Does Windows Vista have more than just a pretty face?

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I’ve written a bit about Windows Vista on this blog previously but generally left the product reviews to people like Paul Thurrott (who has both the time to do a review justice and the readership to make it worthwhile). Yesterday, I saw yet another Windows Vista presentation and (with my corporate mindset) I’m still struggling to see why I should move from Windows XP. Maybe that’s because so much is being made of the new Aero interface and there’s not been much emphasis placed on some of the other functionality. At a first glance Windows Vista has lots of new features; but many of them fall into one of the following categories:

  1. Require modern graphics hardware and won’t make any real difference in a corporate setting.
  2. Implement a totally new interface (or at least new ways of working) and so will require additional end-user training (which most companies won’t invest in, so people will continue to use Windows as they have done since we first saw Explorer in Windows 95).

At least, that’s what I thought until I saw James O’Neill‘s presentation at the Microsoft Technical Roadshow. It turns out that there’s a lot of hidden functionality available in Vista (that doesn’t require new hardware) and the list below is probably just scraping the surface:

  • The startup/shutdown sequence is improved to allow for a more reliable sleep function/resume from hibernation.
  • There’s also an improved paging algorithm (known as superfetching) whereby the operating system learns the memory pages that are used frequently and keeps them in memory (avoiding the delay that occurs in Windows XP when returning from a meeting to find that Outlook takes a while to respond because an operating system process has swapped all of its memory out to disk).
  • Then there’s the ability to use a USB key as extra cache (faster than disk, slower than RAM, no problem if it’s removed suddenly because it’s just a cache, although there would be a slight performance hit for a cache rebuild).
  • The operating system is intended to be self tuning, with an API that allows PC components to be scored (opening up the possibility of warning users that they can run an application but it might run slowly due to the system having a poorly-specified processor or a lack of RAM).
  • The restart manager functionality allows a file to be unlocked (e.g. to apply a patch) without needing to restart the PC.
  • There are improved diagnostics (e.g. to report that a hard disk has bad sectors – often a sign that the disk is about to fail).
  • Security is a major area of improvement:
    • User account control/protection allows for least privileged user access, warning users where elevated privileges are requested. Unfortunately I have a feeling that most users will just ignore the warning (click the “yeah… whatever…” button) in the same way that firewall warnings are often not much help today.
    • There are anti-malware features provided through the integration of Windows Defender (it amazes me that so many of my clients are paranoid about virus protection yet don’t do anything about spyware).
    • Internet Explorer 7.0 is sandboxed (so malicious code is limited in its scope to do damage).
    • The Windows firewall is improved to allow for filtering of outbound traffic as well as inbound.
    • Client support for network access protection (NAP), allowing for quarantining of PCs when returning to the network.
    • Improved data protection (e.g. control over USB device connectivity).
    • BitLocker technology to encrypt the whole hard disk.
  • From a deployment perspective, everything that we know about unattended installation (which hasn’t changed much since Windows NT) changes with new file-based imaging tools that allow for compressed images with single instance storage of multiple build versions and non-destructive rebuilds.
  • Language support is handled via resource files (instead of multiple versions of the same DLL), allowing for creation of a singe worldwide operating system image.
  • The new Windows imaging (.WIM) format allows images to be mounted as a file system, then browsed and edited.
  • A new feature called Windows resource protection is provided to protect system settings. Meanwhile, the number of configuration items that can be controlled via group policy has increased from approximately 1800 to around 3000 (mostly control over printing, USB devices, and power management.
  • For legacy application support, the program files folder structure and the registry are virtualised. This means that programs that need (or assume) administrator permissions can still run as they have a virtual registry to write to.
  • The command prompt is also unprivileged by default, with the same user access control functionality as the GUI.
  • The “breadcrumb trail” that replaces an absolute path in Explorer windows allows me to jump straight to a particular folder in the path.
  • The ability to tag documents (including photos) and “stack” them based on the file metadata (e.g. view all documents by a particular author – although for many organisations the author will typically be something like “Any authorised user” or the company name because in my experience other people rarely set the document properties).
  • Within control panel, a shield next to an applet indicates that user access control applies.
  • The mobility center allows for quick application of different settings (e.g. turn of screensaver when presenting). There’s also easier file sharing with users on the same network and a new synchronisation engine for synchronising with mobile devices, or keeping files in sync with another PC (like backing up my work PC to a home file store).
  • Tabbed browsing in IE7 (something which, as a Firefox user, I now find very difficult to do without in IE6), RSS support and preview pages.

