Brandon Leblanc over at his Self-Proclaimed Windows Geek blog, talks about contemplating a move back to Windows Live Spaces, Microsoft's free online journal service which I have personally have been using since December 9th 2004. I left a comment on Brandon's blog, and I thought I should turn that into a post here.

Quote:

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. I’ve been really busy pumping awesome content into the Windows Experience Blog. Haven’t had much time to post here. I am thinking about moving my blog back to Windows Live Spaces. Why? Simple. It gives me one less thing to worry about. I am running this blog on its own dedicated Windows Server 2008 box which I maintain. If I were to move to Windows Live Spaces, I wouldn’t have to worry about maintaining my own server.

Read the rest here

Well, for me personally, Live Spaces is both a curse and a savior. Back in 2004, it was so complex trying to find somewhere on the Internet to share my thoughts and opinions. Blogger was there but hard to work with, lack a certain level of simplicity and just did not look inviting in addition being hard to customize. Then MSN Spaces came along. Immediately I was hooked to its straightforward approach, yet its degree of customization and the themes just looked great. For a person like me who doesn't know a lot about managing a web site or setting up a web server or don't have the financial resources for third party hosting, Windows Live Spaces is just perfect.

But at the same time, getting your word out, and attracting readers is very, very hard. Stop blogging for a week and your impressions just disappear into think air. I am trying to restart my blogging efforts again. But Spaces makes it hard to reconnect. Because of school I haven't had the time to invest as much. I am working across multiple computers, so that level of personalization I would be able to add through tools like Windows Live Writer is not there, example, tagging, adding photos, videos, wrapping text and so on. I hope the web interface form improves in the future to support something as simple as tagging because I think it helps a great deal with reaching out to your audience.

The spamming tools need to be improved too, if you check out the majority of of comments on my live space, its mostly from Chinese spammers. In addition to that, the search experience is lousy, I can't give my readers the opportunity to search my Live Space in a relevant and natural way (I don't know if this is attributed to the lousy Windows Live Search). I have tried to relay my feedback to the Spaces Team, but sometimes it just falls on deaf airs it seems. I want a Live Space that I can control, that I can use as a tool to extend my voice and make an impact. A live Space where I can find readers with related interest, who actually speak English, so we can have a discussion. Also, I wouldn't mind having integration with a future type Live Groups kind of thing, where I have my own personal group that people can join and we can build a community around. That's what I want without the complexity.

I was trying to view a video on Channel9, when I clicked the video I wanted to review, it requested that I install Silversight. I thought, strange, I am sure I installed Silverlight a long time ago on this system. Anyway, I went ahead and clicked install, then a error page came up, take a look:

But, then I wondered, when did my browser become 64 bit by default. I did a little investigation and discovered that, when you launch IE 7 on Vista 64-bit through the 'Run' Command using 'about:blank' it defaults to Internet Explorer 64-bit. To confirm this, I tried again, with a URL, and checked the Help About dialog and surely enough, it was 32-bit IE.

But, regardless, its strange Microsoft is not up on the 64-Bit bandwagon, in critical areas as this. With this being a fresh technology, I would have hoped that 64-bit development would have been there in mind at the start. Oh, well, I am not being hampered, but it just clues me in that 64-Bit development at Microsoft might be hassle.

From Engineering Windows 7

The Windows 7 Team is blogging again, this time about Microsoft's efforts to improve the boot time for the next release. Michael Fortin who is one of Microsoft’s Distinguished Engineers and leads the Fundamentals feature team in the Core Operating System Group, takes the time out to discuss the challenges and the experiences the Team had testing Windows 7 on various configurations out there. Also of interest, is what the Windows Team considers to be excellent from not so excellent.

Quote:

For Windows 7, we have a dedicated team focused on startup performance, but in reality the effort extends across the entire Windows division and beyond. Our many hardware and software partners are working closely with us and can rightly be considered an extension to the team.

Startup can be one of three experiences; boot, resume from sleep, or resume from hibernate. Although resume from sleep is the default, and often 2 to 5 seconds based on common hardware and standard software loads, this post is primarily about boot as that experience has been commented on frequently. For Windows 7, a top goal is to significantly increase the number of systems that experience very good boot times. In the lab, a very good system is one that boots in under 15 seconds.

For a PC to boot fast a number of tasks need to be performed efficiently and with a high degree of parallelism.

• Files must be read into memory.
• System services need to be initialized.
• Devices need to be identified and started.
• The user’s credentials need to be authenticated for login.
• The desktop needs to be constructed and displayed.
• Startup applications need to be launched.

