Exchange Server Pro » Windows Vista

How and why I stopped using Windows Vista

Paul Cunningham — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 06:33:44 +0000

I am no longer a user of Windows Vista.

It has been nearly a year since Microsoft released Vista. I first wrote about it when I tested the upgrade process from Windows XP to Vista Business Edition. Shortly after that I upgraded my laptop and resolved a few minor issues with the optical drive, the Intel wireless configuration utility, Media Player, Explorer, Small Business Server, and constant system beeps that were starting to drive me nuts.

For most of the year now I’ve used Windows Vista Business Edition on the laptop in my home office and the laptop at my work. Both are about the same hardware spec – dual core CPU with 2Gb RAM. The home office laptop originally ran Windows XP Professional with only 1Gb RAM and was very fast. I later upgraded it to 2Gb RAM after Vista was installed. The laptop at work arrived with Vista pre-installed by Dell (which I stripped right back, removing all the ridiculous apps they ship with) and had 2Gb RAM from the start.

Why have I stopped using Windows Vista?

My primary gripe is the performance of the work laptop. It is just unacceptably slow. When I sit and consider my morning office routine I realise that it is based around how long it takes for Vista to boot and be at a functional desktop with my email and web browser open ready to start work. It takes forever.

Usually I power it up as soon as I get to my desk, and am able to logon pretty soon after that. Then I walk away and make my morning coffee, maybe say hello to a few people, and walk back to my desk. By now I can see my desktop background, the taskbar, and maybe the Sidebar has started loading. This is when I fire up Outlook 2007, and turn away from the laptop to drink my coffee and chat with colleagues. There is plenty of time to do this, because Outlook takes an age to finish launching, and the laptop is virtually unresponsive for the duration.

The Windows Vista features I hate the most!

Folders that decide to present a view suitable for photos, even when no photos are in the folder. Being able to see the “Date Taken” field is pretty useless on a folder full of Microsoft Word documents.
Slow resume from a being locked or in standby mode.
Snipping Tool crashes if running Virtual Machines using 512mb of RAM or more.
This ridiculous behaviour in Explorer.

The bottom line with Vista is that I might put up with these problems, work on tweaks and fixes, maybe even submit error reports and support requests to get some of it fixed, if any of our customers actually wanted to deploy Vista in the near future. But with no customers asking for it there is really no point in me putting up with these painful issues, or investing a lot of time in learning the ins and outs of how to work around or fix them. Good luck to the desktop specialists when customer uptake starts to accelerate (if it ever does… whats this about Windows 7?).

What I’ll miss now that I don’t use Vista

Snipping Tool – this little utility is fantastic for taking screenshots for documentation. It is unfortunate that it crashes when virtual machines are using 512mb of RAM or more.

The Sidebar – some of the gadgets are really handy. I mentioned the Microsoft Office 2007 Recently Used Documents gadget a while ago. The picture slideshow is also great for a new dad like me.

That is all.

Replacing the things I’ll miss about Vista

Goodbye Snipping Tool, hello SnagIT – you can get a free version of SnagIT by following the instructions here. Its not the latest version but it well and truly meets my needs.

Goodbye Sidebar, hello screen realestate – I think I’m really just glad to have the space back on my screen. There are alternative sidebar apps around but I could also just buy a digital photo frame like the Kodak Easyshare SV-710 for the baby photos.

Goodbye Windows Vista, welcome back Windows XP.

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The most annoying feature of Windows Vista

Paul Cunningham — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 06:10:13 +0000

Whinging about UAC is for wimps, this is a real Windows Vista annoyance.

1. Open Windows Explorer and navigate through the folder tree in the left pane (eg, navigate to C:\Temp)

2. Drag and select one or more files or folders in the right pane that you would like to delete

3. Hit delete

Windows Vista wants to delete the Temp folder that you had last selected in the left pane, not the files or folders you just selected in the right pane. Windows XP or Server 2003 would delete the files you had selected in the right pane.