Even though I’m unimpressed generally with Aero, there are some UI features that I may find useful:

Microsoft is caught between a rock and a hard place. They get criticised for a lack of original new features; but we accuse Windows of being bloated. They get criticised for a lack of security; on the other hand when they add new features (improved client firewall, anti-spyware, etc.) they are accused of being anti-competitive. Windows Vista has been a long time coming and whilst many of the features originally planned have since been removed it does include some great new technology.

Will Vista be worth the wait? Probably. Will corporates be keen to adopt the new operating system? That remains to be seen but I suspect there won’t be a big rush if the marketing message continues with the “clear, confident, connected, ooh – doesn’t it look pretty” message.

Looking forward to the 2007 Microsoft Office System

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Microsoft Office

I think I’ve been attending too many Microsoft events recently. Not only do the presenters know me personally, but I’m not hearing much that’s new. To be fair to Microsoft, that’s because two of the biggest product launches this year will be Windows Vista (for which I’m a beta tester) and Exchange Server 2007 (for which I was extremely fortunate to spend two days learning about in depth last month). There are many other products planned for launch in 2007 but those two are the ones that will mean most to me. I spent yesterday at the Microsoft Technical Roadshow – an event that I’ve enjoyed in previous years (although the multiple-track format has been dropped this year due to budget restrictions) – and even though much I’d seen much of the content at previous events, I was particularly impressed with Paul Brombley’s session on the 2007 Microsoft Office System (Office 2007 – formerly codenamed Office 12).

I’ve not done anything with the new version of Office (and can’t think of much that I do with Office 2003 that I didn’t already do with XP, 2000, 97 or even 95 – except that 95 didn’t have Outlook and that I could do more with 2003 if my employer made better use of SharePoint products and technologies) but I had heard of the new ribbon user interface.

Now maybe my comments about a lack of new features in recent Office versions were slightly disingenuous – the new features are there but it probably means that I still work in the same way I did in 1995. Whatever my thoughts are on Office 2003, what I saw and heard yesterday has inspired me to install the latest Office 2007 beta, if only to look more closely at the following features (which are just the ones that grabbed my attention – there are many more too):

In Outlook:

  • A new To-Do bar, which brings much of the old Outlook Today functionality into a sidebar, including upcoming appointments, tasks, and flagged items.
  • RSS integration.
  • Enhanced calendaring functionality (e.g. the ability to overlay multiple calendars – not many of my colleagues maintain their Exchange calendars, but I do keep separate work and personal diaries).
  • Tasks linked integrated with the calendar and assigned a time of day (including those from Project Server).
  • Improved search including query hit highlighting.

In PowerPoint:

  • Server-based slide libraries that can be tagged for use by others and alerts issued if updated versions of the slides are available.

In Word:

  • A mini-bar (I do hope Microsoft changes that name), close to highlighted text, that provides shortcuts to common actions (e.g. increase font size).

In Excel:

  • A zoom slider on the bottom right of the main working area.
  • The ability to publish parts of a report and therefore protect the calculations.
  • Fast table formatting with automatically selected data, alternate shaded lines, frozen frames on the column names and auto-filters.
  • Simple pivot table creation with enhanced conditional formatting and data bars on values.

The new ribbon interface (or, as Microsoft like to refer to it, the “results-oriented user interface”), which provides:

  • Context-sensitive links to commands, expanding and contracting the visible functionality in accordance with window size.
  • A preview of the effects of a command before it is issued (saving many undo commands), e.g. when applying a new style.
  • The ability to insert a new section (e.g. a cover page) from a gallery as a single command.
  • A new graphics engine, which makes it easy to add and edit attractive graphics with impact (not clip-art).

