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I had a 2 gig iPod Nano (Generation 1) for over a year. During the time I really liked my iPod. Everything just worked. I subscribed to a bunch of podcasts and all was happy. At the end of 2006 it started getting a little screwy. I would get sound only on one headphone and ended up tossing it, as Apple told me it’d cost ~200 to fix it now that the warranty is over.

No worries, I figured. This was just the excuse i was looking for to buy the latest and greatest from Apple. I decided to go for the 8 gig 2nd Gen Nano, as it looked the nicest and the cost of the extra space seemed worth it.

Since then I have longed for my first generation Nano. This new Nano hangs just about every week. I still listen to a bunch of podcasts and I still like the Nano for the most part, but the Gen 2 Nano has issues. Every week or so I will attempt to play a podcast and the Nano will just hang. It’s never the same day or the same podcast, but pressing play causes the screen to get stuck in between redraws. The only way to get this to work again is to reset the Nano. Attempting to play the same podcast that caused the hang after the reset works just fine! And yes, I am finding the latest firmware. . .

Tonight I helped one of my buddies build an auto-attendant on Cisco CME + Unity. I was told that the auto-attendants were all controlled by tcl scripts, and figured I knew the language fairly well as I had experience writing tcl scripts for irc bots in the late 90’s. It wasn’t, I had to write the script using a silly Cisco GUI editor. To set a variable you have to drag an “equals” sign (=) labeled ’set’ from the left side onto the part of the script where the variable is used. As I moved the “equals” sign to the right side to put it in place, everything was expanded and I lost track of where I was supposed to put it. Once I finally put it in the correct place I had to right-click and properties it to set the variable. Regardless, we got the job done fairly quick, and his customer is happy.

Now I’m not anti GUI or anything, but the interface really slowed things down. It was both clumsy and cumbersome. As a person who writes scripts on a regular basis, I felt like I was tripping over the GUI over and over. I can’t imagine having to use this on a regular basis. Now I’m not an elitist or anything like that, there are many GUI’s which I use on a daily. I even use QmailAdmin GUI more often than the command line interface when dealing with my mail servers. All I am really saying is that I believe Cisco’s CUE Editor needs some serious usability work done. It is a horrid interface for creating scripts.

I’ve decided to go back to Windows XP, I’ll probably be spending part of my weekend re-installing my company laptop. Windows Vista is nice and I will miss certain features, but XP was just better for me. I’m sick of UAC bugging me. I’m sick of Vista forgetting whether my Wi-Fi network is public or private. I’m sick of compatibility issues. Most of all I’m sick of the BSOD, yes that’s right the BSOD! It’s back . . .

Vista installed and detected all of my hardware. It has the latest patches and updated drivers from Windows Update. The BSOD’s (that’s right plural) were probably an issue with some third party software, which will eventually be upgraded. However I will note that all of the software I am currently running is the “Windows Vista”-compatible version. I even had to dump PDFCreator in favor of CutePDF, and other such trade-ups in the hopes that Vista would just be stable, but no such luck.

Aside from that my laptop is running noticeably warmer and slower since I upgraded. Now this machine isn’t the latest and greatest, it’s a Pentium M 2.13 GHz w/ 1 GB of ram and plenty of disk space yet Vista feels like a slug. I’m going back to XP for the time being.

I seem to recall one of Vista’s features being that it doesn’t need to reboot after Windows Update, unlike XP. Seems this is just another promise Vista was to bring that Microsoft just couldn’t deliver. Let’s face it, the reboot frequency hasn’t changed since NT4 -> Windows 2000.

I’m a tech enthusiast and the geek in my circle of friends. I’m not a big fan of Windows, but I like staying on the edge. Last week I found Vista in my companies software catalog and decided to upgrade my company laptop to Windows Vista business. This is just my thoughts, some are good and some are bad. Overall it’s not that bad . . .

