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By William Van Winkle |
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MAYBE I'M GETTING TOO OLD The kids and politics and food additives and grey skies and several dozen TV series my wife has clogging our DVR, it’s all wearing me down. The belly grows as the memory shrinks. I remember the Windows 95 midnight parties with the Stones’ “Start Me Up” blaring from somewhere, when places like Computer City and Good Guys (R.I.P.) threw huge launch events and no one wanted to be stuck one week later without a copy of the new OS on his or her PC. Now, Windows 95 was a 32-bit OS and updated the 16-bit structures prevalent in the days of Windows 3.1 and DOS. That’s a big change in architecture. And while I do recall something about performance under protected mode, I don’t remember there being massive outcries about incompatibility. But again, the lights are growing dim. The kids are jumping on my belly. Surely, those sorts of complaints were rampant, just as they are now, and I simply don’t remember them. Kind of like I don’t remember there being a lot of problems with Windows XP when it came out. In fact, in May of 2001, PC Magazine wrote the following: “Windows XP’s new Compatibility mode caught our eye. Compatibility mode is designed to let you run applications created for previous versions of Windows (excluding Windows 3.1.1 and earlier) on Windows XP. We scoured the labs for old software and concentrated on running a group of photo-editing products....As tested on the Dell Dimension 4100 running Windows XP in Compatibility mode, each product installed and ran without problems. We also tested whether installing games that require an older version of DirectX would create a problem (Windows XP ships with DirectX 8). We loaded Jane’s Navy Fighters (designed for Windows 95), and it played fine. We also installed a host of early simulation games, and they played fine.” Fine, fine, and fine. So maybe I’m not quite as old and senile as some factors might indicate. Maybe there really were no significant problems with Windows 95 or XP when they arrived, and my impressions of Windows Vista might be valid. What impressions? Well, first let me say what Microsoft did right. I love the Aero Glass interface. And...hm. Oh, yeah, the Sidebar thing is cool. The improved search capabilities would be pretty sweet if I didn’t already have Google doing the same thing. I like that the new OS is faster than XP-—wait, no it’s not. But it is more secure. I think. It must be, because Vista keeps asking me pop-up questions in a thinly veiled effort to remind me how secure it is. Here’s the truth: I don’t care much about the security pop-ups. I don’t care that I needed a faster system with better graphics. I don’t even care that Microsoft’s pricing per license is astronomical compared to its competitors. I stop caring about money altogether when productivity comes to a standstill. See, I thought I would be smart and prepare for the future. This month’s cover story is on future-proofing, after all. I even waited for months after Vista’s release, just to give Microsoft time to get its first round of performance and compatibility patches out on Windows Update. Then, armed with a sweet new Shuttle SD37P2 barebones, Intel QX6700 CPU, and a 4GB OCZ memory kit, I thought I was ready to take on the world...or at least 64-bit Windows Vista Ultimate. And you’d think that, having read Chris Angelini’s last few installments of “From the Labs” in this magazine, I would have been properly warned. But no. Clearly, I’d ingested too many food additives that week. My first foray into 64-bit was a disaster. My security camera software wouldn’t install. Neither would my voice recorder transcription software. Application and driver problems descended like biblical plagues. For some unknown reason, most of the sites I tried to pull up in Internet Explorer wouldn’t work, and neither would they work under Firefox or Safari. But who knows if those apps were really working as planned either? Within 48 hours, I conceded defeat and reinstalled with 32-bit Vista Ultimate. The second time I rebooted that configuration, it blue screened. Today, three weeks later, my copy of Adobe Production Studio from last year won’t load. After five-—yes, five-—patches to my Olympus transcription software, that app finally runs under Vista, but the system refuses to see the transcription foot pedal device that worked flawlessly under XP. In fact, nearly every major app I run needed a Vista patch, and while most were available, I still had to spend the hours finding, downloading, installing, and rebooting. My Creative X-Fi software remains in a tangled, bloody heap, and I’m having to make do with integrated audio. I get several “1394 Front Panel” driver errors every time I try to use my Maxtor OneTouch III drive. My secondary internal hard drives seem to have lengthy spinup times whenever I access them, even though I have Vista’s power options set to keep them spun up. Worst of all, I can’t figure out how to share my Vista system’s drives and