Other changes include:

  • FrontPage is now called SharePoint Designer (possibly reflecting the fact that it’s useless for designing standards-compliant web pages for use on any other platform).
  • Support for Windows Workflow Foundation services to provide document approval workflow.
  • Integration with InfoPath forms to capture metadata as part of the document authoring process as well as InfoPath in a browser (and not just Internet Explorer) and within Outlook (e.g. as a custom form).
  • Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) integration:
    • The ability to create basic Gantt charts in WSS using a webpart and link back to Project Server.
    • Document repositories with records management.
    • The ability to publish Excel data in WSS and view it in a web browser, natively within Excel, or programmatically within a custom application.
    • Dashboards, personal report centres and enterprise-wide searches for business intelligence.
  • Integrated communications (i.e. Office Communicator).

Apart from the new interface, probably the most significant change is the new OpenXML document format. Despite being proposed as a royalty-free, open standard, OpenXML has been criticised by supporters of the competing open-source open document format (ODF). Compact and robust, the format is actually zipped XML, so can be easily integrated with many business applications. Microsoft will continue to support the binary formats but OpenXML is the way forwards, with migration tools for the new formats as well as free add-ins for Office 2000, 2002 (XP) and 2003 to allow legacy Office versions to use OpenXML files.Microsoft is currently predicting an October 2006 release date for Office 2007. That means that although volume licensing customers will be able to get hold of it sooner, general availability will be in early 2007. Initially available as a 32-bit product, there will be a 64-bit edition later (64-bit adoption on the desktop is still lagging behind servers). In the meantime, there’s a 2007 Microsoft Office system preview website with more information including a comparison between the various product suites.

More new product names under the System Center brand

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Two more Microsoft products in the management space got a new System Center branding last week. Whilst most of the System Center products have been new offerings, Microsoft announced that Microsoft Operations Manager v3 will be called System Center Operations Manager 2007 and Microsoft Systems Management Server v4 will become System Center Configuration Manager 2007 (these days, the acronym SMS is more often thought of in relation to the short message service in mobile telecommunications).

Introducing Exchange Server 2007

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Another new product name… bland as ever, but definitely preferable to something like Windows PowerShell is Exchange Server 2007. Actually, that one was pretty obvious back at the Exchange Server “12” Ignite training last month but as most of the information I was given there was protected by a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) I couldn’t say anything. At yesterday’s Microsoft Technical Forum event, the new product name was being used extensively (and Eileen Brown told me that my 4-week old E12 t-shirt was out of date… that’s Microsoft product names for you).

On a related note, I read on the Exchange team blog that Exchange Server is now ten years old. It seems like only yesterday I was one of the Microsoft partner representatives on the Exchange 4.0 Server UK launch tour (my first experience of working directly with Microsoft). Happy birthday Exchange Server.

Forum evangelism

Posted on By Mark Wilson

This example forum post history was stolen from James O’Neill. Given the comments I get whenever I write about Macs (like the prospect buying a Mac and installing an operating system that’s not OS X on it), it seemed kind of relevant:

A: I’m thinking of getting a new computer.
B: I’ve got a Mac, you should get one too.
C: Macs are pretty, but Windows is more flexible.
D: Windoze is evil man. Look at all the money M$ makes. You should get Linux [gives list of distributions].
B: Linux is hard. My granny can use a Mac, and she’s been dead for 10 years.
D: If she can’t build a kernel she shouldn’t have a computer, tree hugger.
C: Have you looked at Windows XP-Dead Grandparent Edition? It’s got lots of features [lists them. All of them].
E: Yeah, but that’s the problem XP DGE is so bloated. It’s been downhill since Windows 3.0, and we didn’t get viruses in those days.
D: And those features are just a cover for Micro$oft to steal your brain.
C: [Gives feature by feature justification, explains 15 years of changes in viruses. Denies brain stealing rumour. Misses meal].
A: None of you have given me a reason to choose one OS over another.
F-Z: WE DON’T CARE!
K: Why do you need a computer? In my day we did everything in the darkroom – computers are just cheating.
J: Hey, I’m new here and I’m not sure if this is the right place – does anyone have a recipe for pancakes?
L: Grab yourself a 3174 and run it green screen to an OS/390 host. If you’re short of cash then AS/400s are going for about £129 on eBay. Those fancy Mac things are really based on RS6000 technology anyway. Apple steal everything just like M$.
X: Nah – OS/390 hasn’t cut it since they renamed it Z/OS…

Sound familiar to anyone?

