May 13th, 2008
The key to Windows success? It’s all about the drivers
The greatest advantage of the Windows ecosystem is that there are so many choices.
The biggest problem with the Windows ecosystem is that there are so many choices.
Ironic, isn’t it?
The sheer number of choices means you can almost certainly find exactly the PC you want. In the notebook category alone, you can get a two-pound ultraportable or a 20-pound desktop replacement, or anything in between, with or without Tablet or touchscreen features. You can opt for a system with a battery life of 6-8 hours or one that will run like a bat out of hell for 80 minutes. If you prefer a desktop, you can take your pick of giant towers, midsize towers, small form factor cases designed to fit in AV equipment racks, or all-in one designs, with a dizzying range of expansion options. For a Windows PC, you can spend $500, $5000, or anything in between.
All those choices give you a practically infinite number of hardware and software combinations. And that’s where the problems begin. All those choices also offer a correspondingly large chance of encountering problems from the unexpected interaction of parts that weren’t designed to be used together.
That, in large part, is why Windows Vista has struggled for the past 18 months.
May 9th, 2008
Why do Macs need so much fixing?
Last weekend, in the course of a column about Steve Ballmer, my colleague Larry Dignan tossed an offhand shout-out in my general direction:
When Ed Bott has a series on how to fix–or at least cope with Vista–you know this OS isn’t so hot. Why should this thing need so much fixing?
And the TalkBack section of my series on Fixing Vista (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) has drawn the same sort of comments, usually from diehard ABMers.
To which I say, give me a freakin’ break. I’ve made an entire career out of helping people become more productive with Windows, which includes explaining how things work, how to customize system settings and features, and, yes, how to fix problems. And here’s a news flash: I have peers on the Apple side of the universe who make their living exactly the same way. In fact, maybe the real question should be, Why does the Mac OS need so much fixing? Consider the evidence:
MacFixIt.com is an enormously popular website that offers up a veritable gold mine of solutions to help people fix problems with the Mac OS. (It doesn’t always “just work”?) Ironically, it’s a CNET property. Yes, that’s right, the same company that owns ZDNet.
And speaking of three-part series on fixing computer operating systems… I was floored to find a 1500-word post called How to Fix the Finder 1: Faster, written by one of the most passionate Mac advocates around: It begins: “The Mac OS X Finder is at the top of everyone’s fix-it list. Here’s a look at what’s wrong with the Finder, and ideas for fixing it.” And that was just the first installment in (ahem) a three-part series that continued with the 1200-word part 2 (Smarter) and the 1600-word part 3 (Prettier). That’s 4300 words on how to fix just the file manager in the Mac OS.
A few months ago, MacWorld published a lengthy article called Fix Mac slowdowns. It’s filled with headings like “Web browsing is too slow” and “E-mail takes forever” and (my favorite) “Everything is too slow,” which includes this familiar advice:
If everything you do on your Mac seems to take much longer than it once did, look for several common system problems, as well as individual programs that are outdated or are simply using more than their fair share of your Mac’s resources.
There’s a site called TroubledMac.com that offers a $15 e-book called Fix a Troubled Mac: A Mac OS X Troubleshooting Guide. And I found a lengthy article called Fixing Mac Glitches and Sluggishness at a site called Lowendmac.com.
Maybe this is a trend. Just this week, ZDNet’s own Jason O’Grady, half of the Apple Core blogging team, wondered aloud if Mac OS 10.5.2 (Apple’s latest round of bug fixes for Leopard) is Apple’s own version of Vista:
I’ve heard many different complaints about Mac OS 10.5.2 since it was released, from my own Skype/podcasting problems to issues with just about everything else, including: printing, third-party wireless routers, software freezing and problems with Time Machine. The Apple discussion boards are littered with stories about all kinds of crawlers in 10.5.2 … Chuck Freedman from the PowerPage Podcast shares his problems with 10.5.2 on his MacBook Pro – he thinks it’s the buggiest software update in years. So much so, that his friend Dennis (updated to give proper credit) coined a new term for 10.5.2 – “Apple Vista.”
