If you’ll remember, a while ago I had a bad experience with Windows Vista Service Pack 1, release candidate 1.

Well, it certainly seems that Microsoft did quite a bit of work following that release candidate.

Since SP1 isn’t yet available via Windows Update, so I had to go through the standalone installer route (I’ll tell you where to get them later).  But first let me give you a little bit of background as to why I decided to give it another go.

Vista was starting to run really slowly.  REALLY slowly.  In fact, nearly a month after removing the release candidate of SP1, it was again unusable.  Fortunately for me, I’d backed the machine up with Norton Ghost (disclaimer: that’s an affiliate link, before you ask), so my first job was to back everything up to my external drive.

I then got out the old trusty Windows 98 bootdisk and wiped all the partitions except my clunky Vista install.  I then created a 32GB FAT32 partition and copied the Ghost image files to that.  Then I rolled back to a Vista backup from January 2008 (well, I’m skipping a step - I went back to XP for 24 hours.  I’ll tell you why I decided not to stay that way at a later date).

The installers took a long while to download, and the installation took about an hour.  It was fairly straightforward: next, next, next, next, ok, I agree, etc.  And even though it said not to run anything during installation, it didn’t complain about Spider Solitaire

So what’s the outcome?

Not much has changed, except I have a solid computer again.  It does feel slightly faster - not much, I have to admit: the short time I spent back on XP felt faster for a while - but it does feel more reliable.

Most of the actual improvements - UEFI support, cryptographic improvements,

But file copy performance?  Seems a bit quicker, but then I usually use Directory Opus anyway, and I suspect some of those improvements will be in Windows Explorer.

As for the numerous minor tweaks made, and delays they’ve removed, I suspect they all go towards a psychological feeling things are working quicker - and they certainly seem to be to me - so it’s all good.

So the verdict?  No marks for RC1, but for the full release - I’d say seven out of ten.  Maybe it didn’t have all the performance improvements they were touting, but it’s worth the time and effort.

If you want to get hold of the standalone installers yourself, you can download the five-language standalone installer for 32-bit or 64-bit Vista (they’re 434MB and 726MB respectively, and cover English, French, German, Spanish and Japanese), or the all language version, again available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions (these are 544MB and 873MB).  Alternatively, if you’ve got a lot of PCs in your firm that will need updating, you can get the installer discs - there’s a 544MB ISO image for 32-bit PCs, as well as a 1418MB DVD ISO for both 32 and 64 bit versions.

The networking in Vista is just a little bit too complex these days.  I remember when Windows for Workgroups came out, and we could all share files across a LAN easily…

Well I just can’t work it out in Vista any more, or XP for that matter.  Just too many firewall/UAC/security things going on.

So my quick and dirty solution?

The cuddly, fluffy and open source Filezilla server.  (*sigh*)

Still, good to see 1970s protocols still work as well as they ever did 

To redress the balance from yesterday, I promised a list of ten things I like about Vista.  So here we go…

Oh, and please - no emails telling me it was copied from OS X or Plan 9 or wherever. I’m trying to keep things simple here by comparing Windows to Windows, not Windows to everything else. Let’s save that discussion for later.

1. Start menu
   I like the ability to start typing on the start menu and find the program I’m looking for that way.
2. Internet connection icon
   Nice to be able to see in the system tray when I’m connected to the Internet. Shame it doesn’t work properly, and downgrades my access to local only, when machines on the same LAN are working fine, but hey - you can’t have everything. (Okay, enough of that - let’s stay positive. Move on…)
3. Games
   The revamped Spider Solitaire, Freecell and so on are quite nice to look at, but the real improvement is the improved undo. Finally, you can undo the move that broke a game, or go back right to the start of a game if you want to, or undo a deal in Spider Solitaire. Nice to see something working again. (Putting LAN play back into Hearts would be nice though. Oh, I said I wasn’t going to do that any more, didn’t I?)
4. Installer
   Surprisingly, the installer for Vista is much simpler, and safer to use. Too many times I’ve had to reinstall operating systems because of various software or hardware problems, but if something goes wrong on installation, you can usually roll back to the previous version of the operating system. Nice.
5. Ease of access centre
   Accessibility is much better in Vista, and finally there’s no chance that some irritating sysadmin won’t install it - always a pain for techies trying to support someone who needs the narrator or magnifier.
6. Speech recognition
   Finally, no need to shell out another 75 big ones on Dragon Dictate to make a few Word documents. (Although isn’t Vista more than 75 notes more expensive than… sorry, I’m at it again!)
7. Volume controls for each application
   Probably the reason why DirectX 10 lost hardware-accelerated audio. For everything there’s a trade-off, I suppose, and the app-specific volume level can be exceptionally useful. That said, I’d like an option to choose between accelerated audio and this one, even if it meant rebooting to do it.
8. Better power management
   It’s been needed for a while, and although there are some problems with it, at least finally there is a consistent interface for it, and the management tools are a bit better than most vendor tools I’ve used.
9. System Configuration Utility
   A bit hidden (it’s in Administrative Tools), but I’ve seen people selling shareware utilities that don’t even do what this one does.  You can edit boot.ini nice and safely,  switch services on and off and edit what programs run at startup.  I’m sure you can think of several utilities out there that do pretty much what I’ve just described, only they cost a tenner or so…
10. Enhanced disk manager
    I know, this is going to sound a bit odd: after all, it’s hardly Partition Magic, is it?  That said, it’s quite useful sometimes to be able to just make the odd change without having to boot into it.  (Especially since I haven’t upgraded PM since version 5, which doesn’t handle Vista’s version of NTFS…)