folders with other machines on the LAN. They look shared. All the options say they’re shared. But they don’t share. Kudos to NVIDIA for getting its Quadro NVS drivers for Vista in shape; I take back everything I said about not having your drivers ready at Vista’s launch. God help you, NVIDIA, and everyone in your boat. In his typically cryptic manner, RAM publisher John Martinez commented to me the other day that, “Macs don’t have CPUs.” No doubt, Intel will be disappointed to get the news. However, what he meant is that Macs don’t really advertise their CPUs. Or their memory counts. Or much of anything else under their hoods. You and I know they’re built pretty much like PCs these days, but Apple has never let a discussion of its products be about speeds and feeds. Instead, it’s about cool features and usability. And when I say usability, part of what I mean is that it works. Period. Whether true or not, the public set of beliefs surrounding the Mac says that these computers don’t blue screen or contract viruses or halt mysteriously in the middle of running an operation. No, a Mac is all about fun and getting stuff done. We channel people like to poke away at Apple and point out how expensive those machines are compared to our whiteboxes. Why, you’d have to be crazy to buy those things! Obviously, there’s no shortage of crazy people about. According to IDC, Apple sold 761,000 Macs in Q2 of 2006. This year, that number ballooned to just shy of one million, giving Apple 5.6% of the overall U.S. PC market, a 26% quarter-over-quarter gain, and the No. 4 position in units sold—-only 5,000 units shy of No. 3 rival Gateway. So much for the big boom in sales brought forth by Vista’s launch. While Apple gained 26%, the overall U.S. PC market lost over one million units for the quarter. This makes you wonder: Is Windows Vista a boon or a boat anchor? Let’s ask the big OEMs. Me: Hi, Mr. Big OEM? RAM here. I’m really curious to get your opinion about Windows Vista. How’s it doing for you guys? Big OEM: Um, fine. Why do you ask? Me: Oh, nothing. I just saw this spot on your Web site devoted to people who bought your machines with Vista installed and now want to downgrade to XP. Crazy, huh? Big OEM: We’re all about encouraging choice. Me: That’s super. I also read that Microsoft just extended its Windows Life-Cycle Policy, the one that lets OEMs continue to license XP. Your original cut-off for XP was January 31st, 2008, but now it’s July 31st. Things must be pretty bad for you to put that kind of pressure on Microsoft. Big OEM: I really couldn’t say. Me: Why not? Big OEM: My system just locked up. I’ll have to call you back. While the details of the Vista-to-XP Pro deal vary from OEM to OEM, and there’s usually a $15 or $20 charge tied to getting an XP Recovery disc, NPD Group has stated that there’s clear demand for the downgrade in the business sector. Perhaps the anticipation of this is why Microsoft only makes the downgrade available for Vista’s OEM Business and Ultimate editions. The good news is that this offer isn’t only limited to Vista pre-installed on tier-one machines. Anyone with an OEM copy of Business or Ultimate need only call Microsoft’s customer support center with Vista serial number in hand. Microsoft says this is a storm in a teapot, that it sold more than 60 million licenses from launch to the end of June, and you don’t get numbers like that unless you have a great product. The European Union takes a slightly different view. After a recent landmark ruling judging against Microsoft over the company’s anti-competitive tactics, now the great minds across the pond are mulling over mandating that PCs be sold naked—-sans operating system. This is an intriguing thought, and you have to wonder how much, if anything, it would change in the world. We’d end up with out-of-the-box, click-here-to-install-everything software sets, because everyone knows you can’t let consumers have more than two choices in the process of doing anything. Would it give Linux a chance to displace Windows? Maybe, maybe not. After all, system builders are free to offer naked PCs today, complete with a dim sum menu of OSes and applications. I suspect such a mandate would only complicate things for consumers and add unnecessary expense. Unless the industry could come up with some sort of measurement for how well an operating system works, some sort of stability benchmark. Is it so infeasible? If there were some organization that judged operating systems according to their “it just works”-ness instead of whether it came with a built-in browser or an MPEG-2 decoder or an offer for a free flash drive when you buy the software at full price, maybe that would make a dent. Maybe that would give system builders the tool they need to create a competitive advantage over the tier-ones. No longer would it be a matter of how much cheaper do HP and Dell get their Windows copies. It would be about showing customers, “Look, our top three OS choices get at least a 20% higher ‘it just works’ score than the new Windows.” |
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