This feature was stinging me about once a week when I first started using Vista. Now it catches me out far less often, but it is still very annoying when it does. Even more annoying is if you are being reckless and hit Yes (the default answer) without really reading the dialog, or are using Shift + Del to bypass the Recycle Bin, or are deleting files from a network drive (when Recycle Bin does not come into play).

Its a very annoying feature, but luckily it won’t be a problem for me any longer.

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Huge Microsoft Piracy Bust!

Paul Cunningham — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 23:12:49 +0000

There is a good story on the Windows Vista Team blog about a bust on a Chinese software piracy ring. The story is a good one because it demonstrates the positive outcomes from the Windows Genuine Advantage program that many people gripe about.

Well done to Microsoft I say.

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Vista Laptop Keeps Beeping!

Paul Cunningham — Thu, 31 May 2007 12:25:51 +0000

I’ve been working with a new laptop at work lately. I’ve gotten into the habit of keeping a set of earphones plugged into the laptop all day so that when I want to listen to some music or a podcast I can do so without bothering colleagues, and just generally in case of random application or website sounds that might crop up. I also tend to have the sound muted as well just to be safe.

Today I happen to have the earphones in when I was doing some work and noticed I had forgotten to turn off the default Windows sound scheme, so I was hearing the annoying *click* each time I navigated between folders. I went straight into the Control Panel and set the sound scheme to “No sounds”.

Immediately I noticed something even more annoying – as I launched my Citrix Program Neighborhood and starting navigating through that the laptop would beep each time I clicked on anything. This was despite having the earphones in, the sound muted, and the sound scheme set to “No sounds”. Because the sound was audible to my colleagues it had to be coming from the system speaker as opposed to the speakers for the sound card. As soon as I re-enabled the default Windows sound scheme the beeping would stop.

I tried a few things like setting a custom sound scheme with no sounds selected, or with just one or two obscure sound events selected, but this did not fix it. The solution turned out to be in the registry.

To fix the problem launch Regedit.exe and navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Sound. Look for the values “Beep” and “ExtendedSounds”.

Set both of these values to “No” and reboot your system.

Now you can set your Windows sound scheme to “No sounds” (or anything else you like) without the system beeps occurring.

Note that you can run Regedit.exe and edit the keys in HKEY_CURRENT_USER without requiring administrative privileges (user accounts are permitted to edit their own registry settings since this is how they are able to make changes to settings). If your corporate systems administrator has locked down Regedit.exe access you may not be able to do this yourself and would need to contact your IT support team for assistance.

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The Security Alert That Wasn’t There

Paul Cunningham — Sun, 13 May 2007 10:52:27 +0000

I logged onto my laptop this evening to check something for work and noticed that Vista was showing a security alert in my system tray.

I double-clicked the icon to open Security Center and find out what was wrong, and it informs me that my Windows Defender (the anti-spyware/malware built in to Windows Vista) is out of date.

No problems, I’ll just click the “Update Now” button to fix the problem and…. oh, wait….

No updates available. What do you do when an operating system tells you about a problem that can’t be fixed?

Edit: 12 hours later it has managed to download the new updates.

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Some Vista Quick Bits

Paul Cunningham — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 10:35:12 +0000

These are some tips I’ve been meaning to post over the last few weeks. I’ve been using my Vista laptop all day lately so I’m finding more and more of this type of stuff.

Audio Skipping in Windows Media Player

I’ve been spending a few days plugging away at the keyboard and listening to some MP3s with Windows Media Player. I noticed almost immediately that every song would start skipping or stuttering about ten to twenty seconds before the end of the song. This was really starting to annoy me, and at first I suspected the crossfade feature in Media Player but that turned out to be already switched off.

The cause of the problem turned out to be the Vista sound enhancements. These are found by opening the Control Panel, choosing Hardware and Sound, and then choosing Sound. In the Playback tab there will be some devices depending on your hardware. In the Speaker/Headphones properties there is an Enhancements tab. Even though in my case none of the listed enhancements were ticked, I still had to tick to “Disable all enhancements” before the problem went away.

