Doug's Mailbag: Making Vista Run Smooth, Favorite Mobile OS, More -- Redmondmag.com

Barney's Blog

Doug's Mailbag: Making Vista Run Smooth, Favorite Mobile OS, More

Apparently, government agencies have figured out a way to make Vista run smoothly (many of them will be upgrading to Windows 7 from that OS, rather than XP). Fred figured out how to do it, too:

I made sure the notebook I could only get with Vista -- and not XP Pro which I'd have preferred -- came with a good 3GB of RAM (to minimize swapping), and disabled UAC (only way I could get write access to my HOSTS file).
-Fred

After Microsoft's release of Windows Mobile 6.5, Doug asked readers to share their favorite mobile OS. The answers so far aren't in Microsoft's favor:

This is a surprising question because the answer is obvious (and sorry, but being a Microsoft puppet, you are not going to like it). It is the iPhone.

Microsoft is lucky to have a franchise called Windows; it is the de facto choice even if it is not good. We make money because off of it but we do not like the company. We especially do not like the CEO. There is no innovation from the company.
-Dhiren

My favorite phone is the iPhone. As soon as 2.0 was released, it became a useful corporate (i.e., MS Exchange) tool. It works reliably, unlike the Treo, and it doesn't require me to maintain a server, like the BlackBerry. The interface is as intuitive as TiVo. And unlike TiVo, features get added regularly!

Most importantly, it features an intuitive UI that just makes sense, unlike the Office 2007 ribbon and so many other things out of Redmond.
-Todd

And Walt gives his Bing feedback -- and it's not very good:

I was looking for some information on installing the VS.NET 2008 Remote Debugger a couple of weeks ago, and for some reason, when I asked for Google from IE, it threw me over to Bing. I searched for "vs.net 2008 remote debugger." The mish-mash of stuff that came up there was very unhelpful.

I then re-requested Google and got it. Bingo -- found what I wanted with the same exact search within the first two items returned! How can Microsoft not even deeply index their own sites as well as Google does?
-Walt

Share your thoughts by writing a comment here or sending an e-mail to [email protected].

Posted by Doug Barney on 10/12/2009 at 1:17 PM

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