I got a Vista capable laptop - long story

[Destructionator XV]

Well, on the way to the bank yesterday to cash my paycheck, an old co-worker saw me and said hello. It turns out she is moving, and is trying to sell off all her old stuff before going. Among this stuff was several computers, one of which was a less than year old laptop.

Sweet, I think. I take a quick look at it and tell her I'll buy. She wanted $150 for it, but since the screen was cracked, I offered her $80 and she accepted. The crack was actually much worse than it looked once I turned it on; over 1/3 of the screen is unusable, but she is someone I knew and she needed the money, so no big deal. Besides, it has an external monitor jack, and the upper right corner of the screen is good, so I think it is going to be fine. Besides, $80 for a relatively new laptop is a pretty good deal, even if I do have to eventually just replace the screen.

I didn't get installation media for an OS, but I already owned a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate that I got from Microsoft, but haven't had a free computer powerful enough to actually use it. This one's specs seem to be good enough, so I am installing that now. (And if Vista runs poorly on it, I can always go Linux, or even XP (I have an unused license laying around), but about 1/3 of the reason I bought this is to play around with with the new OS.)

If you are curious, the other reasons I bought it are, as I said, a friend needed the money, and lastly, I want a portable, wireless system I can use to connect back to home. Portable is partially out due to the bad screen (and suboptimal keyboard; my first choice would be a used Thinkpad), but it is still wireless capable - my only computer that is (including my old laptop, which I still love: a 12 year old IBM Thinkpad 560). Sadly, this computer has no serial port, so I can't connect it to my old IBM and use its slow, low resolution screen. (Which is actually plenty adequate. Like I said, I do love that, just no wireless and not even ethernet makes it a little... isolated.)

The specs on this new computer (transcribed off the sticker on the front of it):

AMD Turion 64 X2 dual core processor (my first dual core!)

OEM install of Vista Home Premium (the product key is on the bottom, but I don't have the installation media. I'm told my Ultimate install DVD will work fine too if I put in the OEM key instead of my Ultimate key. But since I own ultimate, I'll use it.)

1 GB of DDR2 RAM. (Linux says only about 900 MB is usable, which tells me the graphics is integrated and shares memory with it. This might make the Vista experience less than optimal, but we'll see.)

Dual Layer DVD+/-RW burner. (This is cool, and almost worth the $80 alone, since I don't have a dvd-r burner; my main computer's only does + discs. I could write scripts over SSH to do burns even if the screen didn't work at all.)

120 GB SATA hard drive. (Again, almost worth the money itself, since I can always remote control it. My main box's 160 GB hard drive is filling up far more rapidly than I expected, and this laptop's drive doesn't seem damaged at all - having another 120 GB to use will be nice.)

nVidia GeForce Go 6100 graphics. (I know almost nothing about graphics cards, but since it came with Vista on OEM, I assume this is plenty adequate for my use. Like I said, the memory seems to be borrowed from the main system mem, but I doubt that will be a big deal in practice.)

It also has a modem and jack, an external monitor jack, a firewire port (my only computer that does), 3 usb ports (cool), headphone and microphone jacks, a 4-in-1 media card reader (again, my only computer that does), and an 802.11b/g wireless chip (one last time, my only computer that does).

The screen is 12.1 inches, WXGA LCD. Of course, it is damaged, but not completely unusable. 12 inches is about my ideal size for laptops; big enough to see easily, but not so big it is a pain to carry around.

It weighs in at 4 pounds, which feels light. Lastly, it has an AC adapter and battery - which I've not yet tested, so we'll see how well it works soon.



Now, while waiting on it to install, I'd like to talk about my ideal laptops. In general, I think the small varieties of Thinkpads are the ones to buy. Their keyboards are by far the most usable (I think most laptop keyboards are horrible, but the Thinkpad ones are actually nice to use, even in comparison to a real desktop keyboard). The keys feel good, the control key is in a good place, the home/end/etc cluster is usable, and the regular keys are laid out normally and all have a good size. The trackpoint mouse on the Thinkpads is also rather nice. I utterly dislike the touchpads on most laptops; they are annoying to use, accidentally hitting them does all kinds of weirdness, the buttons invariably feel bad (especially for middle button use!), but find the trackpoint to be rather easy to use and it doesn't get in the way.

Those are the main reasons for my Thinkpad loyalty. Secondarily, I've had only good experiences with their tech support when I've needed it (my brother owns a Lenovo that had a problem under warranty. I called tech support friday night, and they shipped a replacement that arrived saturday morning - very prompt), so that is nice to know.