Saving Window Sizes When You Close And Reopen Them

Straight away I got frustrated with my Windows Explorer and other windows opening up at small sizes and needing to be stretched to my usual size every time. Windows XP used to just remember this stuff for you.

The solution is simple enough though. Once you’ve got a window at the size you want it you just hold the Alt key on your keyboard when you close the window. The next time you open it up it will be the same size as you left it.

Setting Folder Views For All Folders

Vista by default has various folder views depending on the type of content in the folder (music, pictures, videos, documents, etc). This is neat, but its annoying at the same time because for the most part I want folders to default to the Details view with a nice wide “Name” column for long file names. I was hunting all over the place for the old Windows XP “Apply to all folders” button.

I finally found it by using the Vista Help and Support (which is actually really good!). The Folder Options dialog has been moved to Control Panel in Appearance and Personalisation. You can use this to re-enable the menu strip in Windows Explorer for the usual File, View, Tools etc. It also gives you the familiar “Apply to all folders” button so you can set up your Explorer columns just the way you like and have new folders appear that way by default.

Windows Explorer Right-Click Menu

On the topic of Windows Explorer, Microsoft has kindly built-in two neat features that were previously only available by installing Resource Kit utilities. By holding the left Shift key when you right-click on a folder you get menu options to “Open Command Window Here” and “Copy as Path”.

These are really handy and I use them almost daily, for example when you have drilled deep down the folder hierarchy and want to quickly open a CMD prompt to issue some commands, or when you are copying long paths into documents or notes.

Handy Sidebar Gadget

There are a lot of Sidebar gadgets appearing on the web. Some are good, some are rubbish, few are genuinely as useful (to me) as this one – the Microsoft Office 2007 Recently Used Documents gadget. It sits neatly in the sidebar listing your most recent three documents, and has a great fly-out window for a longer list to re-open documents from.

Vista Sidebar gadgets are an interesting new toy for people who are into scripting. Between this and Powershell we’ve finally got some big new things to play with. I’m hoping I can throw a few useful gadgets out there for people in the near future.

Vista, Internet Explorer 7, and Outlook Web Access

IE7 on Vista doesn’t play nice with OWA on Exchange Server 2003 without some updates. Everything works fine in the Basic view, but the Premium view has trouble replying or composing new messages. The first step to fixing this is to update your Exchange Server 2003 installation with the patch in the Microsoft KB article here…

The Compose Message form stops responding after you install Internet Explorer 7.0 and the S/MIME control on an Outlook Web Access client in Exchange Server 2003

There is a restart required, but you may get away without one if you first stop IIS.

After the restart (or not, depending on how you went) when you log back into OWA you will see a warning that the S/MIME control on your computer is now out of date with the version on the server.

Open the Options window in OWA and you will see a glowing blue “Reinstall” button in the Email Security section.

Once you click the button you are prompted to run or save (I just choose to run it) the update, and then you are asked to close Internet Explorer so the update can be completed.

Once you log back in to OWA you should be able to reply and compose new messages again.

Note: if you only run the S/MIME update without updating the Exchange server you may find Internet Explorer crashes whenever you try to use OWA.

Windows SBS 2003, Vista, and Office 2007

Finally just a quick tip for anyone considering deploying Vista/Office 2007 to their Small Business Server environment. There is an update available from Microsoft to update the SBS Client Deployment tools as well as some other compatibility issues between the products.

Update for Windows Small Business Server 2003: Windows Vista and Outlook 2007 compatibility

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Windows Command Line Tips

Paul Cunningham — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 03:44:14 +0000

Every now and then I’ll see someone in a forum post the results of a ping or tracert in a troubleshooting thread, and comment that it took a long time for them to type out the results manually. Obviously thats the hard way of doing it, so here are some very simple tips to make using the Windows command line a little easier in these situations.

