Jeremy’s side of the story. Be sure to watch the video.

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The latest installment of my saga with a Sony Vaio is up at ZDNet now:

Fixing Windows Vista, one machine at a time

If I had bought a machine that worked as poorly as this Sony Vaio, I would have returned it right away, but I’m glad I was able to fix it. And I really hope more OEMs will realize how much crapware sucks. In the case of this Sony Vaio, the biggest irony was the startup message saying "ThirdPartyAppMgr has stopped working." When you can’t even get your crapware installed correctly, it’s time to rethink your process:

One Windows Vista feature that I like a lot is the setup process, which is far more customer-friendly than ever before. With XP, you need to have a product key to complete setup. Without a key, setup just stops. If you have an XP system from an OEM that doesn’t supply Windows reinstallation media but instead uses a recovery partition, you’re completely screwed, because the product key on the side of your case will only work with media built for your system.

By contrast, with Vista you can borrow retail or OEM installation media for any system, do a clean install without a product key, and then take up to 30 days to activate over the phone using the product key on the side of the case. It’s still not the most elegant solution, but it’s a vast improvement over the XP way.

A post by Joel Spolsky announcing a new site he and Jeff Atwood are building (stackoverflow.com) covers the same theme as my recent Don’t believe everything you read, In the process of describing why he’s doing this, he nailed one of my pet peeves. In this passage, he’s talking about programmers, but he could just as easily be talking about newbie end users or IT professionals or Exchange administrators:

[T]hey happily program away, using trial-and-error. When they can’t figure something out, they type a question into Google.

And sometimes, the first result looks like it’s going to have the answer to their exact question, and they are excited, until they click on the link, and discover that it’s a pay site, and the answer is cloaked or hidden or behind a pay-wall, and you have to buy a membership.

And you won’t even get an expert answer. You’ll get a bunch of responses typed by other programmers like you. Some of the responses will be wrong, some will be right, some may be out of date, and it’s hard to imagine that with the cooperative spirit of the internet this is the best thing we programmers have come up with.

Joel’s too polite to mention the sites he’s talking about, but I’m not. I am sick and tired of looking up an error message or a troubleshooting term and getting taken to a link at Experts-exchange.com (I won’t include a link, because I don’t want to send them the traffic and it would only annoy you to see this in action). When you click on that link, you get to read the question someone asked, which is pretty close to the question you asked, but the answers are cloaked with text that says you have to pay for a membership before you’re allowed to read the replies. And it’s apparent from the structure of the replies that there’s no “expert” involved, just a bunch of other (paid) user/members.

Now, I have no argument with Experts Exchange trying to make a living with this economic model. If it works for them, good. But I do object to Google indexing these results and sending me to sites where the landing page is a teaser rather than the actual content I’m looking for. I’m not sure how to register that complaint, but I do know that the Google spider pays a visit here every so often, so maybe I just did.

(h/t to Dwight Silverman for the pointer)

Several people asked me for more details about the software I’m running on my new Dell Inspiron 530. The short answer is Windows Server 2008 Standard, x64. You can get more details about how well the Hyper-V server software works on this system in my latest post at ZDNet:

Is Hyper-V ready for the Windows desktop?

And don’t miss the accompanying image gallery.

Earlier this week I mentioned my saga getting accurate information about memory support for the Dell Inspiron 530. After a BIOS update, I was indeed able to get Windows Server 2008 to recognize all 4 GB of installed RAM. But wait, it gets better.

Newegg has 2GB SDRAM DDR2 800 modules available for $37 each, so I picked up a pair. With shipping, the price tag was under $80. They arrived yesterday, and I swapped them for two of the 1GB modules in the Inspiron 530. According to the manual for this machine, the maximum memory supported is 4GB. But this system had no trouble recognizing the new RAM.

This motherboard will reportedly recognize up to 8GB, when used with a 64-bit OS. With three VMs running (Vista Ultimate and Server 2008 with 1GB each and XP SP3 with 512MB), I’m using a total of 3.61GB. With the new memory, I have room for two or three more VMs.

