lounge on my comfy sofa), achieves two primary uses, plus a few other smaller ones.  (more…)

I wouldn’t say I was backwards, exactly, but I do have some very old technology sitting in my study, some of which is still in regular(ish) use.  To take an example, I have a PC sitting on my desk that is almost 7 years old.  Granted it’s only used for testing web sites, but it’s got to the stage where it’s struggling just to do that, and that’s taking into account that I reinstalled everything fairly recently too.

I also have an old Palm m125 which I’ve been carrying around with me to act as my diary, syncing it to my Mac when I remember to.  It does the job, just about, despite being older than the PC (it would have been new in 2001).  I say it does the job, actually it’s been throwing tantrums just lately, refusing to switch on and then losing everything in memory and thus any changes I’ve made since the last sync.

Then there’s my mobile phone, a Motorola L6.  Granted, it’s nowhere near as old as the aforementioned relics, but I did buy it back in 2006, so it’s a few years older than your average mobile.  I still reckon it’s got at least another year of use in it though, despite the paint coming off the bottom, a dodgy battery connection (sort of fixed by stuffing some paper between the battery and the cover) and a dead camera.

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I may be an adult, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that I’m grown-up.  After all, one of my favourite phrases goes something along the lines of “you’re only young once, but you can be immature forever”.  Our fancy dress parties are testament to that overwhelming tendency to revert to a child at any available opportunity.  With that in mind, today’s activities are quite out of the ordinary for me.  I’ve spent the day doing ‘Saturday’ things.

This morning I went to do the weekly food shop at Tesco, but on the way I stopped in at B&Q – that’s when I first noticed things were different.  After all, B&Q is not a child’s playground.  It’s more of a grown man’s playground, full of power tools, electrical items, things that need assembly, all manner of things that most people don’t recognise and wouldn’t know what to do with, and generally a lot of stuff that makes you feel more like a man.  I went in to buy a pack of staples (no, not for a stapler) for hammering into our decking (more on that in a moment), and ended up coming out with a wireless doorbell and a keyring torch as well.

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I love VNC.  I’ve been using VNC for years.  Back when I was working at the University of Essex as the Chaplaincy Assistant I used VNC pretty much every day to use my computer.  These days I don’t use it quite so often, but it still has its uses.

For those not in-the-know, VNC is basically a screen sharing protocol.  When I was ChapAss I would load up my VNC program, tap in the IP address of my computer at home, and VNC would show me my own desktop and allow me to use the computer as if I was physically sat in front of it.  The benefit for me at that point was that I could use all the programs I was familiar with (which were far better than the ones the uni computers provided) and keep all my files in one place.  It worked really well, apart from when my computer crashed – then it meant phoning the house to see if anyone was in who could restart the computer.

Now, working from home, I have no need of VNC in quite the same way.  However, I do have two computers and only one monitor, so it still comes in handy sometimes.  My Mac is my main computer, on which I do pretty much everything.  But I also have a PC dual-booting XP and Ubuntu, mainly for testing purposes – it’s good to know that my web sites work on ‘normal’ computers too.  And Linux.  So rather than connecting a keyboard, mouse and monitor to my PC, taking up valuable space on my desktop, I VNC into the machine when I want to use it, using both computers from one monitor and set of controls.

Of course, there is one small problem that needs to be overcome for this to work properly, and the root of that problem is that traditionally Mac mice have only one button.  With only one mouse button, how do you right click on an operating system that depends on it?

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Yesterday morning when I turned my PC on it refused to let me into Windows.  It got as far as the logon screen and then rebooted itself.  It took until this morning to figure out what the problem was – the USB wireless dongle had come loose and the dodgy hardware connection was causing Windows to panic.  Aww… poor Windows… can’t cope with stuff…

Anyway, a byproduct of that temporary glitch was that I started looking into getting Linux working again.  I say again, it wasn’t actually broken before.  I had installed Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy on the PC over a year ago and never really used it because I couldn’t get it to recognise the wireless dongle I had.  However, having got Windows back online with a CAT5 cable I decided to see if I could persuade Ubuntu to go online too.  And that’s proved to be a mammoth operation, and I’ve got little work done today so far.

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Over the years I’ve owned a motley collection of computers.  My first (other than family computers) was a little laptop I came to university with.  It was relatively cheap, being in an end-of-line sale at Novatech, so it wasn’t exactly state of the art by the time I bought it.  It had a 360MHz AMD processor, 32MB of RAM, a 5.6GB hard disk, and ran Windows 95.  Not exactly impressive, even then.  Still, it did me fine for a year, though it did spend most of its life sat on my desk and wasn’t really mobile much.  After that came a 1.2GHz tower, with 128MB RAM, 20GB hard disk, and Windows XP.  Even though it was still entry-level it was a significant step up for me, and allowed me to play games.  Not very good games, but they were games nonetheless.

However, it wasn’t long before I grew tired of the plastic look of XP, and started modding my desktop with all manner of programs, making it look very little like Microsoft designed it to be.  Eventually I found myself themeing everything I could lay my hands on to make it look more like a Mac, striving for that perfect interface.  It was no surprise then when a few years later I bought my first Mac, a second hand G3 Blue&White.  Although originally it would have been only 450MHz the previous owner had stuffed a 1GHz G4 upgrade chip from Sonnet in there, which made a big difference.  In terms of numbers it should have been slower than the PC it replaced, but in fact it was still faster and smoother and certainly more satisfying to use.  Hooray for Apple!

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Avid readers of this blog (oh, and friends too probably) will know that I fairly recently bought myself a Mac Mini, to replace my G3 Mac. It was all somewhat of a last-minute transfer, with the G3 dying almost without warning and leaving me having to go back to using my PC with Windows XP – not an experience I want to repeat if I can help it. The cause of death turned out to be the processor, which was an upgrade by the previous owner, and which stopped the computer booting up at all. So I ended up buying myself a second-hand Mac Mini on eBay, which was about all I could afford at short notice.

Despite being newer and having a faster processor (1.42Ghz rather than 1Ghz) I have to confess the speed increase wasn’t particularly noticeable. In some ways it was much better – its graphics capabilities were much higher, allowing it to do the funky Quartz stuff – but it still struggled on occasions, especially when running several large programs at the same time. That, sadly, is just the way my work goes though – it’s a rarity if I have less than 10 apps running at once, and that could well include several browsers, Photoshop, e-mails, RSS client, FTP client, calendar, address book, word processor… when I’m in full flow it gets rather crowded! In fact, that’s on reason I’m using a virtual desktops setup, giving me the ability to put different programs on different virtual screens, keeping things a little more organised.

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