Lets start with what the default command line window looks like. The command line is accessed by going to Start -> Run, typing ‘cmd.exe’ and pressing Enter. There is also a shortcut to it in Start -> All Programs -> Accessories. It launches in a smallish window, with fairly dull grey text.

The default window size is not that handy if you want to see a long list of results in one screen, such as a ping or tracert to an overseas server. One of the things you can do about this is adjust the window’s vertical size by moving your mouse to the bottom edge of the window and then clicking and dragging to make it bigger.

This is all well and good, but the next time you open a command line window it will be back at the smaller, default window size. The good news is you can make the new window size permanent, as well as enable some other handy features, by adjusting the properties of the command line window. You can access these properties by clicking in the top left corner of the window (on the little icon), or right-clicking anywhere in the blue title bar at the top of the window, and selecting Properties from the menu that appears.

The first setting I like to turn on is QuickEdit Mode. This is the feature that enables you to more easily copy/paste information from your command line window to other applications. More on that shortly.

Moving to the Layout tab you can see settings for controlling the width and height of the window, as well as the width and height of the screen buffer. The difference between the two is that the window size controls the size of the window you see on screen, whereas the screen buffer controls how much information you can use the scrollbars to view. For example, a screen height of 50 means 50 lines of information will be displayed on screen, but the buffer size of 999 means you can scroll back to see the last 999 lines of information. This is handy if you’re running lots of commands and want to scroll back to see the results of one you ran a while ago. In the screenshot I’ve included my usual settings.

If you don’t like the default text colour of grey you can use the Colors tab to change it. Most people I know like the light blue, yellow, or light purple. The light green was pretty popular when the first Matrix movie was released as well. You can use the darker colours if you like but you would need to then change the background colour to something lighter to contrast it and keep it easy on the eye.

Once you are happy with your settings click OK. You will be prompted how you want to save these settings. If you want the settings to apply to all command line windows you open in future then be sure to choose “Modify shortcut that started this window”.

Now lets road test the new settings with another tracert. Note first of all that the text is a little clearer with the new colour you chose (if not feel free to go back and select a different colour). Also with the width of the window set to 120 instead of the default 80 more information can fit on one line, which makes the results appear neater than when they are wrapping across multiple lines.

Now you can easily copy and paste the information to another application. With QuickEdit Mode enable it is as simple as clicking and dragging your mouse across the section you wish to copy, which will highlight it in white. Once you have selected the area you want to copy, simply right-click your mouse to copy it to the clipboard. The white highlight will disappear at this point. Go to your other application (such as the forum you are trying to post the information to, or a Notepad window in my example) and right-click -> Paste (or use the shortcut CTRL+V) to paste the information.

These tips apply to Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Vista.

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Windows Vista High CPU Utilisation By ZCfgSrv.exe

Paul Cunningham — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 21:52:59 +0000

My Dell Inspiron 6400 has the Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG wireless network adapter in it. Prior to the upgrade to Windows Vista this was operating fine using the Intel PRO/Wireless utility software that installs with the driver.

After the Vista upgrade I activated the CPU/Memory utilisation gadget in the sidebar. Over a few days I noticed that the CPU utilisation was often quite high, and would never drop below 50%. I opened Task Manager and found that the process ZCfgSrv.exe was consuming 50% CPU at all times.

A little hunting around online and I found a notification on the Intel website that they are providing driver-only support for the 3945ABG adapter for Windows Vista at this time, and the Intel PRO/Wireless utility software is not compatible.

The solution I found was to remove the utility software but leave the driver installed. You can do this by opening Control Panel in Vista and choosing Uninstall a Program. Then highlight the Intel PROSet/Wireless entry in the list and choose Uninstall/Change

When the installer loads choose Modify and then Next. Unselect all installation options except for the Wireless LAN adapter driver (see screenshot), then click Modify.

This will remove the Intel PRO/Wireless utility software but leave the adapter driver intact. You can then simply use the Vista networking options to manage your wireless networking.