There are a lot of incompatibilities with Vista and older software. I’m a UNIX Administrator, so my company laptop is basically a glorified terminal. My toolkit is primarily Firefox, Thunderbird, PuTTy and WinSCP, and all of this worked beautifully. I do have the need to write pdf’s and enjoy watching the occasional divx video on my laptop. In XP this meant PDFCreator and the DivX Codec. Neither of these are currently compatible, so I’ve had to make adjustments. Today I’m using CutePDF and VideoLAN Client. Not a big deal, just a minor change. I have a few wmv files that WMP 11 can’t handle properly, but VideoLAN can, so in the end it’s a good thing. I’m mostly mentioning this because I want people to know that Vista is very different. In many cases this means getting updates for commercial software or finding free alternatives elsewhere.

Another thing I noticed is that Vista software is not very well packaged. This isn’t Microsoft’s fault, but I have had problems installing software that is for Vista. I went to Adobe’s web page to download the latest Reader and was pleased to find that they had a Vista version. Great, I thought this’d make the upgrade simple. Not true, the install never finishes. This is actually documented on their site. WTF? I’ve had similar issues with a few things like the Cisco VPN Client for Vista. I guess Vista’s UAC is a little mysterious, even for software packagers.

UAC is just plain annoying. There is no middle ground, it’s either ubber annoying or it’s disabled and then the Windows Security Center starts complaining. I see this getting disabled by the people who need it most, the less technical people. UAC is not the security fix that Microsoft envisions, it’s too chatty. When I click on “Manage My Computer” I don’t want a dark screen coming up, I want to manage my damn computer. . .

I’ve never used a bigger badder firewall. In XP I just clicked “Block all incoming connections” and I’m done with it. I did this on Vista, one of the first few things, I even went in and unchecked everything that Vista defaults enabled. Upon my first run of iTunes I found Vista asking me if I wanted to allow incoming connections for iTunes. WTF? I don’t know if I’ll ever truly trust this firewall as much as I did with XP.

I do like Vista’s Wireless networking features. I like how all network connections show up on one button in the task bar. The ability to have public and private networks allows a little more control for those who do allow incoming connections. I only wish Vista was smart enough to see my firewall setting and leave me alone about “Work”, “Home”, or “Public” network. I see this as a big win for the less technical users though.

The new “Start Menu” is actually a step forward. In Windows XP I always went back to the Classic “Start Menu”, it just got in the way and slowed me down. The new Vista “Start Menu” learns a little better and is searchable. I don’t even go in there and delete crap shortcuts made by many programs anymore. The combination of the search feature and the run feature is also a big win. I just type and Vista figures out if I’m giving it a command or searching within my menus.

Vista actually detected all of my hardware. Like a modern Linux distribution on hardware, it just works (aside from Wi-Fi, which still requires separate drivers on Linux). At least for the moment, gone are the days when you have to whip out the install disks for every piece of hardware under the sun. Microsoft would be wise to take a page out of Red Hat and respin Vista every so often with more drivers and all the updates. It would make for a better user experience. Imagine buying Vista next year and your brand new DX10 Video Card working out of the box. It’ll never happen, just would be nice if Vista did just detect everything as it does now.

I will sum up this post in a few quick points for the general public:
1) Save money for software upgrades before upgrading. My DVD Burner came with Nero 6.x, which isn’t Vista compatible. It came with PowerDVD 6, also not Vista compatible. If it wasn’t a company laptop, I’d have to spend quite a bit of money to upgrade each component.
2) If you’re upgrading an older machine, have money for upgrading the hardware. Vista is a hog.
3) If you have software that is necessary, it is not enough to ensure that there is a Vista version of it. Make sure you Google that software and read to see if others are having issues. Adobe can’t even package a damn PDF Reader properly for Vista.
4) If you’re using a laptop, prepare for it to be hotter. Idling, my laptop is noticeably warmer than it was under XP.
5) Be prepared to be annoyed by UAC!
6) The “System Restore” feature is much more “Restore Point” happy than it used to be. In a week I disabled it because my basic system install was taking almost 25 gigs. By the way it’s called “Previous Versions” now.