This is a follow-up to my post last week:

There were a few things that happened in succession to send me into an OS tailspin pretty quickly.

The first was I had just spent a great deal of time installing, and configuring Windows Server 2008 on my desktop to be a “Workstation OS”, and I started experiencing stability problems, and the second was I got a great deal on 8GB of RAM for my desktop, so with that alone, meant I was “locked into” an x86_64 OS, and I had to re-evaluate what I wanted out of an OS.

In that last post, I listed some problems I started having with Server 2008, and I was able to find the culprit - it turned out not to be Server 2008’s “fought”, but somehow either it “really” started being a problem at that time, or Server 2008 was just more attune to the problem somehow.

One problem I listed was horrible I/O performance when creating a VDI file in VirtualBox. Somehow (perhaps by default) SMART reporting in my BIOS was disabled, and upon running hdtune on that drive (an old 80GB SATA that was from about 3 machines ago) was failing SMART miserably, and I’m actually surprised it was still running. I think it was causing overall system instability because it was also holding a system pagefile. I know it was also contributing to the VirtualBox startup problems as well, because I had the program itself installed to that drive.

That whole incident did teach me a lesson because I had “hacked” the install of 2008 so much I didn’t even know where to start troubleshooting - could I possibly back out of every tweak and/or hack I had done to convert a Server OS into a Workstation one at a time to find the problem? That would be a pain, and I just lucked up on finding the problem.

I did have a couple of more issues with Server 2008 as my desktop OS. First, it’s nearly impossible to find free or affordable anti-virus for a Windows Server OS. The only solution I could find for free was WinClam (a windows port of the open-source ClamAV). Although ClamAV is a great project, it simply doesn’t offer real-time active protection which is essential (to me anyway) on a Desktop OS. Another problem I was constantly running into was Application compatibility. I was constantly seeing the message “Cannot be installed on a Server OS” or something along the lines of “This application requires Windows XP and/or Windows Vista”. One such application was Windows Live writer - I was astonished that I was running an Windows OS and I couldn’t install a Microsoft product! I did find some hacks that involved manually extracting the .MSI files, and some other stuff, but I’m simply not going to go through all of that to install an application on Windows.

With that, I have permanently scratched the idea of running Windows Server 2008 on my desktop - it will be banished to Virtual Machines forever! Now, I was faced with a decision - what to load?

Windows Server 2008 also shared another problem with my system with Windows Vista; my graphics card was unstable in games with either OS (using the Vista x64 drivers). I could play CS:Source for anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes and it would start to crash. So, that rules out Vista.

Next choice (if I was going to stay with a Windows OS) was Windows XP x64 Edition. I’ve had mixed results with this OS. It actually had gotten better than when I first purchased it RTM back in 2005. I think a lot of the improvement (with driver support) had come from the fact that Windows Vista x64 was more widely used than XP x64 ever was, and had forced many hardware manufacturers to finally write x64 drivers.

One major problem with XP x64 Edition was shared with Server 2008. For those who don’t know, Windows XP x64 Edition is not based on the Windows XP Pro code base, but rather on Windows Server 2003. Windows XP x64 (like Server 2003) reports itself as NT 5.2 whereas the standard Windows XP Pro (x86-32) reports itself as NT 5.1 resulting in it’s own set of application compatibility. These issues were not as severe as some things I ran into with Server 2008, I’m assuming since application developers knew of its existence and the fact it would be running on Desktop machines. Windows XP x64 also failed the Windows Live Writer test. Microsoft Application can’t install on Windows OS = FAIL!

I knew at this point I would be going back to Linux. My opinion is also that Windows x64 (any variant) isn’t nearly as “good” at x86_64 as Linux (and Unix) as a whole. Running any x86_64 variant of Windows, I have many “*32″ applications littering my task manager - not much out there is written for Windows x64, and I found myself obsessed with finding x64 native stuff, but there isn’t a lot out there. Linux on the other hand, in a x86_64 distro is almost completely 32-bit code free, with the exception of Flash running inside of ‘nspluginwrapper’. Not to mention, by this point I have confirmed that I simply am not meant to run Windows at home. I’m a *NIX guy, and I just have to admit it. I’m more comfortable in a *NIX OS on my home machine - it thinks the way I do For example, I have 3 hard drives in my PC (now that the 4th is confirmed dead - and removed), and I don’t want C:, D:, and E: drives - I want one file system - DANG IT!