For the parts of my ideal laptop, I'd actually somewhat weak specs, since they generally give better battery life and generate less waste heat. Since all I'd do on it normally is connect back to my computer at home, it doesn't need to be very powerful itself. Just good enough to run X11 and ssh. (And some local bonuses, like media players, are nice, but not required and don't tax the system very hard anyway.

I don't even need a hard drive. I have a 512 MB usb flash drive that I barely use (pity I bought it so early; for the same money I spent on it in 2006, I can buy the same model in 8 GB capacity today!), so I could install Linux on that and have room to spare for some local files while doing a remote connection. I could even do an entirely diskless boot, but this only works well when I am plugged in with wires at home, and that eliminates the point of getting a wireless capable laptop.

I wouldn't need more than 128 MB of RAM locally, though 256 would probably be ideal. 64 is the minimum to have a smooth ride with X and SSH while seeing pictures (such as web browsing).

The processor could be as weak as a Pentium one, but I think a Pentium 3 is the ideal model. Plenty powerful enough to do encryption and compression over the wireless without any lag.

So a weak computer; far weaker than most people would consider usable, would be good enough for me.


Anyway, Vista just finished installing and is now loading my desktop for the first time, so let's talk about that. I installed the 64 bit version (my first 64 bit OS too!).

First off, the install process has thus far been my favourite Windows install ever - it was very painless. Even with the broken screen, I had no trouble navigating through it, and it was mostly "set it and forget it" - it installed without my intervention, which is very nice, It seemed to make good time too, but I haven't installed another OS for a while, and this is new hardware, so I can't be sure about that.

It didn't ask any obnoxious questions during the install. Microsoft did a good job at really simplifying the process, doing pretty much the right thing for most users by default.

It seems to have detected the fact that it is on a laptop without hassle - it tells me the battery is 50% charged and charging now. Some little things have changed, but I'm not sure if it is better or worse yet, just a little different.

Thanks to the broken screen, I can't see the taskbar. But, I blind clicked and brought up a properties dialog, which gave several options, including a way to move it to the relatively undamaged top of the screen, so I can now see it. My first experience with UAC is fixing the clock. If this was Linux, I would have to had hammer out su or sudo, so not much different.

Once I plug in an external monitor, I'll look into more UAC related stuff; I prefer to run as a real limited user, but will try it out for a while to see how it rolls.

The install of Windows itself was painless, but then comes the anti-fun that is driver installation. Since I have none of the original discs, I'll need to get these off the Internet. First, the good: sound worked, and so did wired networking. Now, the bad: the graphics drivers are very basic (no Aero), and the wireless drivers don't seem to be present at all.

...and I forgot to partition the drive to leave room to install Linux as a dual boot option (which I normally despise, but I might want here). I'll think up another option for that; perhaps use my USB flash drive for Linux. We'll see.

Anyway, back on topic, I need to get those drivers. I'll plug into my wired network, and try out IE7 on the broken screen.

This brings me to a slight aside: the installer asked if I want to activate yet, and I told it no, since I am currently just testing it. Unlike XP, which would harass me if I didn't activate it quickly, Vista has thus far not given me another peep about it.

The bottom of this laptop is now quite hot, despite me ensuring it gets adequate air. This may be related to the Vista install taxing it a little, or perhaps they just don't make hardware like they used to, and this is normal. I'll return to this later and see if it is still hot then.

I plug in my network wire, and it magically starts to work, just like in XP. To start up Internet Explorer, I hit the start menu and use the new search feature. I type 'internet' and the IE icon quickly appears - this is awesome. Big points to Microsoft on this; the new start menu really does seem to be a real improvement, despite my apprehensiveness to it in the past. (Note this isn't actually my first time using the new Vista start menu, and I felt the same way when I used it before. It is really quite nice.)

Using the touchpad is, as I expected, a pain. Grr. But it is working, so I navigate to nVidia's site, which immediately tells me to get Flash. I tell it where Flash can go, and head over to the download drivers section.

IE came up maximized at first, which I dislike even on undamaged screens, but it was easy enough to restore and change the size. One minor complaint however is the window decorations in Vista seem to take a lot of room - very noticeable when screen space is limited, and when at a low resolution. We'll see how it looks once I get the drivers and an external monitor hooked up.

Anyway, nVidia tells me to go to the laptop manufacturer's site, so I do. As a note, Linux is so much easier to use; the drivers are all there and they either Just Work or they don't - none of this runaround nonsense (with a few minor exceptions, like webcams).

And the manufacturer only has 32 bit XP drivers! Ugh! So, I try Windows Update. Hopefully, it will automatically find something and I can start playing.

I'm a little apprehensive about installing drivers. Most Windows blue screens are caused by bad third party drivers. When the manufacturer's download site has nVidia spelled incorrectly, can I really trust the drivers they provide to be stable? Of course, 32 bit XP drivers won't work on my 64 bit Vista anyway, so the point is moot.