For the record, I think that’s a cheap shot at both Apple and Microsoft. Welcome to the 21st century, people. Personal computers are the most complicated products the average human will encounter intheir lifetime. Each one is made up of hundreds of internal and external parts chosen from millions of alternative sources, run by software that consists of millions of lines of code, and infinitely customizable.
The surprise is not that these complex products occasionally need fixing, but rather that they work so well, so often, for so many people.
(Oh, and I hope my Linux-loving readers won’t feel left out. For equal opportunity’s sake, I could have found ten times as many websites and articles for Linux users, not because Linux is more troublesome but because there are so many distros.)
May 6th, 2008
Fixing Windows Vista, Part 3: Top Troubleshooting Tools
Do you think Windows Vista is slow, crash-prone, or unreliable? Join the crowd.
Over the past year, reviews of Windows Vista by mainstream media outlets, the technical press, bloggers, and ordinary users have been, for the most part, scathing. And many of those bad reviews were absolutely accurate. My co-authors and I just completed an extensive post-Service Pack 1 revision of our book Windows Vista Inside Out. Over the past year, we installed, upgraded, and used Windows Vista on a broad cross-section of hardware designs from nearly a dozen manufacturers. During that time, we experienced some of those same performance, reliability, and compatibility issues ourselves. What we found was simple: With a clean install on well-supported hardware, everything worked just fine. But toss in an incompatible application or a flaky video, storage, or network driver, and performance could suffer. Badly.
Over the past year or so, we have also observed steady and occasionally dramatic improvements in the Windows ecosystem. Most of the large issues in Windows Vista were effectively resolved by a series of updates delivered via Windows Update, including more than 500 fixes that were rolled up into Service Pack 1. Third-party hardware makers, many of whom were slow to get working Vista drivers out the door, have since released updates that can make a huge difference in the Vista experience.
Today’s conventional wisdom, based on more than a year’s worth of relentless negative publicity, says Vista is hopelessly broken. In fact, my experience says the exact opposite is true. I proved the point in the first installment of this series, where I restored a sluggish $2500 Sony Vaio notebook to peak performance in a few hours. And I think anyone with a modicum of PC smarts can do the same. Read the rest of this entry »
April 29th, 2008
Fixing Windows Vista, Part 2: Taming UAC
The User Account Control feature in Windows Vista has been known to drive normally level-headed people over the edge with frustration. If you find it annoying, you might be tempted to turn it off. According to Microsoft research, somewhere between 12 and 16 percent of all Windows Vista users do exactly that. But before you take such a radical step, it helps to understand what UAC is actually doing on your behalf and how you can tone down its hard edges without sacrificing its protection.
The biggest misconception I hear about UAC is that it’s just another silly “Are you sure?” dialog box that users will quickly learn to ignore. That’s only one small part of the overall UAC system. The point of UAC is to allow you to run as a standard user, something that is nearly impossible in Windows XP and earlier Windows versions. In fact, with UAC enabled (the default setting) every user account in Windows Vista runs as a standard user. When you try to do something that requires administrative privileges, you see a UAC consent dialog box. If you’re an administrator, you simply have to click Continue when prompted. If you’re running as a standard user, you have to provide the user name and password of a member of the Administrators group.
| Image Gallery: I’ve created a walkthrough gallery that shows how to tone down the hard edges of UAC without sacrificing its protection. |  |
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UAC has four major benefits:
- On a shared computer, you can set up standard user accounts for users who don’t have the experience or training to make smart decisions about installing software or making system changes. As a result, they won’t be able to do any damage if a malicious website fools them into trying to install a piece of spyware or a Trojan.
- As an administrator, you get a warning before a piece of software attempts to make a change that can adversely affect the system. In Windows XP, clicking OK to a single malicious installer program could install a dozen programs in the background, with no warning to you. In Vista with UAC, you’ll have to give consent to each installation (and presumably will say No, early and often.)
- Badly written programs sometimes try to write user data to system areas, such as the Windows or Program Files folder or a registry key that affects all users. In Windows XP, running this type of program as a standard user would probably cause the program to fail. With Vista, those operations are intercepted and written to a virtualized location in your user profile. The program thinks it wrote a file to the Windows folder, but the actual file appears in your profile.
