Yes.  I am one of the few Vista Evangelists.  I love Vista and I can’t go back to XP.  I have recent cause to try out the Mac again (I’m a unix guy, so the fact that I’ve heard the newer Mac OS’s to be based on unix, I’m a little excited) but no budget so we’ll see how far I get there.

However, despite my infatuation with Vista and how many great things there are, there are a few things that just bug me.  This is the first one in a series.  I may include Windows, SharePoint, Project Server and other Microsoft products at some point, because I have plenty of things to say there, too

Columns in Search and File folders don’t help much

Yes, SEARCH IS AWESOME.  I will hail its praises once a day as I face Redmond.  THANK YOU for Search.

But why, Dear Bill, does it give me emails based on “date modified”?  Why not “date received”?

Think about it.  Email is not something you modify once you receive it.  Not really.  You might make a task from it.  You might set a reminder.  You might tag it in some way, or have it automatically colored in your inbox based on some properties, but you don’t edit email.  Yet for some reason, Vista/Outlook believe these emails to be modified on dates many days after I received it.  Maybe I moved it into a folder or something; I don’t know.

But that date is useless in a search listing!

And I’m thinking - why isn’t it listing who is in the thread?  That would help too.  So I right-click on the column headings, hoping for some kind of toggling selection and guess what.  I got one!

Wow, nice.  It actually did something I thought it should!  But it still lists Date Modified instead of Received.  That’s just so STUPID!

time passes. 

Oh wait.  I feel a sense of dread wash over me.  I’m noticing that enticing word at the bottom of the pop-up menu.

What if I… do I dare… could I, should I… click More…?

PRAISE BE TO REDMOND!

Not only can I put in Date Received, but I can also pick a hundred other fields.  Man, and here I thought I *had* them with something.  I can also put in some other very useful fields like “To names,” something very useful to add to “Authors”.

Oh man, this also reminds me of one of my other bugaboo’s about Vista and that had to do with browsing and looking at Music.  I was happy that it showed the extra tags (ID3 or whatever it used) so I could see Artist, Album, Genre and even a rating, but very unhappy that I couldn’t see a date, file size or other stuff

But armed with my new revelation, I’m guessing if I right-click on the columns, I’ll get more choices, and sure enough I do. 

Hey, that’s actually useful — seeing size, bit rate and length of song. 

Ok, well next time I promise I’ll have something real to complain about.

As I use Microsoft Vista more, I’m impressed by some common sense things that finally made it into the Operating System.  And don’t you try to tell me how to spell hienie.

One of the things that bugged me for a long time was that I had to use third party tools, like sysinternals, to view details on what was taking up disk time, network time, memory, etc.  Task Manager was “ok” but lacked the real troubleshooting information I needed when I wanted to optimize my system.  (side note: Microsoft bought sysinternals a while back).

A Unix machine has no such limitation.  On Unix, I could use top, vmstat, lofs, tcpdump and many other command line tools to hone in and find EXACTLY what was going on with the system.  In short, I was Mr. BadAss Admin.

Now, Microsoft gives us the Resource Monitor:

Like the Task Manager, it gives us eye candy for CPU usage, Network utilization and memory consumption.  It adds a cool graph for Disk Usage.

More importantly, however, it gives you expandable sections for Disk and Network so you can see exactly what process is using the hard drive or network card, and the details of that access.  What file is being throttled at a million miles per second?  Which app is trying to talk out my network and taking up a ton of resources?  Which ship can do the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs?

The collapsed summaries themselves give useful information

I can see current usage and recent peak events

Even cooler that that- you can sort the columns and try to navigate your way to finding the anomalies.

For example, you might find that the search indexer is making your system crawl.  Outlook could be messing with a fragmented OST file.  The password crack program might be beating up your disk trying to brute force Obama’s website /etc/passwd file that was emailed to you by the Hillary campaign.

You can also narrow down network activity - who is woopra talking to?  What servers does trillian connect to?

About the only complaints I have about the tools it that you can’t right-click a process and *do* stuff with it like you can in Task Manager.  I want to be able to right-click and change process priority.  Or kill the process.  Or view the threads.  Or start a network sniffer.  Or tell it to get me a Pepsi.

Another refreshing thing (haha, get it?  it refreshes!  so it’s refreshing! HAHAHAHAHAA) is that Vista is actually *honest* about it’s problems.  It has a thing called the “Reliability Monitor” and it tracks all sorts of badness about your machine.

YES!  It is actually advertising and tracking when failures happen!  On a timeline!  Woo-hoo!

How cool is that? I can see the dates when app failures happen, or actual windows failures, when I install or uninstalled software, and actually SEE WHEN THINGS STARTED GOING WRONG. 

Not only that, I can click on one of the red X’s and it will tell me which app crashed and the details

I applaud the Microsoft developers for putting this stuff in and making power users like me happier about the crashes that do happen.

I also can’t wait to smash the first Mac whore who says “the Mac had that in ‘84 and we didn’t even NEED a service pack and the smell of my own gas is pleasant to me.”

I started a series of Open Letters not too long ago, which is my way of making light of the typically serious “Open Letter” concept to thinly disguise my suggestions and minor complaints as something that should be taken seriously. 

Or in other words, maybe I can fake my way into a solution.

This episode is about Vista.

