I’ve been meaning to recommend IE7 Pro for a long time and just haven’t gotten around to it. So I was glad when this bit from Charles Arthur’s latest column in the Guardian reminded me:

What happens when you quit your browser, or it crashes, and you had lots of work on the go? That’s when you need session restoring – which brings back the tabs and windows you had open, and reloads them.

It’s so necessary, and obvious, that the most remarkable thing about it is that neither Internet Explorer nor Safari, the two browsers from the companies that dominate desktop OSs, presently have it.

In addition to session management, it has an ad blocker, tab management, a user-agent switcher, spell-checking, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Did I mention it’s free and that the developers update it regularly? I’ve been using IE7 Pro for months on Vista without any significant problems to report.

If you use IE7, this is a must-have add-in.

… Just to clarify, based on at least one comment, IE7 Pro is an add-on for IE7. It uses the standard Internet Explorer add-on hooks and security model. It is not at all comparable to full-blown tabbed browsers like Maxthon and Avant, which use the IE rendering engine but completely replace the interface with their own menus, toolbars, and functionality.

Long is “afraid of Microsoft fleeing back to the pre-Scoble stone-age.” The proximate cause is a list of suggestions for the next version of Windows, submitted by beta testers (I wasn’t invited). The next thing you know, a summary of the most popular suggestions, many of them impractical or unlikely or illegal, is being touted as the feature set for the next version of Windows. Which it isn’t. And the guy who posted the list on Microsoft’s Channel 9 forum gets chewed out publicly for doing “illegal stuff.”

I suppose it’s tempting here to do my best Homer Simpson Kent Brockman (D’oh!) impersonation and say, “I, for one, welcome our new Windows overlords.” But my take is simple: Talk’s cheap. The next version of Windows will be out in 2009-2010. A bunch of stuff in the current version needs to get fixed between now and then. If Sheriff Sinofsky can get his team to talk less and do more, that’s just fine with me.

It dawned on me the other day that I’ve been running Windows Vista and Office 2007 full-time since December 2005. During that time, I’ve cycled more than a dozen desktop and notebook PCs through my office, using each one for at least a few weeks and getting as much hardware experience as I could with Vista.

Since Vista’s release last November, I’ve been slowly upgrading and replacing most of the PCs I use for different tasks. Over at ZDNet, I share my current hardware specs in Hardware notebook: What I look for in a Vista PC. Here’s the short version:

• CPU – On a budget, get AMD. Willing to spend more? You’ll get more performance from an Intel Core 2 Duo or quad-core with at least 4MB of Level 2 cache.
• RAM – 1GB is enough, but the upgrade to 2GB is cheap and does wonderful things for performance.
• Hard disks – I recommend having at least twice as much hard disk space as you have data. Now that 500GB drives are in the $100 range, they’re an easy desktop upgrade.
• Video – Onboard video gets a bad rap. Current versions of onboard video from both Intel and Nvidia are perfectly capable of running Vista’s Aero UI at full speed. I recommend a separate GPU if you use multiple monitors. I’m not a gamer, but everything I read from the community says serious gamers should avoid Vista for now.

I’ve been using the same desktop PC – a Dell XPS 210 – for more than three months now. It’s been stable, fast, and mostly trouble-free. In that time, Vista’s Reliability Monitor has been a surprisingly effective way to pinpoint and troubleshoot problems, a topic I plan to tackle in a follow-up post, Meanwhile, here’s a snapshot of its performance for the last month (for more details, see the longer ZDNet post):

If you’ve been running Vista for more than a month, you can check your Reliability Index easily:

1. Click Start and type perfmon in the Search box.
2. Click the Perfmon.exe shortcut, which should be the only listing in the Programs category at the top of the Search Results list (you’ll need to supply an administrator’s credentials in the UAC box).
3. In the Reliability and Performance console window, click Reliability Monitor, under the Monitoring Tools category.

I have to admit, I was initially skeptical that this tool was more than a gimmick, but over time it’s proven to be a good indicator of a system’s health. In the example here, that steadily rising line is a good thing to see.

If you’ve been using Vista for more than a month, what does your Reliability Index look like? Anything about the data you see there that you find puzzling? Share your results and ask questions in the Comments below.

One of the tools I use daily is Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1. (As an aside, could they have come up with a worse product name?)

Over the weekend I installed SUSE Linux 10.2 in a virtual machine. Took forever, but it’s working. Performance is awful, however, a situation that could easily be resolved if I could install the Virtual Machine Additions for Linux, which were originally released for use with Beta 1 of VS2005 R2 SP1 and updated last October. But since the official release of VS2005 R2 SP1 on June 11 those additions seem to have disappeared.