I’ve been very pleasantly surprised with this machine. It’s very small and ultra-quiet. It has room for two internal drives, and I could easily add an external SATA drive with an inexpensive eSATA adapter. I added a Gigabit Ethernet card in place of the onboard 10/100 Ethernet adapter, but stuck with the integrated audio and video, which are just fine for a server.

Dell is currently selling this machine, with a 2.4 GHz quad-core CPU (Intel Q6600), 3GB of RAM, and a 500GB drive, for $499 (offer ends April 16). That configuration includes XP Home; it can be upgraded to XP Professional for $20. It’s a pretty amazing bargain at that price.

I’ll be in Seattle at my first MVP Summit next week. Looking forward to meeting folks like Aaron Tiensivu and John Walkenbach and a million other smart people. If you’ll be there, leave a comment or drop me a line (you can guess my e-mail, honest).

On days like this I feel grateful I don’t have an editor breathing down my neck demanding that I pontificate about what the latest moves in the Yahoo-Microsoft deal mean.

Last week, the tech blogosphere was abuzz over the news that Bill Gates had inadvertently slipped up and disclosed that Windows 7 would arrive in 2009 instead of in 2010 as originally forecast. The buzz was all based on a single offhand remark that Gates made during a Q&A session in Miami: "Sometime in the next year or so we will have a new version [of Windows]."

Well, there you go. Windows 7 in 2009. Gates said so! Then, as quickly as it began, the story apparently began unraveling and a wave of follow-ups began to appear, reflecting the new conventional wisdom that Bill was getting confused about beta versions or something and that Windows 7 is really going to be out in 2010.

So, what caused this sudden, whiplash-inducing turnaround? A few journalists contacted Microsoft for an official comment on the story, and here’s what they got (as reported by Todd Bishop of The Seattle P-I):

We are currently in the planning stages for Windows 7 and development is scoped to three years from Windows Vista Consumer GA. As is standard with the release of a new product, we will be releasing early builds of Windows 7 prior to its General Availability as a means to gain tester feedback. We’re not sharing additional information at this time.

That’s it. Even in Microsoft’s post-Vista climate of “translucency, as opposed to transparency,” this is an almost impenetrably dense statement. Bishop, who is an honest-to-goodness journalist, reported the statement without comment or interpretation. But bloggers with itchier trigger fingers spent 10 seconds or so looking at the statement and then leaped to conclusions. Here’s a sampling of headlines and relevant quotes from yesterday:

Engadget: Windows 7 still slated for 2010 says Microsoft, Bill Gates just crazy-talking

"Microsoft wants to chill everyone out with the somber news that its got no plans to introduce Windows 7 any earlier than January 2010 (three years from the launch of Vista)…"

Techspot.com: Windows 7 still slated for 2010

"Though many welcomed the news of an OS refresh ahead of schedule (while bashing Vista at the same time), it appears that Windows 7 won’t be ready in its final version any earlier than 2010 – three years from Windows Vista’s rocky introduction to market."

InformationWeek: Windows 7 in 2010, Microsoft says

"Windows Vista was released to consumers in late January 2007. That means Windows 7 would not be released until January 2010, according to Microsoft’s statement."

Did Microsoft really say it has no plans to introduce Windows 7 any earlier than January 2010? I keep looking at that statement and trying to figure out what it really means. A lot of very highly paid corporate communications professionals no doubt worked on that statement for days, and it was, without question, approved by people very near the top of Microsoft’s org chart. Here, read it again:

“…development is scoped to three years from Windows Vista Consumer GA…”

Odd language, isn’t it? “Development is scoped to three years”? What the hell does that mean? One logical interpretation is that the scope of Windows 7 (the full feature set to be included) is based on what can be done within that three-year period. If you’re a manager on the Windows team with a cool feature, you have to be able to guarantee that your code will be fully written, tested, and debugged by the end of next year. If you can’t, your cool feature gets postponed to the release after Windows 7.

