Twas the Vista before Christmas, when all through the house
A Windows geek was desperately weilding his mouse
Trying to run the programs that work on XP
But on Microsoft's wondrous new OS crash because of UAC"

I am starting to feel quite quite disappointed with Vista, after initially thinking that it was worth the wait. Finding drivers for hardware is nigh impossible - Nvidia for instance still only has the RC2 version of its Forceware graphics driver available for download, and that was released in in October. There is a later, 97.34 version out, but it doesn't have all the functionality of the XP driver like thermal monitoring, TV output adjustment and... SLI. Great.

It's a similar experience with the Sigmatel High Definition Audio driver. The XP one has all kinds of features like Sonic Focus and Dolby 5.1 Prologic processing but the XP one doesn't. Also, on Vista, no apps are able to use the rear speakers for some reason.

Gaming-wise, DirectX games seem to run fine now on Vista. Just a little slower though, 10-15% if my testing is anything to go by. This is probably due to graphics drivers not being up to snuff. However, OpenGL doesn't appear to be hardware accelerated at all.

I still haven't managed to get Thunderbird and Firefox 2.0 to work again, despite reinstalling both. Since Windows Vista components crash on a regular basis - it seems to be due to tight timeouts in the apps more than anything - it's back to XP for me as the base Windows OS.

We'll see, maybe next year with Vista SP1 things will get better.

Merry Christmas everone...

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 3:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (15)

Vodafone's reign as the cellular speed king courtesy of the High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) upgrade lasted about six months in New Zealand.

Telecom's roll-out of the Alcatel Lucent supplied Evolution Data Only (EV-DO) Rev A upgrade (yes I know, nasty cellular technology acronyms...) has started, in Auckland only for now, and yes, it's faster.

I was given quick preview of the technology at Telecom's Auckland HQ; bearing in mind that we're talking about cellular broadband technology, it's hard not to be impressed by Rev A. Download speeds hit 2.6Mbit/s and uploads ran in the 5-600kbit/s range. Better yet, latency or the delay it takes to send and receive data packets, has dropped to 50-70ms.

That's DSL-like performance, in other words.

Here's the new Telecom Mobile Broadband Rev A card in the hands of Gary Rogers, Telecom's mobile data solutions manager:

The card is in fact a Sierra 595 Type II PCMCIA job. Telecom says there are more devices coming up including a Vodem-like USB "modem", plus an Express Card for people like Mac users who have the newest add-on card slot on their portables.

Telecom is still working on the device roadmap so no word on what'll appear in terms of handsets yet.

Pricing for the Rev A card is the same as for the Rev 0 EV-DO one, that is, $529 plus GST on an open plan, and bundled with 12 month or longer contracts.

For the time being, the coverage area is very limited - Auckland CBD only. The rest of the country will get Rev A progressively around middle of next year however.

I'm waiting for my card to arrive later this afternoon, so that I can test it more thoroughly. However, the first look tells me Rev A will attractive for business users who need that extra bit of performance on the uplink. How succesful the service will be against Vodafone's HSDPA depends on Telecom's marketing savvy: I floated a few what I thought were obvious ideas like bumping up the data plans and bundling the card with fixed-line DSL, but Telecom didn't seem quite sure about the approach yet.

I'm sure someone will say that HSDPA/UMTS is better for roaming, and it is because GSM operators with the W-CDMA upgrade are everywhere. However, only a very rich person or a financially reckless one would data roam with any cellular operator, so it's only an advantage on paper. (Tangent: I'm disgusted to see how so many media picked up on the linked Computerworld story WITHOUT ATTRIBUTION - and they can't even copy and paste properly, getting their figures wrong.)

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 1:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I actually like Microsoft Office 2007 a lot. While it's not a compelling upgrade for the previous verison of Office, the new interface is nice and easier to use. I'm still struggling with loving Outlook 2007 though.

Don't get me wrong, there's lots to like in Outlook 2007. The calendaring is nice, the IMAP support has improved, you get mobile devices support and the spam filtering, while on the aggressive side, really does work.

I think integrating Outlook with Vista for fast searching will get Microsoft into trouble with the various anti-monopoly regulators around the world, but there's no denying it's useful.

If I could make Outlook 2007 email the way I want it to, I'd use it instead of Thunderbird in fact. But, I can't. Here's what I want:

Unfortunately however, Outlook 2007 lets me do none of the above. It'll create new messages in plain text, but if someone sends an HTML message, it'll respond in that format. I can probably fix that by turning off HTML completely, but that's a hack.

Outlook 2007 steadfastly refuses to start message responses at the bottom however. I remember from earlier versions that it was possible to tell it to just that, but Outlook 2007 seems to have ditched that ability. Which is odd, because Outlook Express and Windows Live Mail let you do it.

In order to make Outlook 2007 behave, you have to code. Yes, code. And in VBA too. Dominik Jain's Outlook Quotefix was the saviour for previous versions of Outlook, but it doesn't work yet with 2007.

I'm trying to get the macro from The Urgists to work in Outlook 2007, but so far it won't run.

What I don't get is why oh why Microsoft can't let us have the above features which are actually necessary in some situations, like posting to busy mailing lists? Putting in hacky VBA macros to fix it seems silly.

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 2:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)