The Linux Guest Support for Virtual Server 2005 R2 page (dated April 3, 2006) is still available. It says the Virtual Machine Additions for Linux are available on Microsoft Connect, but it appears they were pulled when the beta program shut down.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think this is a conspiracy, I think someone at Microsoft just dropped the ball here.

If anyone from Microsoft is reading this, can you let the world know where these files have gone to?

In doing a little research to see whether systems built around Intel’s new Core 2 Quadro were worth the extra cost, I ran across a review of several pre-production systems from Tom’s Hardware. In typical TH fashion, the story is sliced into something like 16 pages. This Editor’s Opinion on Page 14 was pretty enthusiastic:

For me, working with one of the first quad core systems was amazing. No matter how many applications you run at the same time, the system reacts to user commands quickly. Some applications require half the time to finish tasks. To me, it’s like being catapulted a year into the future and is unlike the past few years when computing power increased only marginally. Intel pumped out 30% more performance with Core 2 Duo and will double that again with Core 2 Quadro soon.

So here it is 10 months later, and I’m starting to see quad-core Intel systems at (sort of) reasonable prices. But is that breathless opinion from last year still valid? If you’ve seen any more recent reviews, pass along links. Or, even better, if you’re using a quad-core system yourself, how is it working for you? Leave a note in the comments.

Just to be clear, I’m not talking about the ridiculously expensive Core 2 Extreme line. In this case, I’m talking about the Q6600, a quad-core CPU with 8MB of L2 cache and a clock speed of 2.4GHz. Evilkat, in the comments section, points to The Tech Report, where I found this review, which concluded:

Meanwhile, Intel’s quad-core processors are just amazing. Their performance doesn’t seem to be significantly impacted by a front-side bus bottleneck, contrary to what one might expect. They typically scale up to four threads at least as well as Quad FX systems. Their power use is restrained, and as we anticipated, the Core 2 Quad Q6600 looks to be even more power-efficient than the Core 2 Extreme QX6700. In fact, the Q6600 proved to be the most power-efficient processor in our render energy test, beating out dual-core chips in the process. That’s poster-boy-type behavior for the multi-core revolution.

That’s pretty high praise for a chip that can easily live in a $1500 system.

Congratulations to the following people whose e-mail addresses were drawn from the respondents to my recent survey. Each won a free copy of Windows Vista Inside Out:

• Conrad E. Yunker
• Joe Bronikowski
• Eric Dozier
• Wayne Arensman
• David Brueck

I’ve just sent a follow-up e-mail to the fifth winner, who didn’t respond to my first attempt. If I don’t hear back by Tuesday, I’ll draw another name.

Update: The fifth and final recipient has now checked in, bringing this installment to a close. Thanks again to everyone who responded.

Long Zheng is shocked, shocked to discover that A-list online writers, given the choice between getting to the top of Techmeme or waiting to do some fact-checking, choose to hit Publish:

When the blogs catch fire, there’s really no stopping, even when it’s burning the wrong house. I’ve made several mistakes in the past so this is not a cheap shot at other bloggers, but something like this clearly demonstrates how susceptible blogs can become to misinformation spreading like wild fire and how that problem can be compounded by the Chinese-whispers effect.

In this case, a video-on-demand software made by British developer, Skinkers, can be mislabeled as “Microsoft’s Joost-killer” when it’s not made by Microsoft at all. …

The real surprise came when the streams of A-listers jumped on the story without really investigating the real story. May I be so bold as to suggest some of these bloggers fought so hard to get the story out sooner than doing any real facts-checking? I’m no blogosphere-expert but it’s not the first time this has happened.

Imagine that.

And not only do they not bother to get the story right in the first place, they rarely do corrections either.

Continue reading “Welcome to the echo chamber, Long” →

Thanks to everyone who participated in my recent site survey, conducted by the good folks at Federated Media. We received an excellent response, and as promised I’m sharing some of the results here.

Of the five custom questions I added to the survey, I was most interested in seeing what operating systems you’re using. Here’s the result from the survey (note that numbers add up to more than 100% because of multiple responses).

Based on this survey, nearly two-thirds of the active visitors to this site (as opposed to people who get here via search engines) are using Windows Vista. More than 90% are using Windows XP. I sliced and diced the data a little further to see the relative positions of XP and Vista:

One conclusion that these results have brought home for me is the sea change in how market shares get calculated. The rule used to be “one person, one computer.” According to this survey, more than 76% of you have at least three personal computers in your home, and more than 36% have five or more PCs at home. In that sort of environment, it’s not surprising that more than 20% of you would have at least one Linux box on the network and that roughly one in three have a non-Microsoft operating system (OS X or Linux or both) running on the same network as your Windows machines.