Anyway, Windows Update has a lot of updates, and some 'Ultimate Extras'. I'll play with the extras later, first the updates. Among the list were several security patches, and the big one: drivers. Since it comes from Microsoft, I have a little more faith in their stability, but only time will tell how good they really are. If I start to get blue screens, I'll roll back to basic VGA; I don't have the patience for random crashes.

I think Vista SP1 is out too, and I assume it is among the updates, but I didn't check for it. At 200 MB of downloads though, I must assume it probably is.

Anyway, as this downloads, a few observations. First, it still hasn't asked me to activate it yet. Interesting. Also, hitting the update download seems to have turned automatic updates on (during the install, I told it to not bother updating yet). This is probably a good thing, but updates scare me.

On Linux, I rarely update anything, since every new version seems to bring unwanted changes or bugs. I stick with what I have, since I know it works and don't want to deal with breakage (which seems to happen every time I dare update anything). Perhaps Windows will update more smoothly; I'll keep it turned on and find out.

The download is moving along slowly, but does seem to be moving around. In the mean time, I'll play with Vista a little.

First thing is the 'gadgets' on the side: they seem utterly worthless. What is the point of that? The real weirdness is a lot of newer systems are adding them: OS X and KDE both have them too now. But it was easy enough to remove the sidebar, so I did. This also got rid of another annoying notification area icon.

The annoying icon for Windows Security Alerts also went away when I hit close. Now to see if it remains gone when I restart; we'll see soon.

A lot of space seems to be wasted in the taskbar area. There is a gap, about the size of an icon, between the quick launch and the taskbar buttons, and there is a gap between the set of permanent notification icons and the rest of them. I can't seem to get rid of these gaps. Not a huge hassle, but a little bit of one.


Talking about the usability of Windows in general, I find it to be a lot harder to use than Linux. There are several reasons for that, including some I'll try to work around, and some I'll live with - Windows and Linux are different systems, so I shouldn't try to force one to look and act like the other.

The big ones that annoy me are how Windows does windows. It uses click-to-focus and click raises windows. I explicitly reject both these on my Linux system, preferring sloppy focus (the last window under the mouse cursor has keyboard focus automatically) and clicking on a window doesn't raise it at all. This is much easier to use, because it lets me layer my windows and not worry about that layering breaking (rendering useful text unreadable by covering it up), and I can type in things without having extra clicks: I just flick the mouse in the direction of the window and start going.

More things about my window manager and X that is awesome also have to do with the mouse. First off, I love the various copy and paste schemes on Linux. The most useful of all is the select to copy, middle click (or sometimes right click) to paste scheme. This is in addition to the supported Windows way of explicit copy/cut and paste; you can do both at once using the two buffers separately.

I get email notifications about new threads on the boards I visit. Seeing the new posts is easy: I open them in my email reader (mutt, the greatest email program ever), then triple click the line with the link, which selects all and automatically copies it. I then middle click in a konqueror window, anywhere in it, to paste the link, and it is automatically opened.

So, open the email, triple click the line, middle click the browser, done. This is awesome, and works for all kinds of cool stuff. (As an aside: IE8 I think is adding a new feature where it strips out line breaks in links, to make copy paste easier, which I applauded. Amazingly, konqueror does the same thing, and has for years. It is just so transparent that I never consciously noticed it in konq. One of the many little things that makes me stick to that browser, despite its many faults.)

Another thing I really like is alt+clicking a window. This raises it as a useful side-effect, but the most useful part is its primary effect: it moves the window. This lets me click the window anywhere I want and drag to move it around. Even if I can't get at the title bar, no problem, just alt+click it into the right place.

Other useful things blackbox does is middle click to lower a window to get it out of my way. And shading is cool, and so is iconification.

Really, I could go on all day about all the cool things my Linux setup does to make my life easier that Windows doesn't to. I'm not saying Windows sucks, just that it isn't as easy to use for me.


Well, those updates are now installing, having finished downloading. This is getting long and my hands are starting to really hurt from babble-typing for so long, so I'm going to submit for now. More will come later.

[Destructionator XV]

The updates are almost done, so I'm back to talk about what is happening now. The reboot took almost forever, but there were new updates it was doing, and it is newer than Windows 98, so I expected that. (Windows 95 and 98 were awesome; they boot up and shut down almost instantly if you don't have annoying useless stuff autorunning).

...still waiting on it to configure the updates. Finally, done. Now, the sides of the screen are black, and Windows asked me for my permission to install the graphics driver, which I granted, and was greeted with a random superflourous animation. Annoyingly, the driver added some random 'nVidia control panel' to the right click menu on the desktop - why would it do that? Isn't that what the Windows control panel is for, to which third party drivers can add new icons?