WARNING: POTENTIAL MISUNDERSTANDING AHEAD. 

First off, I’m in love with Vista.  Before I moved over, I heard horror stories about using Vista.  Look, I’m a technophile.  I’m an IT Director for a large ISP.  I’m familiar with over 20 operating systems, and a few of those, I can honestly say I’m intimately familiar.

However, I experienced little by way of horror storiness when I moved to Vista a couple of month ago.  I attribute that success to a few things:

1. I’m really really smart
2. I’m really really lucky
3. I went straight to Vista w/SP1
4. I had a kick-ass machine (Core 2 Duo laptop) with lots of RAM (3GB)
5. I used VMWare to make my old XP image available as-it-was-before.
6. I would google a problem when I encountered it, worked to understand and solve it at the time vs throwing my arms up in disgust and giving up and blog online complaining about it.

I’d say while all of these reasons were important, #6 was the biggest factor.

Now, to the Mr/Mrs Vista Developer that might be reading this.  I want to compliment you on a great, fantastic superb job on this OS.  Specifically, I want to point out a few things that have impressed me over my recent adoption to Vista so that you know I like them so much.

Search

Search is awesome. Thank you.  This probably saves me an hour a day.  Well, maybe not so much as it saves me time - it makes me able to do certain things in a much shorter period of time, so it’s more likely I get them done.  A lot of the time, it involves finding something in my email or a document, and Search just plain works.  Except for the time my index got corrupted and it had to rebuild.  That sucked. 

Standby / Resume / multi-monitor setup

My laptop and I are on full speaking terms now.  Before the upgrade, docking and undocking caused near panic attacks because I was never sure if the screen would be visible, if the left would be right, or what.  Now, tho — man I never give it a second thought.  It suspends in no time, wakes up automatically, and I haven’t gotten “stuck” yet.  When I dock at work, which has two external monitors with one rotated 90 degrees, it remembers.  When I dock back at home, which uses laptop and one external, it remembers.  When I open the laptop with no external monitors, it remembers. 

Handles crashes better

I’m sure there’s more than just one person saying “whoa” what do you mean - it still crashes?!?!?  Yes.  Sure it does.  When you have an OS that’s adopted by the entire world and run on more hardware than ANYTHING, there will be problems.  But unlike its predecessors, Vista w/SP1 makes crashing almost fun!  You get these great colorful windows, it lets you know what happened, and it tracks all of them for you.  You can actually see all your crashes, check for a status online and be notified when its fixed (if applicable).  I for one am very impressed with this aspect of Windows.  It makes it easier to figure out

UAC - User Access Control

Yes, I admit it.  I love this stuff!  The mac vs PC commercials will have you dreading your first popup (brilliant marketing there, boys!) but really - it’s an incredible boon to more secure computing.  I *like* having the OS complain when something you’re running is about to do something potentially disastrous.  I *like* having to right-click on a setup program and say ‘run as administrator’ so that I’m telling the OS  - “hey, I’m installing something here, so it’s OK to do stuff like write to the registry”. 

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I’m sure that if I bit the bullet and switched to Mac OSX, I’d have the same adoption curve and probably find a million things to fall in love with.  But I can’t use that knowledge at my job, and that’s a major deciding factor.  I don’t have time to learn a 2nd OS “just because” - besides, I’d still have to learn Vista and develop a deployment and support plan for our company for hundreds of desktops and laptops.

Once again, I found myself having some pretty bad computer performance / usability issues over the last 2-3 weeks.  I’ve fixed it, but I at least want to document what went on in case someone else runs into it.

Although, now that I think about it - what’s the point?  The answer eventually was, in this order, A) update the drivers and B) install microsoft updates.  Since there’s nothing magical or mysterious about these fixes, and the steps I took are exactly what any techno-savvy support person would do, why would I waste your time with all the details?

So I’ll summarize that my laptop would resume from standby and not have any displayable screens.  Both the laptop screen and the external monitor would be blank.  Only a reboot would fix (to save data, I would remote desktop from another machine while on network).  I also had a short span of time where it WOULD show the startup page but it would not accept CTRL-ALT-DEL at all.

So instead of boring you, I’ll give you a joke.

A father asked his 10-year old son if he knew about the birds and the bees.

“I don’t want to know,” the child said, bursting into tears. “Promise me you won’t tell me.” 

Confused, the father asked what was wrong.

The boy sobbed, “When I was six, I got the ‘There’s no Easter Bunny’ speech. At seven, I got the ‘There’s no Tooth Fairy’ speech.

When I was eight, you hit me with the ‘There’s no Santa’ speech.
 
If you’re going to tell me that grown-ups don’t really get laid, I’ll have nothing left to live for.”

I had to rebuild a Sun E450 by way of re-configuring all the metadevices. Out of the 5 controllers on the box, 3 of them (3!) were bad, meaning there wasn’t one good submirror set in the whole system. Every one of the RAID1 metadevices had “Maintenance” on them due to the bad controller(s).

I wrote up all the details and stored it on our intranet, but what I would like to say is that the articles found in this series — http://supportforum.sun.com/hardware/index.php?t=msg&goto=13076&rid=0 were a great help. Most of it was refresher, as there’s nothing there I haven’t done before, but since it was 7-8 years ago… it was ver nice to have such clearly written examples and instructions.