- Internet Explorer 7 runs in Protected Mode when UAC is on. That causes processes in a browser window to run at a low integrity level, where they’re blocked from interacting with processes that have a higher integrity level. The net effect is to stop entire classes of web-based attacks in their tracks.
Microsoft product unit manager David Cross made some remarks several weeks ago that have been widely misinterpreted. He was quoted as saying that the reason Microsoft added UAC to Windows Vista was “to annoy users.” The reality is that UAC shouldn’t be annoying, and consent dialog boxes shouldn’t be common. If you’re being pestered with UAC prompts all day long, you should be annoyed at the software developer that wrote the crappy program that’s responsible for those prompts, and you should in turn annoy them until they fix it.
But if you do find UAC annoying in day-to-day use, I recommend that you try one or more of the alternatives described in this post before resorting to the “nuclear alternative” of completely disabling it. The three techniques I outline here (with illustrations in the accompanying screenshot gallery) can help cut the annoyance factor dramatically
Page 2: Stop annoying UAC “fade to black” slowdowns
Page 3: Create an Administrator account that’s free of UAC prompts
Page 4: Use shortcuts to start programs in admin mode without UAC prompts
Next –>
April 29th, 2008
Sorry, conspiracy buffs, there’s no Windows “back door”
Techdirt’s Mike Masnick is usually pretty reliable, but he completely blew it today, hitting the publish button on one of the sloppiest, most inflammatory stories I’ve seen in a long time:
Microsoft Gives Vista Backdoor Keys To The Police
It’s long been assumed that Microsoft has built in various “backdoors” for law enforcement to get around its own security, but now reader Kevin Stapp writes in to let us know that the company has also been literally handing out the keys to law enforcement. Apparently, they’re giving out special USB keys that simply get around Microsoft’s security, allowing the holder of the key to very quickly get forensic information (including internet surfing history), passwords and supposedly encrypted data off of a laptop. While you can understand why police like this, the very fact that the backdoor is there and that a bunch of these USB keys are out there pretty much guarantees that those with nefarious intent also have such keys.
OK, now go read the linked story from the Seattle Times. There’s not a word - not one word - about back doors or encryption. Sadly, the usual suspects in the Techmeme echo chamber are whipping the inaccuracy around the infield at major league speeds. CrunchGear says Microsoft has “developed a thumb drive that helps Johnny Law quickly extract information, encrypted or otherwise, from computers.” And Valleywag talks about “a USB dongle that plugs into a computer, bypasses any Windows passwords or encryption, and quickly downloads sensitive data such as your Web browsing history.”
I’ve heard of jumping to conclusions, but these are some truly giant leaps. Read the rest of this entry »
April 23rd, 2008
Good Microsoft, Bad Microsoft
On paper and in theory, Microsoft is a single corporation, with something like 80,000 employees worldwide. In the real world, it’s actually a collection of dozens, maybe even hundreds, of small companies that appear to act without a lot of central supervision.
That is the only possible explanation for how the same company could do something totally amazing on the same day that it makes headlines with a ridiculously boneheaded move.
Good Microsoft unveiled Live Mesh today. A kind Microsoft employee hooked me up with an invite to the beta program, and I have it running here on my main desktop PC and my notebook. After spending only a couple hours using it, I’m in awe of its performance and usability in allowing me to move between local files and cloud-based storage without even being aware of it. I’m really forcing myself to temper some of that initial enthusiasm so that I can learn how this stuff works and get a sense of where the platform is headed. But I can’t help but feel excited about some of the ways this technology can change the way I work.
Unfortunately, Bad Microsoft decided to make an appearance this week as well, if this report from Ars Technica is accurate:
MSN Entertainment and Video Services general manager Rob Bennett sent out an e-mail this afternoon to customers, advising them to make any and all authorizations or deauthorizations before August 31. “As of August 31, 2008, we will no longer be able to support the retrieval of license keys for the songs you purchased from MSN Music or the authorization of additional computers,” reads the e-mail seen by Ars. “You will need to obtain a license key for each of your songs downloaded from MSN Music on any new computer, and you must do so before August 31, 2008. If you attempt to transfer your songs to additional computers after August 31, 2008, those songs will not successfully play.”