Following up on the earlier post, here’s my understanding of the situation as it affects owners of Creative Audigy cards:

• If you have a stereo gaming PC, with or without a subwoofer, Creative Vista drivers will work just great for you. You don’t need the ALchemy add-on.
• If you have a multi-channel system that you use for media playback, it will work fine with only the Vista drivers. (I know, because I’m in that category.)
• If you play games that use hardware-accelerated 3D audio and EAX on a multi-channel system, you need to install the Creative ALchemy for Audigy software. It costs $9.95

I’m not a gaming expert, so if I got any of that wrong, I know I can count on my readers who are avid gamers to set me straight right away.

Now, the Audigy line is Creative’s budget series. The X-Fi line costs more and does more, and if you own an X-Fi card you can download the  X-Fi edition of Creative ALchemy for free.

This raises all sorts of questions about business models in an industry where profit margins are notoriously slim. If you segment your product line into a budget line and a high-end line, should both sets of customers expect to get the same type of support? The quality of support should be the same, of course, but maybe the high-end customers get free updates while those who buy the budget line have to pay for updates, as Creative decided to do here.

These economic and business decisions are not made in a vacuum. The $30 Audigy SE card I just bought has four jacks on it. Those outputs are fine for making direct connections to speakers, but I needed to pay an extra $16 for a Digital I/O adapter that plugs into RCA jack #4 and includes SPDIF digital/optical inputs and outputs. What percent of customers are going to use this? Way less than 10%, maybe less than 1%. If you add those I/O connectors to every card you make, you drive the cost up for every card and you raise the price for every customer. Or you charge full price to the ones who are going to use this connection. Although I find this business model annoying because it hit me right in the pocketbook, I understand it.

My colleague Adrian Kingsley-Hughes (aka The PC Doctor) usually gets stuff right, but he’s posted a story this morning that appears to be grossly in error:

Creative charging $9.99 for Vista drivers?

From the “that’s gotta be a dumb PR move” files, Creative Labs decides to try to charge $9.99 for Vista compatible drivers for the Audigy range of sound cards.

No, this isn’t April 1st and I kid you not.  Creative really does think that people are going to pay money for a driver. 

I scratched my head over this one, because I just installed a new Audigy SE card in my home theater system on Tuesday, downloaded the drivers (no charge) from Creative’s website, and am happily listening to 5.1 surround sound in my living room. Creative didn’t ask me to pay for these drivers, and I didn’t offer. We both seem to be happy with the deal.

So what’s the real story? Creative’s Vista drivers for the Audigy series are free. In fact, the update I got was posted last week, although the driver files are dated in April. They include full support for all audio features and the basic Creative console application, and they work great.

The upgrade package with the $9.99 price tag is Creative’s ALchemy software. I’ll let them explain:

In Windows Vista, Microsoft removed the Vendor Extension mechanism from Vista’s DirectSound implementation. With previous Windows Operating Systems, the Vendor Extension enabled the Sound Blaster Audigy to provide accelerated audio for DirectSound3D games.

Without Creative ALchemy,most DirectSound games running in Vista will be reduced to stereo output without any EAX effects.

Creative ALchemy (Audigy Edition) restores your Sound Blaster Audigy’s ability to process EAX effects, 3D surround sound, sampling rate conversion and hardware audio mixing for DirectSound3D games in Windows Vista.

Creative Labs had to do some fairly significant software development work to add this feature into their Vista package for older sound cards, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask gamers to help defray some of the cost of development. This shouldn’t be a surprise, either. The company announced its plans back in May.

The trouble with a story like this is it quickly gets bounced around the echo chamber and pretty soon it gets accepted, regardless of the underlying facts. I hope this one gets corrected quickly.

Update: In the comments, Adrian says he disagrees: “No matter how you cut this Ed, people are being asked to pay for drivers.”

Hmm. That’s not what Creative says:

ALchemy is a software application that translates audio calls from one API to another.  ALchemy is NOT a hardware driver, and will require that you have an appropriate driver installed and functioning properly first.

People are being asked to pay for a software update. That’s been going on for a long time. In cases like this, where an OS update breaks compatibility with an existing product, vendors have three choices:

1. Abandon the product and tell their customers it’s not supported on the new OS.

2. Create an update and give it away for free.

3. Create an update and charge for it.

Every decision is different, and every company has to struggle to figure out the right thing to do. That $9.99 price tag seems pretty reasonable to me, especially if the alternative is to abandon the customers because management can’t justify the cost of the development effort otherwise.

Technorati Tags: Creative, Audigy, drivers, Windows Vista