Now, I had to decide what to load. Initially - I avoided just loading back up Ubuntu - I wanted to take a week and explore what was out there already, and what was coming down the pipe (by loading and testing some Beta and RC class stuff).

Next post: what I tested, and what I picked.

1. Misplaced trust: Don’t enter your online banking password on someone else’s computer. Don’t trust a brand. Don’t trust security systems that don’t trust you. Don’t even trust yourselves too much–because trusting in the infallibility of something you create can prove fatal to security.
2. Security through ignorance: Most of us are probably aware that obscurity is not security. That doesn’t mean we don’t try to use obscurity for security, sometimes without even knowing we’re doing it. A great example of this is the effects of Google and Yahoo! indexing Flash content. This indexing is showing that a lot of sensitive information is naively encoded in Flash objects, and has been available to people with the know-how to harvest it all along.
   Many of the people who created these security sieves never realized that they were essentially relying on obscurity for their security, though.
   The problem in many cases is that they didn’t really understand the technology they were using, and as a result they never thought things through enough to realize that the only thing “protecting” such information was a veil of obscurity. Don’t make that same mistake; understand the security implications of the technologies you use.
3. Unsecured e-mail: Do you send business secrets through e-mail? Does your Web site offer a way to recover passwords via e-mail? If those e-mails aren’t encrypted, you’re basically handing the keys to the kingdom to anyone who cares to get them. A particularly egregious example of this kind of blunder was the case of unencrypted embassy emails sent through the Tor network.
4. Unsecured encryption: Just like the anonymity provided by Tor, encryption itself is not a magical cure-all. In order for OpenPGP encryption to be usable and useful for protecting communications, you have to be able to decrypt any encrypted messages you receive. In order for it to be secure, you have to keep your private key private, as well as the passphrase you use to access it. If the computer on which you maintain your private key, and where you decrypt and read messages you receive, isn’t properly secured, that means your encryption isn’t properly secured either.
   Some systems are more prone to problems that compromise the security of your private key than others–things like unauthorized access that might allow someone to copy your private key and launch an offline brute force attack on your passphrase, and keyloggers that can capture your passphrase as you type it in.
   It’s even worse when you use encryption on someone else’s computer, where you may have little idea what security measures have been taken by those who have administrative access, or even whether they themselves can be fully trusted. Ultimately, you may be better off communicating via plain text than encrypting messages, if the security of your encryption keys is too weak. At least if you communicate in plain text you know whether it’s effectively protected against eavesdropping.
5. Unwinnable battles: Choose your fights wisely. Don’t focus a lot of energy trying to protect what can’t be protected effectively. If securing the unsecurable is necessary to your business model, you may want to rethink that business model–not only because of the inherent flaw in a business model like that, but also because all that effort put into securing the unsecurable is diverted from securing everything else.
   Don’t take the easy way out, blaming everything on anyone except yourself when your business model is built to fail, giving yourself excuses to squander time and energy on a quixotic quest for the unattainable. It’s not my fault your business model sucks.

If I am honest I have had trouble writing this second part. Not because of time or computer issues, or even that near myth-worthy sentiment that Vista is unstable. To be honest this should be Vista in Use - Day Eight. The reason I think I have had trouble writing this second part is that for the most part I have been able to get on with things much as I have become accustomed to in Windows since Windows 2000 and then XP.

This may sound like code for, “It hasn’t changed much so why bother?” It isn’t. It’s more to do with being busy most of the week and to this point, Vista has not hindered me despite being a rather different beast. That is a very good thing.

So what have I noticed that is really a great improvement over Windows XP?

As I hinted last week, the biggest changes that I immediately picked up on have been with the Windows Explorer. This is the equivalent of the Mac’s Finder, Gnome’s Nautilus and KDE’s Konqueror/Dolphin. Generally speaking every time you interact with the file system to manage files it’s Windows Explorer.

Inline search is very useful

The Start Menu has really grown on me, it makes much more sense and is much neater. As the week went by with using XP at work I noticed myself getting more frustrated that on XP I had to search for the application in a long All Programs list. Even more aggravating is file search which has always been Windows’ Achilles heel. Now I just click the Start Orb and start tapping in the filename or some keywords. Beautifully simple.