How many tracks did Microsoft sell through this service? Apple has sold 4 billion tracks at 99 cents each. MSN Music probably had 1 percent of ITMS’ market share, maybe less. At that rate we’re talking probably 40 million tracks, almost certainly not hundreds of millions. So why not make a gesture in the direction of those customers, one that doesn’t involve the middle finger? Why not publish instructions on how to burn those downloaded DRM-laden tracks to CD, where they would be safe from deactivation servers? And then why not offer some compensation to those who made purchases at the MSN Music store? How much goodwill and good news coverage could the company buy for 10 or 20 million dollars? Even at Microsoft that’s more than chump change, but it’s a bargain compared to the amount of ill will they managed to generate in one day by offering nothing. Nada. Zero, zip, zilch.
And that bottom line doesn’t count the number of prospective Microsoft customers who are lost before they ever spend a dollar. Ray Ozzie’s memo on mesh computing talks about the “power of choice” and “connected entertainment”:
[E]ach individual will be afforded a media-centric or gaming-centric web presence through which they can express their tastes/interests/affinities and interact with others through linking, sharing, ranking and tagging of music, video, photos, games, and more. This vision is being realized today through the Zune Social for media and Xbox LIVE for gaming. Services such as the MSN.com home page, MSN Mobile, MSN Video, Zune Marketplace and software such as Windows Mobile, Microsoft Mediaroom and Windows Media Center will be progressively transformed by this connected entertainment vision.
What a great opportunity Good Microsoft had today. They could have contacted their MSN Music customers, who have already proven they’re interested in this “connected entertainment” stuff that Ozzie is writing about, and offered them early entree into the Live Mesh service. They could have rewarded those customers for their past loyalty by offering them something of value. But instead of inviting those customers onto the bus, they pushed them under it. Way to go, Bad Microsoft.
Over the past year, I’ve seen encouraging signs of a Microsoft that is capable of learning from its mistakes and enforcing accountability. It’s a shame the folks at Bad Microsoft keep creating so many opportunities for the folks at Good Microsoft to learn so many painful lessons.
April 21st, 2008
Fixing Windows Vista, one machine at a time
If the “Vista sucks” movement has a public face, it’s the Sony Vaio. No one knows that better than my new friend Jeremy Toeman. In May 2007, this 15-year Windows veteran replaced his old, beloved, XP-powered Vaio with a newer Vaio that came with Windows Vista Business installed. Practically overnight, he told me, his experience went from “awesome” to “awful.” The experience was so terrible, in fact, that after several months of struggling he finally surrendered, putting his $2500 Windows notebook in storage and replacing it with a MacBook last summer.
At first glance, Jeremy’s machine is Exhibit A in the case against Windows Vista. As Jeremy documented in a series of posts, this gorgeous machine was ugly in action: slow to start, sluggish when performing everyday tasks, crash-prone, and overloaded with annoying and unwanted software. But is it really a hopeless case, or was this system done in by the rush to market and a sloppy OEM integration?
My instinct and experience says that even under these extreme circumstances, Windows Vista can be fixed. That’s why, for the past two months, Jeremy and I have been collaborating on an experiment. After he sent me his Vaio in early March, I blew away all traces of the old installation and set up a pristine copy of Windows Vista Business, with up-to-date drivers and zero crapware. (This screen shot, from the accompanying image gallery, shows the blizzard of dialog boxes and icons that are part of the original, unpleasant experience.) The initial results were eye-opening and impressive. After my makeover, this machine was every bit as fast as its specs said it should have been.
Around the same time, Sony sent me a brand-new SZ770N Vaio, also with Windows Vista Business installed. The new model is in the same series as Jeremy’s machine, and physically nearly identical. Not surprisingly, the CPU and graphics processor in the newer unit were both significantly faster than last year’s model. Over the next two weeks, I played with both machines, switching between the original factory images and my own clean installs to see where the differences lay.
April 17th, 2008
Is Hyper-V ready for the Windows desktop?