Ugh.

Anyway, Windows Aero is now an option under appearance settings, so I'm turning it on. I find myself really missing the alt+drag option to move windows from X, since that would really help me see the OK button on the dialog. Anyway, a keyboard down to it and am able to hit OK. Window borders now become translucent; cool, it seemed to work. I now click the nvidia control panel which prompts me to change my screen resolution to something bigger. I accept, and the whole screen is now being used again.

Of course, the damage means I am unable to see the bottom third of it and parts of the top, but this resolution seems to be generally better all around; the window decorations no longer seem to take up too much space.

The text is a little small, but legible. I'll keep it.

I need to dig my digital camera out so you guys can see what the screen looks like with its damage. I'll do that later.

The nvidia control panel has a bunch stuff about which I know little, and didn't have an option to tell it to not use part of the screen (which I didn't realistically expect anyway). It did have some settings for multiple monitors though, which I may want to look at later once I get the external one set up.


Windows Update installed several drivers. I now have a modem icon indicating that driver is installed. And I can't figure out how to make the annoying and (currently) useless icon to go away! Grrr!

The annoying security center came back too. Blargh. Anyway, let's give wireless a spin. I turn the switch on, and Windows immediately informs me that wireless networks are available. I see my mother's network on the list. Connecting to it is easy; I put in the password and it magically connects, offering to save the network and connect automatically if possible in the future. Cool.

The password box is a nice addition to Windows. It had a checkbox I could hit to see the characters I am typing into the box instead of dots. This is very nice as it lets me see typos more easily.

... I am bouncing a bit and tapped the screen which made it display weird. The damage is only going to get worse as time goes on.

Windows just popped me up a click here for solutions to problems thing... but it had no solutions listed. So why did it pop it up? Mystery to me, but it went away easily enough.

The control panel seems nice enough; the new search thing is cool, but nothing else to add right now. I'll surely have more to say as I continue to play.

lol though: a new computer voice for text to speech! I really prefer Microsoft Bob from WinXP though. Oh well. The speech recognition might be fun; I'll play with that later after I get a microphone.

Performance wise, Vista and this hardware seems to be doing ok. There is some lag when bringing up new stuff, but nothing really bad yet.

There is a lot of stuff in this control panel I'll need to talk about.

First, the power settings. I can change what the power button does. The options are sleep, hibernate, shut down, and do nothing. There are different columns for when plugged in or on the battery. Thanks to my damaged screen, I won't be able to easily use the start menu to shut down, so I'm going to set the main power button to do stuff.

I have three options: close the lid, press power, or press standby.

Sleep keeps the state in memory, but puts most the hardware in low power standby mode. This drains the battery a little, but is reactivated fast.

Hibernate writes the RAM to disk and then shuts the power off. This doesn't drain the battery, and is a little slower in restoring.

Shut down does what you expect.

Shut down is probably the one I'll use least often, so I'll keyboard my way through the start menu or use the command line (yes, Windows can do that) to get at that.

Closing the lid means I'll probably be right back, so sleep or do nothing would be the best choices. I set those for battery and plugged in, respectively.

Pressing the power button means I'm leaving for a while, so hibernate seems to be the best: it is powered down, but easy to restore.

I want it to do the same whether it is on battery power or not, so I use the drop down boxes to select these options.

I test it and see that it works as advertised. No hassle, and pretty good speed, even for hibernate.

Other power settings can be changed too, with the divide of on battery or plugged in. Display brightness is one. By default, when on battery, it does to half brightness. This makes sense, so I kept it that way. Otherwise, I turned plugged in down to the same as battery for most the other options; no need to drive up my electric bill with stuff I don't need.

Navigating up and down the new control panel is pretty easy thanks to the drop down bread crumbs UI.

I'm finding that modem icon very annoying. I like having a modem that works; that is awesome, but I don't need its icon there constantly! If I want to change the settings, I'll use the control panel. But I can't seem to get it to go away. I hit control+shift+escape to bring up task manager and end its process. Success!

Now, to keep it from coming back without being asked. One of the things on the new control panel is change startup programs. Let's try it. Boom, it lists the program on the side and lets me see details on it, but the remove button is grayed out.

I hit show all users, which gives a UAC prompt (which also changed the graphics mode twice; in normal vga mode before the driver this was unnoticeable, but now it adds several seconds of wait time. I can see how that would be annoying.). I agree and I now have the power to remove or disable startup items. Cool. I do so. If I need the program again, I know where to find it, thanks to the information on the side.

It doesn't look like I got SP1. Maybe I did, but I can't tell for sure.