Well, there’s the balancing list.  Anything on there you agree or disagree with?

OK, my last post was about DirectX 10,  and why I thought it might be Microsoft’s biggest mistake of all time.  So now I revert to the pair of posts I was originally going to make: 10 things I do and don’t like about Vista.  I’m doing this one first out of laziness because I now have only 9 to do 

1. Performance
   Vista is slower than XP, which in turn was slower than Windows 2000.  It does feel funny running a 2GHz processor that used to run XP as fast as lightning, and having it perform like the older PC upstairs running Windows 2000.  Worse, Service Pack 1 won’t fix it, either.
2. Internet Explorer 7
   It’s not much faster or better than Internet Explorer 6, and yet it manages to claw its way back to the front every now and again and displace Firefox as default browser.  Naughty.
   Oh, and of course, there’s  always the fact that they’ve changed the rendering engine significantly to eliminate some, but not all of the rendering problems with IE.  So we just have another version of IE to test everything against.  Thanks for that.
3. DirectX 10
   Well, as I said yesterday…
4. Aero
   I like being able to choose the colours of things.  It gives me a feeling that there’s an area of my life, however small, where I have some control.  Now I get a single colour to change, and the only one that looks good is the black.  And even when you do that you still can’t change the highlight colour. Reminds me of the quote from Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy about black buttons with black writing on a black background lighting up black when you press them…
5. Windows Media Player
   Yet again, another one that keeps snooping on you.  While I use VLC to counter most of its DRM infested  horribleness,  it’s still embedded in things like Channel 4’s 4oD. Which is still, currently, better than the BBC’s effort.
6. User Account Control
   When you try to do anything to your PC, like install software, you have to wade through half a dozen inconsistent prompts (allow the program or cancel? Continue or cancel). Then sometimes it will fail because of permissions anyway and you have to start again, as administrator.
   You can tun it off, of course, but then the Security Centre will sit there and irritate you instead…
7. Disk Defragmenter
   There used to be visual feedback on the defrag. It used to be quite fascinating (in a monotonous sort of way) to sit back and watch the show. Now a little dialog box sits there. Or, the defrag kicks in late at night, halfway through that late-night gaming session you already know you shouldn’t be having. This is especially true during racing games, especially the ones that make you do an entire quarter-hour race without saving, so that defrag can kick in and slow the machine to a crawl on the last lap, the first time you’re leading the race, so you end up flipping three times in the air and coming last.
   Not that I’m bitter, you understand.
8. Cleartype
   Supposedly, it makes it much easier to see the fonts by adding more smoothing, designed for LCD screens. (All right, I know this one came in with XP Media Centre edition, but hear me out.) You can’t tune it (at least not that I’ve found) without a third-party addon. You can, of course, turn it off - which looks fine on CRTs, but looks a little bit worse on LCDs. Why provide the feature without the ability to make it work properly? Unless Microsoft get paid by a sinister secret society of corrupt ophthalmologists, of course…
9. Automatic Updates
   Some of us have download limits with our ISPs (actually, don’t we all nowadays?) So when automatic updates downloaded a 50MB service pack for Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition - when I had it on my USB drive already - I wasn’t best pleased.
10. Windows Explorer
    I didn’t rank this list, but if I had, this would be number one. The rewrite seems to have made it much slower, it has so many toolbars around it that it takes forever to change folder, there’s nothing displayed in the title bar (I mean, ever - what’s up with that?), the twisty things next to folders fade in and out with disconcerting ease. And worst of all, the wait for the CD to spin up as soon as you launch Explorer with a CD in is still there, continuing a Windows tradition of annoying people that dates back to Windows 95 release 1.