A few days ago, my ZDNet blogging colleague Jason Perlow offered some suggestions on how he would design Windows 7 for maximum backward compatibility. One of his key proposals involved using virtualization to solve application compatibility problems:
What if Microsoft were to build a “Personal” Hyper-V into the Windows 7 client?
[…]
All Microsoft needs to do is include a stripped-down XP virtualized subsystem that contains all the core Windows XP SP3 libraries and a fully Para-virtualized XP kernel, so that it will run on 32-bit systems as well as 64-bit Intel VT-accelerated and AMD-V enabled systems, with a “Seamless” way to present XP applications, perhaps via a internal RDP interface or a DirectX accelerated virtual video driver, without having to run a complete XP desktop.
Is that all? Something tells me that might delay the launch date for Windows 7 until, oh, I don’t know, maybe the end of 2013? So I’m going to file that suggestion under N, for Not Gonna Happen. At least not until Windows 8 or even Windows 9.
But the topic did inspire me to sit down and take a closer look at Microsoft’s release candidate of Hyper-V, the virtualization platform that didn’t quite make it into Windows Server 2008. I’ve been using virtualization software on the PC platform for years, including workstation and server software from VMWare and, most recently, Microsoft’s Virtual Server 2005 R2 running on Windows Server 2003.
This is the first opportunity I’ve had to spend any hands-on time with Hyper-V. After less than a week, I’m hooked. And Jason’s suggestion, although ambitious, isn’t science fiction. Windows 7 is being built on the same code base as Windows Server 2008. So in theory at least, this software could be ported to the desktop OS. In this walkthrough and the accompanying image gallery, I’ll show you how Hyper-V works, what it can and can’t do, and where it falls short on the client side. Read the rest of this entry »
April 14th, 2008
Making sense of Windows’ irrational pricing and licensing
A few weeks ago, Microsoft announced it was cutting the price of retail, shrink-wrapped copies of Windows Vista. The new suggested price for an upgrade edition of Windows Vista Ultimate is $219, down from $299. The cost of an upgrade edition of Vista Home Premium drops to $129 from $159. Those price cuts were effective with the release of Vista Service Pack 1 in mid-March, and the actual prices that people pay (the so-called street price) will invariably be lower: Amazon, for example, is offering discounts on the upgrade editions of Vista Ultimate and Home Premium for $195 and $95, respectively. The full versions are $300 and $216.
Those prices are, frankly, higher than what any sane person would pay. You can get a better deal direct from Microsoft, just by installing an unlicensed copy of Windows and not activating it within the first 30 days. As I noted back in December, Microsoft will sell you a fully legal Vista Ultimate license for $199, no questions asked, as part of its “get legal” program. In fact, Microsoft’s direct prices are significantly better than the suggested retail prices and practically identical to the discounted prices available from partners like Amazon.
But the customers who really get the short end of the deal are those who consider upgrading after they buy a new computer with Vista preinstalled. A customer who buys a new Dell XPS 420, for example, can choose Vista Home Premium preinstalled or can upgrade to Vista Ultimate at the time of purchase for $150. If they wait, however, the price goes up to $159 (and the hassle increases as well).
Trying to find the best price for Microsoft software is a frustrating game, with a constantly shifting set of rules that leave most people feeling like losers. Trying to understand whether you’re staying within those rules is stressful. I don’t know a single person who thinks the retail price of Windows is fair and that the terms of use are understandable. In fact, the entire licensing structure for Windows feels Byzantine and outmoded. It needs an overhaul, and next year’s launch of Windows 7 offers a perfect opportunity for Microsoft to give its consumer and small business customers a fresh start. If I were in charge of the retail launch, I’d make five changes:
- Clean up the version confusion. Offer Home and Business versions (equivalent to the current Home Premium and Business editions) and an Ultimate edition that combines both.
- Cut the price. Make the Home edition $49, and sell the Business edition for $99. The cost of Ultimate? Add the other two prices together to get $148.
- No more upgrade SKUs. A license is a license, whether it’s new or an upgrade. You shouldn’t have to sort out ”qualifying upgrade products” or kludgey install workarounds that confuse even so-called experts.