Anyway, time to take a look at My Computer. It tells me over 30 GB of the drive is used. What could be all that? Let's take a look.

First thing I do is uncheck hidden files and hide file extensions. I like to see all those.

Explorer no longer has the menu it used to have, so I'm stuck doing right clicks. Well, that works, and I find 10 GB is used in a folder called Windows.old. The installer kept a copy of the previous owner's files when I installed my copy, which is a good decision usually. If your install is broken, it is safe to hit reinstall from the disk with no special options, since you shouldn't lose your stuff. The folder was marked read only, but I could still nuke it (which is expected to me).

But since I don't need the previous owner's stuff, I delete it all with shift+delete to bypass the recycle bin. The estimate says it will be about three minutes to delete all 63,000 files in there. It prompts a few times for system files, and I have to check a box then hit yes to get the equivalent of the old "yes to all" option.

After that, it went on its own, and the estimate seemed pretty accurate. It finished on time and went smoothly. There were a lot of random useless animations in the progress dialog though; I guess someone at Microsoft felt those CPU cycles just have to be used! Silly.

Another file in here is a 8k file called BOOTSECT.BAK - backup of the boot sector from the installer, presumably. I'm guessing I could use that to restore old bootloaders if I wanted to, such as if Windows overwrote Linux's loader.

Time to try some programs. First, I try to load mplay32, the minimalist media player present since Windows 95. Sadly, it seems to be gone.

Since I think WMP is far too bloated and slow for my likes, I quest to get mplay32 back. I'll pull it from my XP 32 bit VM and see if it works. My XP VM is on Linux, running under qemu. It is very fast - qemu is awesome.

Seconds later, the file is copied to my Linux box's Samba folder.

Back to Vista, I go to network, and I have to give it permission to scan the network, then tell it if I want it to always do this. I tell it, and seconds later I can see the whole network: my parent's computers, my Linux box, and even the VM (thanks to qemu for being awesome).

Seconds later, the file is copied, and it runs. It works normally (I found a wav file to play just by hammering in .wav to the start menu's search), but it asks to fix media settings every time and is unable to do so. I need to fix that. At least I have my previous lightweight program though; this is going to be quite usable.

I find myself missing the icon on the left of a window in Windows, which you used to be able to double click to close. Oh well, no big deal. Actually, it is still there on most windows, just not all. Weird.

Notepad, Paint, Wordpad, cmd, all seem to work as expected. Paint may have support for transparency now; I'll need to take a closer look.

A little thing: the mplay32 from XP's icon looks so... bad.. next to the native Vista program's icons. I don't normally care about stuff like this (and I really don't), but it does look out of place.


Anyway, thus far, Vista is seeming nice, as nice as XP (but I still haven't really used either super seriously, so not quite conclusive yet). More as I continue to play later.

[Destructionator XV]

Well, I hooked up an external monitor, and that seems to be working pretty well, but not perfectly. The resolution on the external monitor is the same as the laptop's screen, which isn't ideal. I haven't switched back yet, so I'm not sure if Windows will be smart enough to find out the other monitor isn't there anymore and restore the old settings.

I'm now playing with installing additional things. I had plenty of options: Ultimate Extras (which are pending a restart to finish installing for some ridiculous reason), and lots of cool stuff under Windows programs. Some of there were IIS 7, which serves HTTP and FTP, (I resisted the urge to install it to play; if I do install that it will be in a VM) telnet client and server (will be installed), services for UNIX (very cool - gives me native Windows versions of a bunch of Unix tools and a POSIX API to play with), and some other things I passed up for now.

After getting the Unix services foundation installed, it seems I have to download 500 MB of actual tools from Microsoft. Windows told me what to do and provided links for me; it has been easy so far and that is currently in progress. It looks like it gives me perl, grep, awk, ksh; a lot of fun stuff.

Later I intend to install Visual Studio 2008 to give that a try, and of course some of the Linux programs I need to get real work done: vim, cdrecord, growisofs, mkisofs. And some Windows programs for connecting to Linux: xming, putty, psftp, pscp, plink. Finally, I'll probably want a C compiler of some sort, but I'll wait on that for now; I probably won't be writing C on this box anyway.

I just enabled remote desktop access to the machine, so hopefully, I can use that over the network to play with it from Linux. Let's try it.

Oh, random aside: I got my webcam working under Linux, and may do some random videos later. I'll do a digicam shot of the laptop's screen first though.

Anyway, I had to compile a new version of rdesktop on Linux to connect to Vista; the version I had installed was too old. Grabbing version 1.5.0 from the rdesktop website worked, and it compiled quickly.

I am now connected to my Vista box from Linux! If you haven't used rdesktop before, you are really missing out. It is very cool. Vista Ultimate has it, and so does WinXP pro, and surely many other versions (I think Win 2k can do it too).