Love the PC – hate the technical support

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I love my IBM ThinkPad T40 – it’s easily the most solidly built of my three notebook PCs and whilst my everyday PC is a much more highly specified Fujitsu-Siemens Lifebook S7010D the ThinkPad is my machine of choice.

Unfortunately, a few weeks back, I accidentally deleted the hidden protected area (HPA) on my ThinkPad (also known as the Access IBM pre-desktop area).

My first experience of IBM’s technical support was great – once they had confirmed that the machine was in warranty, they were happy to send me recovery CDs free of charge but since then things have not been good. Even my less-than-satisfactory experiences of Dell and CA support via e-mail from India was better than my current experience of IBM. All I could get from IBM hardware support was a statement that the restore CD should bring back the pre-desktop area (it doesn’t) and a referral to the software support line. There lies the problem (via an e-mail from an obscure e-mail address that fell foul of Outlook’s junk e-mail filters) – IBM provides free hardware support during the computer’s warranty period and free software support for the first 30 days after the purchase of the computer, after which the software support becomes chargeable. Fair enough for operating system support, but for an IBM technology accessed via a hardware function key? My last e-mail asked them to clarify whether they consider a partition provided on the hard disk to be hardware or software. No response (although I suspect I know the answer to that one).

Surely it’s not unusual for a hard disk to be replaced in an IBM PC and for the Access IBM pre-desktop area to be restored? Grrr.

Turn off your PC at night and save the planet (well, at least the English countryside and some cash)

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I was interested to hear the following information in a presentation by Microsoft UK’s James O’Neill this afternoon:

  • A single personal computer PC draws 125W of power each hour (but 5W when in sleep mode).
  • Running that PC for 50 hours a week (instead of 24×7) saves 120W (0.12KW) x 6160 hours = 740 KWh per year.
  • Generating 740KWh of electricity represents 1/3 tonne of carbon dioxide (CO2) per PC per year.

Maybe if we all turned off our PCs at night we wouldn’t need to fill the English countryside with wind turbines…

Oh yes – in case you don’t care about global warming, 740KWh of electricity costs around £45 a year [source: my domestic electricity bill from Powergen].

Running another operating system on a Mac

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Since Apple switched to using Intel processors for certain Macintosh models, I’ve been excited by the possibility of running Windows on a Mac. Some say its sacrilege. I say it’s sensible. I love the Apple hardware, but am not a fan of the software, which (in my opinion) is proprietary and expensive. I also know Windows very well (including how to keep it secure). Ideally, I’d have a Mac Mini, dual-booting a major Linux distribution and Windows XP.

There have been various reports of people who have managed to write an EFI boot loader for Windows on a “MacIntel”, as well as reports of those who have turned their systems into an unbootable and unsupported heap of PC components in the process; but Apple provided me with a nice birthday present earlier this month by announcing Boot Camp – software to allow dual-booting of OS X and Windows XP, including driver support.

I’m not quite ready to switch yet – Boot Camp is still a beta and the final release will be included in the next version of OS X (meaning I’ll have to shell out another wad of cash to upgrade to OS X Leopard before I can use a release version of the Boot Camp technology). I’m also wary of first generation MacIntel hardware and would like to see support for Windows XP Media Center Edition, so guess I’ll be watching this space for a little longer.

In the meantime, these links provide really useful information on the progress of Windows on a Mac:

For Mac users who fancy using Linux, there are some PowerPC Linux distros (like Yellow Dog Linux) and if you’re not convinced as to why you might want to use them (after all, isn’t OS X just another Unix operating system anyway?) I recommend Giles Turnbull’s article entitled why install Linux on your Mac? Then there’s the Mactel-Linux project to adapt Linux to MacIntel hardware as well as reports that Red Hat plan to include Intel-based Mac support in Fedora and a variety of sites claiming to have other distros working too. Whilst it sounds a bit of a mess (chain-loading LILO via NTLDR), there’s also a triple-boot solution (OS X/XP/Linux) using Boot Camp (from the OnMac guys).

