PC Fashion Plate

Redmond also wants PCs to be cool. The Vista Aero interface is definitely slick, and Microsoft wants hot-looking machines to go along with its hot software. So who better to design these things than today's top fashion designers?

Posted by Doug Barney on 09/03/20080 comments

Defending Mojave

Some critics bashed the whole thing as a set up, arguing that Vista was running on super high-end hardware to make it look good. Microsoft is fighting back, pointing out that Mojave/Vista is running on year-old HP laptops with just a couple gigs of RAM.

Posted by Doug Barney on 09/03/20080 comments

Google Browser Nearing Reality

Google must have been reading Redmond magazine. I wrote a column for Redmond, "The Barney Browser," in June 2008. My idea was for Google to build a browser and focus on intelligently storing searches, along with archiving the overall process of exploration. I wrote: "The Google Barney Browser integrates searching with a file system so the intelligence that comes from searches can be organized, used, shared and built upon. Perhaps these strings of pages can be cached so if the site goes down, the information isn't lost."

Posted by Doug Barney on 09/02/20080 comments

Mailbag: Vista This, Vista That

I read your article in Redmond Report and just wanted to respond. The main driver for our organization wanting to continue to run XP is the stability of the OS, minimal issues, and the cost in time and money to replace old hardware. Today, these older desktop machines run acceptably well with XP, but they would not meet the hardware requirements for the new OS.

Secondly, we have monitored the issues surrounding Vista and believe we would be significantly adding to our work load if we migrated. Most organizations have more work on their to-do list than they have resources to accomplish them, leaving only the most critical and cost-effective projects to be funded. The value is not high enough to make the move at a corporate level.
-Jonathan

Even with all the problems we had with the XP SP3 upgrade, I still like XP a lot more than Vista!
-Tony

I tell all of my customers and clients not to buy anything with Vista on it. If you really need a new system, look online for machines that still ship with XP. Often, these are refurbished machines, so the end user has a tough choice to make: get an antiquated machine with XP or I can de-Vistafy your machine for you. And people are buying it; there is an actual demand for this service. What choice does the user have? Try to work with Vista and pray that any software they buy that isn't explicitly rated for Vista has a 50/50 chance of working, and you all know the penalty for returning opened software.

This Vista debacle is beyond belief. Learning Linux, any distro, is easier than dealing with Vista. The tech support time is so high that it is prohibitive. The only people who have made money on Vista is Microsoft, and while I have nothing against capitalism, this is out and out theft. Vista does not work, and NO amount of patching by Microsoft will ever get it to work with the ease and finesse of XP Pro. This has to be illegal, but who can afford to sue Microsoft?
-Ari

I work for a school district and we have no plans to move to Vista.
-Anonymous

The poor economy has less to do with our reluctance to go to Vista here at the City of Eugene, than the fact that there is no perceived advantage to go to Vista, even with some increase in security. The UAC, with all its prompting, is seen by management as too burdensome for the users. There is great reluctance on the part of upper management to force this on our users. The move to Vista would be costly in having to upgrade many workstations to 1GB or more of memory. Then the departments would see an annoying UAC and no bang for their buck after buying more memory.

The culture here is "everybody a local admin." With IT already seen as a cost center, we really don't want to make the departments pay more money in hardware costs for an annoying OS. There have been suggestions in upper management that if we went to Vista, we are to rip the UAC out of our install set. No increase in security with a hardware cost to the users translates into no Vista for us.
-Robert

After many hours of saving and retrieving ghost images from my XP machine, I decided to upgrade to Vista. What a big mistake! I have now decided to downgrade back to XP, because I cannot connect to the Vista machine using NET USE after many hours of trying, and I am sick and tired of searching for solutions. It shouldn't be that hard for an experienced IT pro. Computers are supposed to make life easier, and upgrades are supposed to do just that -- upgrade. Vista is not ready for prime time.
-Richard

I'm waiting for Vista SP2, hoping that will finally restore the Fax Wizard that even XP Home had, and that MS, in its infinite wisdom, opted to leave out of Vista Home Premium. But I'm not holding my breath waiting, and my hopes aren't high. I'm more likely to go the dual-boot route with Ubuntu, where a fax printer is just another package that's part of the distribution.

Beats me how Microsoft can think it's encouraging customer loyalty when it refuses to allow customers to buy the MS products they want.
-Fred

Posted by Doug Barney on 09/02/20080 comments

A Patch for an IE Patch

Posted by Doug Barney on 09/02/20080 comments

Patch That Web!

The Web is a wilder, woollier and perhaps more dangerous world. Researchers and vendors such as Cenzic have been pointing out how unpatched many Web servers and apps are. In fact, Cenzic claims that seven out of 10 sites aren't safe.