Tagging in Windows Explorer

I have also really appreciated the excellent tagging capabilities in Windows Vista. Simply select a file (or files) and click the tags field and enter them in or select them from a drop down list of previously entered phases. This works much better than in Mac OS X’s Finder where in Tiger at least to enter this useful metadata you have to right click and click Get Info and enter the metadata in a separate property sheet. It’s just not quite as quick. There is also the ability to rate media files such as audio, photos and videos which is a nice touch.

 
Network and Sharing Centre - Friendly and much improved

One area of Windows that has always driven me nuts was its networking capabilities. I’ll freely admit I am still working my way around the system but one thing I have noticed is that it detects peer to peer Workgroups robustly. I cannot recall how many Windows XP reboots have been attributed to the Network Places window either inexplicably freezing up or just flat out not picking up the workgroups on a network. This seems to be much better now! It always made me wonder what on earth Microsoft were doing if Samba (As used in OS X and Linux etc.) could pick up workgroups more reliably.

Better backgrounds

Like Mac OS X Windows Vista has ditched pretty much all the old Windows cruft which included some spectacularly crap background images, some of which had been wafting around since Windows 3.1. Likewise many of the very awful colour schemes have been consigned to history although curiously the Windows 98 style Windows Standard colour scheme remains along with the Windows Classic scheme (of Win 2000/ME/XP/2003 heritage.)

User Account Control is something new to Windows users. Put short, this is a way of where an application wants to do something that will change your system’s settings, it asks you - “are you sure?” OS X, BSD, Unix, Linux etc. users are used to this but for Windows users this is all new. Much has been made of how annoying it is but I can’t say it has been at all. It certainly hasn’t popped up any more than OS X does and unlike the aforementioned systems no password is required. In my book this is a positive change though my one bugbear is that my setup appears to flicker to black and then the UAC prompt — not at all a usability issue but aesthetically not the nicest.

Windows Live Photo Gallery

Windows Vista ships with some useful software like Photo Gallery, Media Player, DVD Maker, Movie Maker etc. One should note that iLife these aren’t, but they are fairly good, particularly Photo Gallery. DVD Maker and Movie Maker are however compared to Apple’s iLife lacking.

Windows Movie Maker

This remains one area where if you want to edit home movies, make DVDs, manage your photos or make music, a new Mac with the latest iLife software is still unsurpassed.

This still leaves much of the surface untouched, Windows Media Centre is included in Home Premium and Ultimate editions and is an excellent way of turning your PC into a home entertainment theatre with TV, recording, music, photos, computer video etc. It’s very slick and I need to explore it more for the next part.

Wrapping Up

Think about how much Microsoft did between Windows 2000 and the release of Windows XP. They’re very similar (NT 5.0 and 5.1 respectively) and now consider that Vista was in development for 5 years (I know the project was ‘restarted) — you can see that this is a massive release with so much in it. That is why now I feel like I am still scratching the surface with what is new.

But, in that lies the truth I exposed at the start. Yes it’s new. It looks great and different, Explorer has changed and so have many of the things we know and love from XP. However, even as a new user to Vista (with only cursory experiences before) I have been able to get cracking and working with no fuss or hindrance. Not one jot. I will reserve proper judgement in a year to see if like past versions of Windows, if Vista ‘craps out’ after a year of being installed, necessitating a reboot. But I have found working with it a joy. I’ve not sat down with Mac OS X Leopard enough yet, but I have used it a bit and I am very familiar with OS X releases back to 10.1, and System 6-9 before that. And I can say that Vista for me is better and more fluid to use than OS X.

Why? It doesn’t have that stupid Dock. The Dock and the fixed menu bar have in this modern age become a hindrance. Managing windows is a nightmare, and whilst Exposé makes things tolerable, I find I can work much quicker in Windows, particularly Vista. The basic principles of flipping between workspaces and windows just somehow seems to work better in Linux and Windows.

So far my experiences have been rock solid and enjoyable. The system flies along and I have yet to have any point where I felt hurry up!

None of this is to say that OS X is objectively bad. Subjectively however I know what I prefer just as others do who prefer OS X.

I will probably come back on this in a week’s time for a ‘third and final’ part, and then I think we will let the system run with feedback as a year passes by.