Worst of all, of course, there are plenty of others that could have made this list: Security Centre, Windows Genuine Advantage, Vista’s in-build CD burning features.  I could go on, but I’m sure everyone could make a list like this just like me.  However, tomorrow, I shall redress the balance a little by highlighting ten things I like about Vista.

I was thinking this morning, lying in bed, half asleep, about writing two articles: ten things I like, and ten things I don’t, about Windows Vista.  I got to about number three on the “don’t” list -DirectX 10 - and the more I thought about it, the more I realised that it could actually turn out, in the long run, to be the biggest mistake Microsoft’s ever made with the Windows platform: worse that Bob, worse than Windows ME, worse even than the behated Windows Genuine Disadvantage.

So what’s wrong with DirectX 10?  After all, it supports a load of smart new features, such as XInput, XACT, ShaderModel 4 and so on.  It also contains a Direct3D 9 layer, and can run Direct3D 9 games without a problem.

Yes, but not everyone plays just the latest games, do they?  After all, the hardware requirements for most new games tends to be quite beefy - I personally didn’t buy Doom 3 when it first came out, despite my desperate longing for it, because it would have required me to spend about £300 just to meet the minimum required hardware, even though my computer at the time wasn’t that old.

Besides which, everyone has their favourite games from yesteryear that they still play - this is why the Playstations still have backward compatability mode, and why these controllers with hundreds of built in Commodore 64 or Atari games are still so popular.

Take, for example, Carmageddon 2, one of my favourites.  Because DirectSound has been deprecated, and sound is no longer hardware-accelerated (a surefire way to get games to run slower, by the way), C2 runs in total silence.   What’s the point in running over pedestrians if you can’t hear them squelch?  And it really takes the fun out of the pedestrian electro-bastard ray…

And companies are now making both DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 versions of their games.  This is a bit of a disaster for Microsoft, really - it’s back to the days when DirectX was just starting and they were trying to get everyone onto Windows 95 instead of DOS and Windows 3.1.

Oh all right, I know what you’re thinking: I’m whining just because  I can’t play Carma2.  Well, actually, I can.  I just install it in a VirtualPC session on Windows 2000.  What I lose in hardware acceleration (and C2 used to run smoothly on a 300MHz processor with no 3D acceleration) I gain in being able to hear what’s going on.  Problem solved.

But what’s got me thinking that this is a big mistake is something I saw in the supermarket the other day.

Round the corner from me is a shopping park, complete with supermarkets and PC World.  Now the supermarket I usually go into used to have a big display of PC games that took up the same shelf space as the PS3, Wii and XBox 360 allocations combined.  About a week ago, all that changed.

The supermarket has expanded its games range, from two racks to three.  One for PS3, one for Wii, and one for Xbox 360, PSP and Nintendo DS (essentially, that one’s unchanged from before).  PC games are - apparently - stocked on the bottom shelf of the PS3 rack (a rack being about 16 shelves high and 3 feet wide.)  However there isn’t a PC title in sight any more - all the PC titles are now in the bargain section, round the corner.  All one of them.

Well, maybe it’s competition from the PC World round the corner.  After all, they don’t sell console stuff, do they?  Oh, they do.  Ah.

So obviously the supermarket are selling more games, but to console buyers.  And it’s obviously the PS3 and the Wii that are increasing sales.  What Microsoft really don’t need is for their own developers to pull the rug out from under the Windows gaming market, potentially persuading people to go elsewhere.  Especially when your own console is having problems of its own.

Sales of Vista haven’t been going well, by all accounts.  Microsoft have had to capitulate and allow manufacturers to start selling XP once more.  It’s like Windows ME all over again.   For something so hyped, with the advertising suggesting that Vista has the “wow” factor, it’s looking more and more like Vista has the “ow” factor.

What with CNet rating Vista as one of the ten worst tech products of all time (along with the C5,  Atari Jaguar and the Amstrad em@iler), sales of Vista massively down on XP,  grumbles about WPA, moans about poor performance that SP1 won’t solve, five year old bugs coming back to haunt you and the recommended minimum memory for Vista being more than for Windows for Supercomputers,  I’d suggest that if you own shares in Microsoft, now would be the time to sell them, before things get any worse.

So if I were in charge of policy at Microsoft?  It’s quite simple.  I’d be round to the DirectX and SP1 developers with a big stick with a nail through it and a pile of old games.  Then I’d - shall we say suggest? - that until these don’t run, their work ain’t done.