| A Week of Windows Vista |
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| Written by Brent Martin | |||||
| Sunday, 05 August 2007 | |||||
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Life was tough. My year-and-a-half old Acer TravelMate C310 Tablet PC was a D-O-G. I guess it had to do with all of the junk I’ve installed on it for one reason or another over the years (including Oracle database server, Tuxedo, Weblogic so I can run PS on my own terms). The Fat32 partition didn’t help, and the last straw was when I upgraded to Office 2007. It got so bad that when I received an e-mail, my hard drive would spin for 10-20 seconds and everything would lock up. Finally I had enough and was ready to re-install the OS. The problem was that I didn’t have a copy of XP for the Tablet. I only had the Acer recovery CD, which would have put back the same old Fat32 disk partition along with the usual garbage you get with a new PC (AOL, MS Works, etc.) So I decided that an upgrade to Windows Vista Business Edition was in order. Here's how it went: First I invested in a new laptop hard drive as an insurance policy so that if Vista melted my laptop down I could simply pop the old hard drive back in place and I’d be back in business. The additional 60GB of disk space was an added bonus. Honestly I didn’t expect much from the install. I figured the OS wouldn’t recognize most of my devices and I’d be scrambling for device drivers. But once the base install was complete I was able to log in, my display adapter looked pretty good and it recognized my network connection. Looking back I should have started installing device drivers at that point. But at the time I decided to start installing the software I needed, and worry about device drivers when I ran across functionality that didn’t work. The first thing I noticed was that every time you run a setup.exe, the screen kind of goes into this protected mode, and it asks you to give the program permission before you continue. I guess the protected mode screen is meant to keep robot scripts from installing things without your permission. The actual Asking for Permission “feature” reminds me a lot of using a Linux desktop when you’re logged in as a non-privileged account. When you want to change any of your system files, you always get prompted to enter root’s password to continue. While Vista does have the option to make you enter the administrator password, I’m perfectly content just to hit continue. After the install process runs, more often than not Vista asks if everything ran OK and gives you the option to re-run the process in “compatibility mode”. I’ve learned not to do that unless you’re sure that process needs to be in compatibility mode because it sets an attribute on the file and from that point on it will run it in compatibility mode. As you probably expect, MS Office installed with no problems at all. The next critical app for my experiment was Oracle client. Fortunately for me Oracle released a Vista version a few months ago and I downloaded it to my file server PC. I mapped the drive ,and tried to install it. A few seconds after clicking setup.exe, I got a blue screen. OK, I rebooted and tried again. Blue screen. Checked the permissions on the file. Blue screen. Made sure I was running in administrator mode. Blue screen. Thought it might be a display adapter thing so I downloaded the Acer-recommended Vista driver for my video card and installed it. Tried again, and yes I still got the blue screen. Finally in desperation I copied the setup directory to a local disk and tried one last time. This time it worked. With Oracle client installed I was starting to feel optimistic, so I moved on to installing PeopleTools. No matter how many times I went to the Client Setup tab of Config manager, it would never install the icons. I was able to run Application Designer from the bin directory, so I ended up manually creating the program groups and shortcuts. They seem to be working OK for me but it bugs me to have something I can’t explain. Oh well. Next hurdle was installing my client’s VPN software. Vista refused to install the older installation package because it might make my system unstable. Luckily for me I found a VPN client download for Vista on the vendor’s web site and installed it. That one went off without a hitch. Configuring MS Outlook took me down a couple of paths I didn’t anticipate. Once logged in to the VPN, my machine couldn’t resolve the Exchange server name. That’s easy enough to fix, I’d just add an entry in my hosts file. Turns out that only an administrator can edit the hosts file, so I had to run Notepad in Administrator mode to edit it. When I was done I changed the security settings so my user ID could write to it. I’m sure my system is slightly less secure today because of it, but my blood pressure is better. I have an HP iPAQ smart phone, so I decided to plug it in. ActiveSync automatically installed and after a few clicks it was communicating in syncing. It did duplicate my tasks and contacts, but that’s better than loosing them I guess! It gave me the option of syncing to Exchange via HTTP. I entered all of the parameters it asked me to, but it’s not working. My best guess is that they never set the server components up for this. And why would they – everybody here uses Blackberry except me! Then I had a Bluetooth adventure. My first problem was activating the Bluetooth radio. I used to push the Bluetooth button at the top of my keyboard to turn it on and off, but in my new post-Vista world that button (as well as the others) didn’t work any more. Finally I downloaded Acer Softkey and it gave me the software version of the same buttons. That one did work and I was able to get the bluetooth radio to install. But the drivers that Windows installed for me didn’t work. While it recognized my device, it didn’t install any Bluetooth Com port drivers so I couldn’t set up the dial up networking like I wanted. The Bluetooth driver from Acer’s web site didn’t work for me either. Finally after a lot of banging my head I came across this site: http://www.dev-hack.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1297. After following the instructions there I got Bluetooth working well enough to reach my cell phone and establish an internet connection. I could check personal e-mail from work again, WOOOHOOO!!! (don’t worry, my boss doesn’t read my blog). UltraEdit, eWallet, SnagIt, Beyond Compare, and my other programs that make PeopleSoft work bearable work just fine. The latest version of SQLDeveloper works too, although Vista always reverts to more primitive video options when it’s running. So I was feeling pretty good until somebody asked me to load a bunch of users into our test environment. I have a nifty spreadsheet that uses the USER_PROFILE component interface and some VBA code to push users and roles from the spreadsheet to any environment I like. After entering the new users in the spreadsheet I went to PeopleBooks and walked through the steps to set up Component Interface on my workstation and fired up my script. Boom – type mismatch error. Un-registered PeopleSoft_PeopleSoft, re-registered it and tried again. Boom – type mismatch error. Looked on Customer Connection, and the solution I found said something like “Even though Windows XP isn’t supported for component interface, you can try this list of stuff that probably won’t help”. Damn. If Windows XP isn’t officially supported for Component Interface, the GSC guy would probably strap on a space diaper and drive from Pleasonton to Tulsa to kick my ever lovin’ ass for opening the ticket about CI and Vista. But hey, it’s not a show stopper. I plan to install VMWare player and fire up my W2K virtual machine if I can’t figure it out. So now that the dust has settled and I’ve been running Vista for a week now, here’s what I’ve decided: 1) Performance is a lot better. I’m sure it’ll degrade over time as all Windows computers do but for now the boot time is great and everything responds quite nicely. 2) Vista’s user interface is pretty cool. I like the gadgets on the toolbar, the “glass” interface, and how windows are animated. 3) While Vista’s security is a pain, it’s understandable and not unlike Linux. It does make me feel a bit more secure about viruses running rampant – especially since I haven’t installed a virus scanner yet. 4) Vista drivers have a long way to go. My Bluetooth experience caused some pain, and even now I can’t get my laptop monitor to do any better than 1024X768 resolution. 5) Everything seems foreign at first, but after spending some time with it features become recognizable again. The “Start > Run” option was missing until I edited the taskbar properties and elected to show it. You can still change environment variables in Control Panel > System. Add/Remove program was renamed Programs and Features. 6) PeopleSoft hasn’t certified Vista yet, and I’m expecting some pain around that. I intend to mitigate this risk by downloading VMWare player and firing up my Win2K virtual machine if the going gets tough.
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| Last Updated ( Monday, 06 August 2007 ) | |||||
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