I got a screenshot: http://arsdnet.net/vista.png

Windows licensing states that only one user may use a Windows box at a time, so when you connect to Remote Desktop when logged in locally, the local screen will go to sleep and your session picks up where you were. When you disconnect from the remote connection, it the local screen resumes to life, letting you contine your work uninterrupted.

It really is cool, and works quite well, even over the Internet. I put it up there with remote X on coolness (they are different, no doubt, but both are awesome). It makes the telnet server in Windows even more useless (though I install it anyway since it is kinda cool to play with).

Anyway, the Unix tools are installing, so soon, I'll see what they do.

The system now uses about 30 GB of space again; the 10 GB I freed up by deleting the previous owner's stuff has already been reused with these cool additions.

While installing this other stuff, it didn't ask me to insert the installation media - something the last version of Windows I used (Win 98) would do all the time, unless you manually copied the .cab files to the hard drive and told the registry where to find them (or copied them before installing and installed from there - my preference).

This is nice, and probably explains a large chunk of the hard drive space usage. Vista is definitely heavy on disk space.

Anyway, on the Unix stuff. The default install seemed to be base utilities from a BSD system, and optional components included a debugger add-on, GNU stuff, and perl. I went with just the GNU stuff. Next it asked if I want to turn on su, setuid, and case sensitivity (I like case sensitivity, and internally, Windows is case sensitive. But on the outside, it pretends not to be, probably for compatibility with Win95 and such, or more probably for ease of use; not everyone is a case-sensitive lover like I). The default was no, and I'm going with that for now. I'm sure I can change it later if I want it (and I'm tempted to go with case sensitivity, so we'll see.).

Well, another half gig used installing this stuff. The hard drive is down to 79 GB free. We should be about done playing with the OS; the other big thing will be VS (and maybe Microsoft Virtual PC if I can and must get Linux running in it to play with my webcam, etc, since I don't know how to do that on Windows...), so I expect to be one or two more gigs used before calling it finished. Rounding to call it 75 GB still says that is a lot of room left for me to play. Nice.

Now, I praised rdesktop not far above, but I must say I am really loving it.

WHOOO! I just say install of vi fly by on the SUA install! Yay!

Anyway, rdesktop is great because the Windows desktop is now right here on my Linux box, making it easy to work with. I don't have to look at the broken screen nor ... whoa, it is installing X! ... work with the suboptimal laptop keyboard and mouse. Of course, right now, I am using external for all three (my mother's monitor and usb keyboard/mouse), but that is behind me, so I couldn't use both machines at once very easily. Now, I can. It is a bunch of the benefits of a VM and many of the benefits of real hardware combined (and of course, the limitations are combined too, but oh well - the great part is I just spin around back to the physical device and pick up there where I left off here, swinging back to full tradeoff of the real computer again).

The Unix tools being installed on Windows are probably going to make me soft, but they are components from Microsoft for Windows, so I don't feel like a super cheater. I say soft because I should get to know the real Windows way of doing some things (even the Windows command line is actually quite powerful on its own; it doesn't get half the credit it deserves on the internet) instead of still using my linux muscle memory to get stuff done, but oh well. It will still be a blast. And I do cheat a little, like the growisofs I mentioned above. I haven't the slightest clue how to make a video DVD on Windows; the only way I know how is to use the Linux command line tools. Whatever, though, it works.

I'm really going all out on this computer. My plan for buying a laptop was to make it basically a dumb client for my main Linux box, and I'm making this be quite powerful on its own in addition to that. But playing with Vista has been fun anyway.

Up above, I mentioned my preference for sloppy focus. Well, while playing with the Vista control panel, I saw that under the accessibility options, Vista supports it too. It is under a checkbox saying activate windows without clicking on them. What it does is different than my preference, but the same idea. When you move the mouse over a window, after a slight delay, that window gets the focus and is automatically raised. If there was a way to turn off the auto raise and the delay, it would be pretty close to what I love (though still not quite there, and without the other options, like alt+click to raise, it probably won't be nearly as good to use)



Thunderstorm. I'm submitting for now, and will continue later.

[Destructionator XV]

The Unix tools didn't install properly, so I shut down and disconnected the external monitor. Windows correctly went back to using the built in screen, which is good. (And wow text looks so much better on the built in screen than it did on my mother's monitor (which is LCD). I imagine this is because the forced resolution on my mother's monitor wasn't its proper resolution, skewing everything. (It is also a different size and ration than this one).

Anyway, Windows looks really good on this screen, and if it wasn't broken, it would probably be pretty OK. Still, it is usable for the most part.