Read the entire article here

I hope when the Windows Team is testing Windows 7 on systems out there it tries to order from the budget category. My brother purchased a Dell Inspiron in March 2008 with Windows Vista Home Basic 32-bit:

Specs:
Intel Celeron 1.8 Ghz
1 GB of RAM
Shared memory (don't know the amount exactly, but I think its using the X3000 graphics from Intel.

Out of the box it was acceptable performance, boot in about 1 minute, from BIOS to building the desktop. But as applications were added, the performance and boot time of the system degraded. Here is a sampling of the applications he has installed:

- AutoCAD 2009 - His application of choice, day in day out. This app takes a long time to open and he often leaves it open.
- Office 2007 Professional
- Encarta 2008
- Virtual DJ
- iTunes 7.7
- Roxio 9

These are what he often uses. What he has resorted to doing now is just plain hibernate the system and it has worked tremendously in his favor. But, there are the times when has to install Windows Updates and restart the system for them to be installed and configured. Those now rare boot times can be excruciating.

In contrast, I have a laptop Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit with the following specs:
- AMD Turion 2.0 GHz x2
- 2 GBs of RAM
- ATI X1600 256 MBs of vRAM

Apps:
AutoCAD 2009 - Which I also use on a regular basis
Office 2007 Enterprise
Encarta 2008
Corel Graphics Suite x4
NERO 8

Yet, its seeing a similar boot time performance of over 1 minute or more. Loading the desktop can be the most excruciating part. What I notice on the laptop is when its fully loaded up, the applications do open fast. But the boot time is really the downer. I don't like to leave my laptop sleeping or in hibernation of long periods of time. I personally have noticed and this is based on experience with XP not Vista, it does affect your system over time, things start to get corrupted and groggy. I think hibernation is at fault for killing my Dell Inspiron 840c.

What I have done is disable some of the services I know I do not need. For instance, Apples iTunes installs things like Apple Mobile Device Service and iTunes Helper Service. There are some things you can disable from Services in Admin Tools and MSCONFIG, but I personally don't see a drastic difference at all, unless I am doing something wrong.

I would like a feature in Windows 7, similar to IE 7 where you reset the default settings back to its originally state. Meaning, when I buy an OEM branded computer, I can remove all the third party programs that OEM’s often include without having to reinstall the OS from scratch, this should not affect device drivers. But even virus protection software must be removed in the reset process. Let me the user; decide what I want to put on my computer.

But ultimately, a lot of the issues I see with Vista's performance is mostly associated with processors and memory configurations that cannot seem to handle Vista's high requirements, yet the OEMs still push these systems out to consumers. You need to have a serious talk with your partners about doing this. Either let them continue bundling XP on those systems or don't ship them at all. Don't let your brand suffer at the cost of consumer experience because OEMs are trying to save a buck or two.

Zen Garden

Recently, met up with few customer that interested with microsoft virtualization solution. However, they have different opinion and understanding. To share with you guys:

1) Yes, you will need Windows 2008 CAL to run Windows 2008 Hyper-V - however you need to understand this CAL is not just for Hyper-V - you can then run Windows 2008 other features, eg: Domain controller with RODC, serverCore +++

2) Lots of people did mention that Hyper-V do not support Windows 2000 as its virtual machine. It does, you will need SP4 and only support 1 proc. Check the guest operating system supports for Hyper-V:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/954958/en-us

3) Other Microsoft product supported in other virtualization technology? Well, hopefully all in the near future. See what Microsoft would say: Its support policy.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/897615/

We are all aware that today, Windows Vista is being egged on as the new operating system released by Microsoft corporation for use. While I have not tried to use it, there are people who are saying that it is still buggy and may need more patches before the perfect version comes out. Apparently, Windows Vista is following the same footsteps that previous Windows Operating systems such as Windows 98, Windows ME and Windows XP underwent before they were cleared and made reliable to use on.

Unlike the previous Microsoft operating systems, chances are you may find Windows Vista entirely frustrating if in case you want to downgrade to Windows XP once again. There have been posts on the web about turning to dual boot options due to some problems such as driver compatibility on the web but just the same, I think it would be best to delete the entire Windows Vista and install a fresh copy of the Windows XP OS.

This is easier said than done. For one, there will be instances where Vista will stop you from overwriting them if you use the CD to load. If only there was the trusty old FDISK that allowed you to delete partitions and create new ones. But problems such as no floppy drive use these days pose a problem. There are some which only have CD drives to use and normally, you will not find the DOS programs available unless you are able to download them somewhere on the web.

On the next post I will be explaining how you can erase Windows Vista and install a fresh copy of Windows XP. But before doing that, I would suggest you download a copy of the old DOS operating system (in ZIP or ISO) and burn it to a blank CDR.

You can download a copy of the old bootable DOS system here.