Posted by Doug Barney on 09/02/20080 comments

Could IE 8 Be Great?

Microsoft is trying to entice people like me back into the fold with IE 8, now in its second beta. The new browser steals one cool feature of Firefox: When your browser dies, it will restore your old session, including all the tabs.

Posted by Doug Barney on 08/28/20080 comments

Consumers Voting with Their Downgrades

So why would over a third of new PC customers go through the trouble and expense of downgrading to XP? Because XP works!

There are many people that like Vista -- even some that really like it (though I have yet to hear the word "love" used). But for way too many, Vista is slow, unpredictable and incompatible. Microsoft needs a Manhattan Project to fix or replace Vista tout de suite. After all, as Bill Gates used to say, "It's only software."

Posted by Doug Barney on 08/28/20080 comments

Mailbag: Mac Servers and Virtualization

We don't use Mac servers, and I don't know anyone that uses Mac servers in an enterprise environment. And using them to drive VM Vista or XP desktops is even more out there. I'm sure there are a few people out there, but I very much doubt that it is close to 23 percent, or even 3 percent. They may be counting non-Windows as a whole as Mac servers (Unix, Linux, BSD, Mac).
-Dustin

I have not seen a single Mac server in an enterprise IT computer room. Who are these virtual people?
-Anonymous

Well, we sort of use Mac servers. Being that we are a large university, there is not much control over what the faculty or even tech workers for individual departments do. I'm guessing that there are about 10 or so, but none in the datacenter. I don't know of any that are being used to run virtual Windows machines.
-Charlie

Yes, I use Macs for Hyper-V. I run Win 2003 images on a Dell with Win 2008. However, I have some Win XP and Win NT images that were virtualized on MS VS 2005. When I migrated them over to the Hyper-V on Win 2008, I discovered that Hyper-V only supports Vista, Win 2003, and Win 2008 and above. I also saw that Hyper-V will only support two cores per image on Win 2003 images, and I can only assign cores in multiples of two.

On my Mac Pro, I run Parallels Hyper-V server for Mac. It runs my Win XP images just fine. Also, I can assign up to eight cores to any image including Win 2003 and in multiples of 1. I have a Win 2003 Enterprise image as a TS assigned with three cores, not possible with Hyper-V. Performance seems to by equitable between images running on the Mac and the Dell. However, I have not been able to add Win 2003 images running on Mac to a server farm that has images running on the Dell.
-Stephen

Posted by Doug Barney on 08/28/20080 comments

Microsoft Lost Another One

Her first machine was a PC laptop -- I never even thought to suggest a Mac. After that one started to die, I suggested a Mac; it would save me some headaches and her some heartache. Nothing doing. Another laptop, a Toshiba I think, was acquired. The screen on this baby died, and once again I pitched Apple, pointing to her brothers' experience. Nope -- this time, an HP fit the bill. Now it's two years later, and the HP is getting slower and less trustworthy. Another PC? No, sir. This time Lauren demanded a Mac.

Posted by Doug Barney on 08/28/20080 comments

IT Lost an Advocate

You may ask what that means to you. Well, that boss was Ed Foster, creator of InfoWorld's Gripe Line, a column that took vendors to task for rampant rip-offs, poor products and shoddy support.

Foster wrote this column for years, crafting countless words and putting vendors on notice. Ed left us late last month.

Posted by Doug Barney on 08/27/20080 comments

Mailbag: Red Hat Security

I think that Red Hat getting hacked was a good thing. I am a die-hard Linux user, but I do not go with the crowd that thinks that if you are using any non-Microsoft OS, then you are safe from bad ware. Humans make mistakes; the software that we create will have bugs, and bugs lead to holes, and holes are how the bad boys get in. The sooner everyone starts thinking about security, the better.

I have to admit that I do feel safer using Linux and Firefox while I am surfing the Web, just as the people in the Twin Towers felt safe on Sept. 11, 2001, just before the planes hit.
-Raymond

I have countered for years that Mac and open source operating systems are not targets -- not because they are so secure, but because there were so few of them. The more that are out there, the more they will be hacked. The hackers want quantity. It only makes sense that they will concentrate their efforts where they will get the most results for the least amount of work.
-Bernie

It is Microsoft's licensing that really burns me up, not so much whether it has a better product than others. I'm not sure why those who clamor around Microsoft don't get that. While there have been some who have made silly claims about open source and its security, at least a company that uses FOSS or OSS can hire someone (if they don't possess in-house talent) to review code to ensure that everything is up to snuff. I have a few clients who have done just that with Internet-facing Linux systems -- and it is one thing you cannot do with closed source, no matter who it is. And that is the difference and is why I will always look for an open source alternative for anything I use and recommend.
-Anonymous

Posted by Doug Barney on 08/27/20080 comments