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Vista Upgrade and Optical Drives

Paul Cunningham — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 03:45:59 +0000

The Vista upgrade on my Dell Inspiron 6400 went pretty well in the end. I took the time to update the system BIOS first as advised by the Vista Upgrade Advisor, and also downloaded the Vista drivers from the Dell website before I started.

The upgrade itself was fine, no errors or problems whatsoever. After the upgrade I had to repeat the reinstallation of AVG Free 7.5 as with my earlier test upgrades. Another application that needed updated was Daemon Tools. Downloading the latest version (4.08 at the time of this writing) fixes the incompatibility. I’d recommend removing or upgrading Daemon Tools first, as the installation of 4.08 after the Vista upgrade required a couple of reboots to remove the non-functioning earlier version and get the new one on.

After a few hours of poking around Vista I went to install Office 2007 and found my optical drive (NEC-6650A DVD+/-RW) didn’t work. I tried a few reboots, tried uninstalling the device in Device Manager and letting it detect again, but still it wouldn’t work. Eventually I found this KB article on the Microsoft website. This solution worked perfectly first time, although only one of the two registry keys mentioned in the article were present on my laptop.

All systems go.

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Upgrading Windows XP Professional to Windows Vista Business Edition

Paul Cunningham — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 09:25:37 +0000

My licenses for Windows Vista Business Edition arrived last week and so I thought I would document the process I followed for upgrading from Windows XP Professional.

The first step I took was to download and install the Vista Upgrade Advisor, to test for software and hardware compatibility. Note: on one of my VMWare test pc’s I had to download MSXML 6 in order to install the Upgrade Advisor.

Once the Upgrade Advisor is installed you can run the scan to generate a report of software and hardware issues that should be resolved before you attempt to upgrade to Vista. For example, on my Dell Inspiron 6400 the report advised me to upgrade the laptop system BIOS before performing the upgrade. It also alerted me to some compatibility issues with some development tools I run on that laptop. For my VMWare test pc it advised me to increase the amount of RAM for the system and also to upgrade my video card (on the host machine) to receive the full Vista experience.

After you have investigated and resolved any of the issues identified by the Upgrade Advisor you can proceed with the installation of Windows Vista. Insert the Vista DVD, launch it if it doesn’t autoplay, and choose “Install Now”. A decision to make is whether to allow the installer to connect to the internet for the latest drivers and security updates during installation. If you have an internet connection available I highly recommend this.

Enter your product key when prompted, accept the license agreement, and then choose Upgrade so that your files, settings, and programs are preserved. You will receive a warning if there are any issues from the Upgrade Advisor report that you did not resolve. After that the upgrade begins.

When the upgrade has finished installing you are prompted to choose how to keep Windows Vista up to date and secure. I recommend choosing “Use recommended settings”. Next, set your clock and timezone. If a network is detected you are also prompted to choose your computer’s location. Choose the appropriate location for your needs. If you aren’t sure choose “Public location”.

The upgrade is now complete.

Almost anyway. Vista now runs through a process of checking your computer’s performance and setting up the desktop and certain application settings. It should only do it this one time so future startups will be faster.

The first significant issue I encountered was AVG Free 7.5 failing to load, displaying a licensing error.

I didn’t have the license details handy (even though its free it still has a license key) to reactivate it, and a bit of searching on the web revealed this is not an uncommon problem, so the solution was to reinstall AVG Free 7.5 from the installation file, being sure to choose to run it as an administrator when I launched the installation file. I chose to perform a “repair installation” and this was successful. This required a restart, and then also required me to update AVG again as I had reinstalled from an older installation file.

Overall this particular upgrade to Vista went quite well. That was the VMWare test pc, so the next computer to be upgraded will be my Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop. I’ll post any significant issues and their solutions here but hopefully it will go as smoothly as the test pc.

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Exchange Server Pro » Windows Vista

How and why I stopped using Windows Vista

Why have I stopped using Windows Vista?

The Windows Vista features I hate the most!

What I’ll miss now that I don’t use Vista

Replacing the things I’ll miss about Vista

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