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100 Things people are really saying about Windows Vista

January 9, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Microsplot has an interesting article contradicting Microsoft’s slogan “100 Reasons You’ll Be Speechless“. Au contrair, MS. People are talking more than ever about Vista, and not all of it is Wow.

Some of the items are not entirely Microsoft’s fault, such as not supplying disks with a new computer, but the majority of the issues are directly to be blamed on Microsoft. You can see a number of quotes from articles around the web for each of the points brought forward in the article.

The 100 things in a nutshell:

  1. Vista is a flop. A disaster. Dead.
  2. Vista is one of the 10 worst tech products of 2007!
  3. Vista is the most disappointing tech product of 2007!
  4. This took five years?
  5. What happened to all the promised features in Vista?
  6. Vista isn’t ready for release!
  7. Vista? Yawn.
  8. Vista? Why?
  9. Vista: The end of the Microsoft empire?
  10. Abandon Vista, Microsoft! [Read more...]
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Don’t give up on Vista?

November 21, 2007 By Leave a Comment

After all the Mac guy vs. PC guy videos, you might think they’re running out of ideas. Not so. This one is too funny (especially since I’m struggling with Vista every day…):

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Windows Powershell 1.0

November 20, 2007 By Leave a Comment

Today I ran into an interesting problem. I wanted to print out a search result set – I needed to check off some of the files that I found from a Windows Search result, and add the ones that weren’t checked off to another list. Apparently, the only option in Windows is to make screen shots and paste them into Word to print them. If you have more than two or three screens, that can become a drag.

There had to be a better method. Our systems guy suggested using Posix tools for Windows, and then using ls or find to get to the right data. I didn’t feel like adding yet another non-Microsoft utility (that will become unsupported in no time) to the mix of things. Then I remembered looking at PowerShell a couple of months ago.

PowerShell is the next generation command line for Windows. It approaches everything in the system as an object, and you can perform operations on those objects, retrieve information from them, etc. When I looked at it, my reaction was “Cool!”, but since I didn’t have an actual need for it, it dwindled away in a corner of the harddisk, until I needed disk space and it was deleted.

Basically, what I needed to do was select all the files in a certain directory, and all its subdirectories, with a certain file extension (*.r, for compiled Progress code), that were created after October 24th. Of those files, I need to know the filename, and path.

After some fiddling around, and realizing that I needed the last written date instead of the creation date, I came up with the following beauty:

Get-ChildItem -filter *.r -recurse | where { $_.LastWriteTime -gt “10/24/2007″ } | Format-List FullName | Out-Printer

I would have preferred Format-Table, but it turned out some of the paths were too long to be displayed in the table list.

PowerShell 1.0 looks pretty promising, and PowerShell 2.0 is currently in beta, looking even better. This may be something that will be in my standard toolbox from now on.

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Kensington Bluetooth 2.0 under Windows Vista 64-bit

October 11, 2007 By 17 Comments

I finally got my Bluetooth adapter (a Kensington Bluetooth USB Adapter 2.0) working. Initially when I bought it, trying to install the factory supplied driver wouldn’t work. After a tiresome exchange with support, where they informed me that there was no Vista driver available, and they didn’t have any information about whether or not the driver would be developed.

Well, apparently they developed one (yay Kensington), but failed to inform people who had filed a request for it (Booh! Hiss!). However, when I tried to install it, everything seemed to work fine until a message box popped up informing me that the installation had failed. Digging through the Vista Temp directory, I found the installation log, with one Error message (the rest was fine): “ERROR Device plugged in, no MS stack”.

After trying to run the installation program with Administrative rights, and with UAC turned on and off, I was ready to give up. The funny thing was that the installation program just seemed to download the actual installation program, explode it, run the setup program in there, and delete it when it finished or failed. So, during a new attempt, I grabbed the directory that the installation program created. It has the platform specific files (in my case 64-bit), a setup program and some other stuff. Of course, the installation failed again, but at least I had the files now.
Update:The files are located in \Users\[you]\AppData\Local\Temp\BTW_6.0.1.6200.

When I pulled up the Device Manager in Vista, it showed the Bluetooth EDR dongle listed. I tried several different things (which I won’t mention, because they didn’t work), until I decided to Update the driver for the dongle. When Vista asked me for the driver, I pointed it to the driver directory within the exploded installation directory, and Vista was happier than a clam to install a bunch of devices (Kensington Bluetooth EDR Dongle with trace filter, Microsoft Bluetooth Enumerator, and two Bluetooth devices in the Network adapters group). Yay!

The next (and last) step in setting up the adapter with my Motorola RAZR was the easiest: go to Control Panel, Bluetooth Devices, and Add a new device. Make sure your phone is discoverable, and set up a passkey. Voila! The phone should now be connected.

Next thing on the list is trying to grab floAt’s Mobile Agent. I have an older version installed, and have already figured out that the only way floAt can talk to my phone seems to be to use the COM port (when you pull up Bluetooth Devices, click your phone, select Properties, and go to the Services tab, it will tell you which COM port the phone uses).

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iTunes 7.4 not properly installed

September 26, 2007 By Leave a Comment

Somewhere along the upgrade trail from 7.3 to 7.4.2, I started getting the annoying message “iTunes was not properly installed. If you wish to import or burn CDs, you need to reinstall iTunes” whenever I start iTunes. After following this advice, and restarting iTunes, I got the message “iTunes was not properly installed. If…” – OK, you got the idea…

Apparently a lot of other people seem to be having this problem. And it happens under Vista 32 and 64 bit. Despite the message, people are reporting that importing works fine (I haven’t seen any messages confirming that burning a CD still works).

A discussion thread on the Apple Support forum helped me out: simply installing the GEAR Software drivers seemed to resolve at least the message. In some cases, a new error message pops up saying it can’t find the folder with the CD settings. In that case you have to uninstall iTunes 7.4.x, install 7.3.2, copy the CD folder to a safe location, uninstall iTunes 7.3.2, reinstall iTunes 7.4.x, install the GEAR driver, and copy the CD folder back.

I haven’t tried importing or burning a CD yet, but at least iTunes starts without pausing for me to click OK!

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