Free Computer Consultant ………. Daily Insights

Microsoft never misses a chance to really torque me off with their “home” versions of Windows. Windows Vista Home Premium is fine for most people - at home, but it lacks two features that I see no justification in leaving out.

Vista Home Premium does not allow remote control via remote desktop. This is an exceptionally handy feature, especially for someone trying to help you out (potentially) and becomes a real advantage if you buy a Windows Home Server.  Why leave this feature out (other than to torque me off)?

And Windows complete backup and restore. Come on, even if you don’t like it as a tool, doesn’t it sound good to say that you have included a complete backup and restore utility in your product? Seems like good PR to me.

If it weren’t for the price issue, and it is an issue - you don’t get much extra for the price, I would just load Ultimate on everything. Ok, so Bitlocker is a valuable feature; most won’t use it anyway, so why not just give it to them?

Microsoft needs ONE version of Windows for the workstation. Price it to sell, not be stolen. Then watch your customers line up to buy it with a smile on their face. That would be something new for Microsoft, wouldn’t it?

Windows Vista SP1 (Service Pack 1) is being released in stages, which is good. Otherwise we would have to wait until the entire service pack is ready before receiving certain fixes.

Many IT professionals will refuse to use a new release of Windows until SP1 is available - as it’s always needed it seems.

One aspect of Vista has received perhaps more angry accusations than any other. WGA (Windows Genuine Authentication) is touted by Microsoft as being anti-piracy, but is really more of an anti-fair-use policy.

True software pirates have ways of making their pirated software work long enough to collect the money. It’s the people who own legitimate copies of Vista who are being hurt the most.

WGA in Vista as it stands can potentially “kill” or severely limit Vista if it feels you don’t have a genuine version. Usually, a waste of time call to Microsoft in India will get you going if you truly own your software. But forcing that phone call justifiably angers many honest Microsoft customers.

Customers who then look for alternatives to Windows.

Microsoft says it has done away with the “kill switch” in Vista SP1 in favor of a more friendly message telling the user how to get genuine or at least appear like it to Vista.

At the same time, they say they have plugged a couple of holes that let hackers fool Vista into thinking it doesn’t need to check.

It’s a good thing. Too bad so many honest customers have had to pay the price for Microsoft’s draconian policy.

Windows Vista can be ignored by people who use their computer only at home for very limited purposes. Shoot, I think Gary North (a prodigious newsletter writer) still uses an old PC with WordPerfect on MS Dos with a 1983 IBM keyboard.

But if computing is in your career, whether self employed or working for someone else; or if you really want to get the most out of your PC at home, I think you should take a look at Windows Vista. I’m not saying dump XP now and upgrade to Vista immediately, but take note that Vista service pack 1 is due out soon (I hope) and Vista and its technological changes from XP are NOT going away.

My point is that many people put off learning XP because Windows 2000 Pro worked great. I certainly encouraged most of my clients to save their money and stay with W2K Pro for some time. But then the somewhat killer app of Remote Desktop started showing some real value for them and the migration began.

The problem with waiting too long to explore the new Operating System is that when you do decide (or someone decides for you) to upgrade, you feel behind and are playing catch up. That’s no fun.

If you have the chance, load Windows Vista on machine in a dual boot configuration and start taking it for a spin.

A lot of people have written extensively on ways to get Vista on the cheap, so I won’t repeat all of that here.

For those of you in the United States, be warned. Many of your jobs are at risk of going overseas. Don’t encourage your boss to send your job there because training you would cost too much and you would give him/her too much grief. Learn on your own and put yourself at the head of the pack - then get paid accordingly.

If your XP Pro or W2K Pro machine is being updated with all of the latest Microsoft “security” patches, etc, then your PC is likely starting to slow down. Maybe it’s too much patched code, maybe something else. All I know is that it’s become very noticeable.

Just do yourself a favor and don’t fall too far behind on Vista and other coming changes. Your financial wellbeing could depend on it.

After 646-204, many professionals who are not interested in 70-620 or 220-601 instead settle for the much easier 70-649.

I had a Pentium 4 2.4 processor floating around that would only eBay for about $25. So I decided to see how little I could spend to turn it into a decent computer.

I found the Asus P4V8X-MX motherboard was feature packed and very inexpensive. 1 GB of memory from Crucial.com was less than $75. The SATA hard drive I had laying around had XP installed on it from an Asus P5B or P5L installation, not sure which, but surprised the heck out of me when it booted into windows with just a few drivers missing.

Since more and more of the problems I solve are regarding Windows Vista, I decided to see how Vista would fare on this board.

So I downloaded and ran the Windows Upgrade Advisor. After doing its thing, the advisor reported that it had encountered an error (thanks for all of that detail, Microsoft); and perhaps I should re-download the latest version (did it change in 15 minutes?) and try again.

Forget it. Install Vista anyway.

I booted with the Windows Vista Ultimate DVD (Dell OEM copy) and chose to install to a new partition. Wisely, I had only allocated about half of the 120GB disk to the Windows XP Pro installation.

With Vista, there really aren’t too many questions to answer during the install so I came back later to see how it was doing. I had to press the power button since it had gone to sleep waiting for me (fitting, as I have fallen asleep so many times waiting for Windows) but essentially it was all done.

The Asus P4V8X-MX board did not come with Vista drivers and I didn’t download any. Yet everything worked; no yellow exclamations in device manager; NIC, sound, and an old Asus GeForce MX 400 AGP video card all worked perfectly. The P4V8X-MX has video on the board making it a great value, but I figured AGP video with its own RAM would perform better - and the card was just gathering dust anyway.

So I guess my advice when Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor reports an error is to just go ahead anyway.

With one BIG caveat!:

I had backed up the PC first, even though I didn’t care about the XP install, with Acronis True Image software to a USB hard drive.

When I was done I now had a dual boot, Windows XP Pro, Windows Vista Ultimate, computer. Runs great on both.