Well, I just tried those UNIX tools, and I guess the install went better than it seemed, since now that I have rebooted, they are working; I reflexively typed 'ls' at a terminal, and got a listing. csh and ksh also work. This is really nice; both Windows commands like 'dir' and Unix commands like 'ls' work. Very nice.

I'm now putting on VS 2008 and VPC 2007. Then I grab my little useful Linuxesque stuff, and I'll be all set up! (And after that, I probably won't actually play with this machine for a while, unless I think up some hilarity to do with its wireless on Windows; perhaps combined with my extra wireless router I got for Christmas but haven't seriously used yet.) Oh yeah, and one last thing: Qt, at least the runtime libs, for testing. And a few other runtime libs for my programs, like SDL.

I really wish I remembered to set aside some room for Linux, since I really want to try out the wireless and battery tools Linux has (my Thinkpad uses Linux, but since its battery is long dead and it has no wireless, I never tried either on it). I doubt a VM nor a usb stick install will be adequate for either; I might just have to try a risky resize of the partition. Hmm... perhaps I can do an external hard drive through my usb enclosure? I don't have the enclosure here tight now, and all my spare hard drives don't actually work well (bad sectors), but it might be an option to try for an experiment.

But first, let's go back to disk management in the Vista control panel to ensure I actually need to do this.

I just remote desktoped in again, and this time, the local screen didn't go to sleep. Perhaps it did before just because it timed out.

So I go control panel, administrative tools, computer management. Disk management is on the left.

It shows two volumes: an unknown 1 GB one and the 110 GB Vista partition.

And there goes the local screen to sleep. Good. Must just be due to the time out.

My VS install just failed for some reason, and Windows closed the program. It helpfully left a link to resume on the desktop, and suggested I try restarting. That is obnoxious, but at least it is trying to help, making the best out of a situation I'd rather avoid entirely.

The failed install might be due to me installing two things at once, and telling it to postpone the restart indefinitely. I hate rebooting, and I like doing many things at once. That isn't the way you are supposed to do it on Windows though.

I'll have to do at least one more reboot tonight, to test downsizing that partition. Then maybe, just maybe, I'll play with putting Slackware on it for a yucky dual boot. I hate dual boots, but I really want to play with Linux wireless and battery functions.

An additional reason why I'll hate dual booting here is restarting Vista is not only somewhat slow, the 'net tells me it slows down operation too, since it takes a long time to settle down. Leaving it running (or at least hibernating rather than rebooting) lets it settle down and get a good caching scheme going and such.

The good is I will usually stick to one OS or the other, and that one will probably be Windows, since I am going through so much hassle to get it set up awesomely, and I have Linux on the main box. Linux on the laptop will be primarily for playing and learning. So it shouldn't be that bad.

And the VS install has restarted. Ugh. Time to wait again. And it seems to have worked, but it requires a restart to complete!

Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. Over.

Why does everything need reboots? ANNOYING.

Anyway, the only big thing left is qt (which also installs the mingw gcc), and I'll wait on 4.4 or whatever the next one is numbered to come out before doing that. Then I'll see how well the dual core can compile C++.

But about half my linuxy stuff is downloaded. Just the dvd burning tools now. So let's call it a day.

[Destructionator XV]

Well, I'm back to it, now shrinking the Vista partition to make room for Linux.

This is amazingly easy from the Disk Management console. It asks how much I'd like to shrink it by, and then I wait a while, and it makes it so. It tells me the drive is actually 112 GB (instead of the 120 the laptop's sticker claims) and is a SCSI disk. This may be important in getting Linux to install.

Now that the partition is safely shrunk (I went to 100 GB, leaving about 10 GB free for Linux), I can play again, knowing that linux can be added at any time.

I must say again that this screen and the Windows install in general look really good, despite the huge damaged areas and cracks. IMO Windows has looked good since Win95. I didn't love the new Luna interface in XP, but it wasn't bad, and of course, the classic option was still there. On Vista, Aero actually does look good, and I haven't tried Classic yet.

One thing that makes Windows consistently look good is Microsoft's very good selection of desktop wallpapers. The clouds.bmp in Win 95 and the bliss image in XP were two of my favourites (and actually, for a while, I used a screenshot of Windows as my wallpaper in Linux! Now, of course, I'm using a generated gradient, and sometimes a solid color, but images are still awesome.), and the other ones offered were also often of high quality.

Vista continues in that excellence.

Anyway, I also looked at how much it would cost me to replace the damaged screen, and it looks to be over two hundred bucks on parts alone - forget that, just not worth it. Maybe I'll check ebay later though. (Also, I found this model new and it is $750; less than I estimated, but not by much.)

PuTTY fits in the relatively good corner of the screen, good. This damaged screen is plenty usable for myself. The only sad part is this means my Thinkpad will have less of a use, but oh well.