Finally, for those who want to play this the other way around and run OS X on a PC, there’s the OSx86 project.

Why webstats are so interesting

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I’ve been writing this blog for a couple of years now. With over 500 posts, it’s consumed a scary amount of my time, but at least it’s finally something useful to do with the markwilson.co.uk domain that I first registered back in the late ’90s when I was thinking of leaving my job and working as a freelance IT contractor!

Over time I’ve tried to move towards a standards-compliant website, with lots of information that people find useful. I’ve still got some way to go – not being a developer, my code is not as standards-compliant as I’d like it to be (although the website that I have been working on recently with my buddy Alex should soon be pretty much there from a CSS and XHTML standpoint) and the usefulness of the content is totally subjective (but the blog started out as a dumping ground for my notes and that’s still its primary purpose – if others find it useful then that’s great and the trickle of Google AdSense/PayPal revenue is always welcome).

From time to time I look at the website statistics (webstats) for the site and always find them an interesting read. I can’t claim to be an expert in search engine optimisation (nor do I want to be) but the Webalizer webstats that my ISP provides are great because they let me see:

  • How many hits I’m getting (not surprisingly I get more hits after I post new articles and less when I’m busy with work or other projects) on a monthly, daily or hourly basis.
  • The HTTP response codes that Apache dishes out (200s are good, 404s are bad).
  • The top 30 URLs that are being hit (not surprisingly /blog is number 1, but it also helps to see pages that account for lots of bandwidth but not much traffic – the ones where maybe I should be looking at optimising the code).
  • Entry and exit pages (there’s a big correlation between these two, so obviously I’m not encouraging enough browsing of the site).
  • Where people visit from (mostly crawlers, although unfortunately I can see how the stats are skewed by my own broadband connection at number 18 because I use the site so much to look things up for myself).
  • Who is referring visitors to me.
  • What people are looking for when they get referred here.
  • What browser people are using.
  • Where people are visiting from.

This information lets me understand which pages are most popular as well as highlighting technical issues with the site but it doesn’t always go far enough.

Some time ago, I applied for a Google Analytics (formerly Urchin) account and last week I finally set it up. Whilst the Webalizer stats are still useful in many ways for me as a website administrator, the Google Analytics information is much richer. For example, I no longer need my ClustrMaps map because I can see a geomap along with my pages per visit ratio, how many visitors return and who sends them here. For marketeers there are tools to track campaigns and see how they are progressing, and I can also find a whole load of technical information about my visitors (e.g. connection speed used, browser, platform, java and flash capabilities, language, screen colours and resolution – all of which can help in decisions as to what features should be incorporated in future). There’s also information about how long visitors spent viewing a particular page (in fact there are so many reports that I can’t list them all here).

So, what have I learned from all of this – well, from Google Analytics I can see that most of you have a broadband connection, are using Windows (94%), IE (65%, vs. 29% for Firefox), view the site in 32-bit colour and have a screen resolution of 1024×768. That means that most of you should be able to see the content as I intended. I also know that people tend to visit a single page and then leave the site and that Google is my main referrer. Webalizer tells me that Apache gave a strange error 405 to someone this month (somebody obviously tried to do something they shouldn’t be trying to do) but also some 404s (so maybe I have some broken links to investigate). I can also tell that (for the IP addresses that could be resolved) most of my visitors were from Western Europe or the United States but hello to everyone who has visited this month from Australia, China, India, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates.

I hope this has illustrated how website statistics can be useful, even for small-time website operators like me and I encourage you to check out Webalizer (which reads Apache web server log files) and Google Analytics (which needs some JavaScript to be added to the website code). Alternatives (e.g. for IIS users) include AWstats and Christopher Heng also has a list of free web statistics and web log analysers on his site.