- Sell a family upgrade pack. Copy Apple, and sell a pack of five licenses (Home only) for $199. And just like Apple, don’t offer that discount to businesses.
- Offer a deactivation option. Product activation is a necessary evil, but other companies do a better job of it. Adobe, for instance, allows Acrobat users to deactivate a license so they can uninstall are reinstall the software, on the same PC or a different one. Windows should do the same.
I’m sure some Microsoft execs are recoiling in horror at the thought of slashing prices and redoing licensing procedures. But I’ll bet the company’s bottom line would actually improve with this model, customer satisfaction would skyrocket, and it would kill the misperception that Windows is overpriced compared to the Mac OS.
Of course, there’s still the little matter of actually delivering a product people want to buy and then marketing it intelligently. But that’s a topic for another day and another post.
April 9th, 2008
Cast your vote in the Windows 7 release date prediction pool
When will Windows 7 be ready for release? The tech blogosphere seems to have interpreted Microsoft’s latest carefully parsed announcement as pointing to a January 2010 release. But I agree with my colleague Mary Jo Foley that a 2010 date doesn’t make much sense. And I don’t need any inside information to make that prediction. All it takes is some common sense. In this post, I’ll give you the lay of the Windows 7 landscape, and just to make things interesting, I’ll kick off the unofficial Windows 7 Release Date Prediction Pool with my prediction. Think you know more than me? Leave your best guess in the Talkback section. (Rules at the end of this post.)
I think Windows 7 will arrive long before the end of 2009. My reasoning is based on these four pillars:
Vista’s brand value is near zero. From a branding perspective, the Windows Vista name is practically toxic. Although the Vista experience has improved tremendously in the past year, the damage is already done, and the best solution is to get its replacement ready sooner rather than later.
It’s gotta be in time for Q4. If you’re responsible for revenue at Microsoft, you desperately want to ship a new operating system in time for computer makers to load it on new computers during the crucial holiday selling season. If you miss that season and ship too late in the year, you surrender huge amounts of cash and alienate your partners. Windows Vista was originally supposed to ship in October 2006, and the delay to January 30, 2007 was just one of many missteps in its checkered existence.
Waiting until Q4 2010 is not an option. There’s no way that Windows 7 can be ready for Q4 of 2008, so Microsoft and its PC maker partners are already braced for a lackluster selling season this year. But missing Q4 2009 also? Heads would roll in Redmond if that happened.
Yes, it can be done. Microsoft watchers like to point to the company’s atrocious record with development timelines. Vista’s messy schedule, with the notorious 2004 “Longhorn reset,” could be a Harvard Business School case study in how not to build software. So why will things be different this time? Because Steven Sinofsky is in charge. During his tenure as head of the Office division, Sinofsky earned a reputation for shipping products on time. And with a stint as a visiting scholar at Harvard Business School on his bio, you can bet he’s learned the lessons of Vista.
My prediction? I’m sticking with what I wrote back in January. Windows 7 will be released to manufacturing on July 29, 2009, exactly 1000 days after Vista’s November 2, 2006 RTM date. [Update: As at least one commenter has noted, the official RTM date for Windows Vista was actually November 8, 2006, as noted in this press release. The November 2 date I mentioned reflects the time stamp on Vista system files, indicating that the final build was cut on that date and then tested for the next six days.] That leaves plenty of time for PC makers to get their new models ready for the holiday buying season, and it even gives them a fighting chance at a decent back-to-school season.
So there’s my entry in the Windows 7 Release Date Prediction Pool. Hit the Talkback button and add your guess. The rules are simple. You must enter one complete date – day, month, and year. In the event of a tie, the earliest post wins. The actual date will be determined by the date on Microsoft’s official press release announcing the release to manufacturing of Windows 7.
Prizes? What, the smug satisfaction of knowing that you were right and I was wrong isn’t enough? OK, I’ll throw in an autographed copy of my first book on Windows 7. Let the guessing begin!
Ed Bott is an award-winning technology writer with more than two decades' experience writing for mainstream media outlets and online publications. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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