Firing up my Linux desktop through remote X shows that it looks good too (and it also does on my desktop's monitor normally - Vista isn't special in looking good, it just does too). And a white xterm looks good against the cracks too. Nice.

A few other things about Vista I like: the new taskbar giving a preview of the window and the alt+tab giving a preview. Both these previews are in real time, and are pretty useful. I like it.

Well, let's give Visual Studio a go. It seems to need the full screen to work well (as I also experienced when I tried VS 2k5 in my XP VM), so I'm going to remote desktop in and continue from there.

The default rdesktop size, about 800x600, still feels too small, so I'm increasing that. rdesktop --help lists -g for width x height. So I run rdesktop -g 1024x768 192.168.1.11 and get a bigger screen to work with. VS is a lot easier to see now (at the cost of obscuring more of my Linux desktop, but oh well).

I hit new console application and I hammer out a Hello, World in what little I know
of C#, with intillisense immediately popping up, which seems cool (make no mistake, vim can do that too, but I have mine set for tab completion rather than automatic popups). I reflexively hit <esc>:w<cr><f3> to write and make, since that is what I do in my vim, which of course does less than nothing.

Remembering it is F5 to make in VS, I hit that, and the program works. It compiled and started at an ok speed (some lag, but I'm also remoted in, so some is expected). However, second execution goes very fast - it seems something (.NET itself?) had to load up the first time and was cached for the second execution. This may be the compiler at work.

The way .NET apps work is they are compiled to bytecode which is later compiled to native code to be run. The final compiled result is IIRC cached for later.

I close VS and start it back up, and it did so pretty quickly; once it is cached, it isn't horribly slow on this hardware. Not bad.

Something that annoys me though is it felt it necessary to add one of those notification icons to the taskbar! WHY OH WHY?! Telling it I'm not interested in participating in their feedback program right now made it go away. Good.

Btw, the VS install also put in the Silverlight runtime, so I'll probably see what that looks like soon enough.

Next up, I want to give WPF a go just to see what it is like. I create a new project and look at the skeleton.

I want to take a moment to complain about how big these skeletons are. It isn't super relevant, since this verbosity quickly fades to insignificance in a bigger program, but Hello World needing a bloody class just seems outrageous. Too much OO is bad.

The skeleton WPF program seems to take its sweet time to load and run, but it does, giving me a blank white window. Next execution is much faster, probably caching in action again.

VS uses the yellow bars that I first saw in IE when it blocks something. I like this; it is informative, useful, but not too intrusive.

As an aside, I am almost scared at how easily I got used to the taskbar on top of the screen. I like my taskbar (and clock) at the bottom since that is where my eyes rest most the time, but can't do that here due to the screen, but got used to it quickly. It probably helps that the screen (and rdesktop window) is small so I don't really work to push my eyes up.

I add a few controls to the program just for fun, and it does what I expected: almost nothing. To really get a feel for this, I'll have to actually write a program in it, which means I'll have to actually learn it. I don't need to do that right now, so I won't.

(Qt is awesome, and I'm interested in how this stands up to it, but even if it is technically as good and easy, I won't be making any switches because I already know Qt well, and it is cross platform (and native as a lesser coolness). My programs must work very well on Linux, since that is what I use.)

Anyway, VS was fun for now and may be nice to play with some more later, so I'll of course keep it installed, but I'm sticking to vim, which works really well on Windows as well as Linux.

Side note: rdesktop seems to support some kind sound forwarding too... hmmm. Haven't used it yet, but I can try it later.

Just for kicks, I ran putty over rdesktop to connect back, and it naturally works, though the cursor seems to disappear in it (probably black on black).

I want to take the Courier New font out since it looks good in putty. I almost dragged and dropped it out of the rdesktop, but of course that didn't work. Vista has no problem talking to samba on linux though, and hammering out the network path in the start menu opens it with ease - that is such a win feature.

Anyway, back to hibernate (which I have to do from the laptop itself; it wasn't allowed from the gui of rdesktop (I didn't try the command line)); I've had enough for a while.

I fear opening this lid though... those cracks are going to get bigger eventually.


Well, summary: Vista seems pretty good. Don't believe the hate you see on the 'net for it.

[Armaina]

Personally I just think the system was released far too soon. the first service pack fixed up a lot of issues, but so far Vista's 64 bit version is truly 64 bit, even XP's 64 bit version still had some emulation. Granted I'm sure there's a version of Linux that has true 64 bit support, but messing around with the drivers for that is no fun at all...

(granted that doesn't really apply to this laptop, just something I'd thought I'd add as far as the few plus sides to vista, and wheee I'm no crazy for still liking Win 98 SE!)