And where does Microsoft’s carefully parsed statement say anything about release dates? Yes, “Windows Vista Consumer GA [General Availability],” was on January 30, 2007, and if you add three years to that you get January 30, 2010. That’s the impression that statement was no doubt intended to give, but that’s not what it says.

In fact, I think that date makes no sense at all, as I explain in my latest post over at ZDNet. I’m betting that Windows 7 will be ready in the second half of 2009. I’m even going on the record with my very own wild-assed guess. Think you’re smarter than me when it comes to forecasting what Microsoft will do? Cast your vote in the Windows 7 release date prediction pool.

I finally got sick of constantly moderating and deleting trackback and pingback spam (for a definition, see sping at Wikipedia). So I’ve disabled all trackbacks on all posts, old and new. Comments are still gladly accepted and pretty much open. (You should get approved automatically if you have had a comment previously approved; if you’re a first-time commenter, you might have to fill in a Captcha.)

That’s a shame for the legitimate sites that want to use trackbacks for their legitimate purpose, but I’m sorry to say those sites are being outnumbered by about 20:1.

Using Google to find answers to esoteric questions has built-in risks. In terms of wisdom and experience, the crowd is not always right and certainly not consistently reliable.

Today’s case in point involves a new system I placed into service last week. It’s a Dell Inspiron 530, purchased for about $500 from the Dell Outlet Center two weeks ago, with an Intel Q6600 quad-core processor, 4 GB of RAM, and a 500 GB hard drive. Its role is to replace a three-year-old dual-core Pentium D830 system that I use for testing Windows Server stuff. Installing the RTM version of Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition (x64) was fast and easy. Getting the release candidate of Hyper-V working was a little trickier (more on that later) but it’s also working just fine.

However, this morning, when I went to create a new virtual machine running Windows XP, I was surprised to see an error message telling me I didn’t have enough RAM. Really? I had two other VMs running at the time, each using 1024 MB of RAM. There should have been enough left over for the 512 MB I had specified.

But when I looked at Task Manager on the server, I saw that the system was only recognizing 3.3 GB of RAM. This problem shouldn’t crop up on a 64-bit operating system, unless there’s a problem with the hardware.

So I asked The Google to help, searching for 4gb x64 inspiron 530. And in the top five search results I saw a post from Ubuntu Forums with preview text reading, “The Inspiron 530 has had its BIOS tweaked so that it is not possible to use all 4GB, including windows (Even in 64-bit mode).” A commenter on the same forum as recently as February insisted:

You can search dell community forum and get the same answer. The manual said 4 gb max with note(*) that you will not see 4 gb; so you cannot win this argument with dell. It is crippled in the bios. This is Dell line of low end desktop so people will tell you that Dell will probably not going to uncripple the bios.

And indeed, another post in the top five search results was from the Dell Community forums, with the heading “Inspiron 530 BIOS 1.0.12 does NOT correct 4GB RAM problems … If you read the actual post, you might infer that his real problem is the fact that he’s using a 32-bit version of Windows XP Pro, which will not see more than 3.25 GB of RAM. But how many people will just see that title in the search results list and file away the “fact” that this BIOS update doesn’t work? A search of other posts on the Dell Community forums didn’t turn up any more encouraging words.

Now, I had previously noted that this BIOS update was available (the system I received was using BIOS revision 1.0.10) and had downloaded but not installed it. So I ran the BIOS updater, restarted the system, and … well, see for yourself:

That number had previously been 3316 or so. The only change I had to make to unlock that extra RAM for my 64-bit OS was to update the BIOS. And the conspiracy theorists who were certain that Dell was deliberately “crippling” this system to force customers to buy more expensive hardware? They were … what’s the word I’m looking for here? Oh yeah. They were wrong.

I had a similar experience last week, when I ran across an add-in that promised to make the SnagIt screen capture program (one of my 10 favorite Windows apps of all time) work with Windows Live Writer (another one of the all-time faves on the list my ZDNet readers created). The only review at Microsoft’s Windows Live Gallery said “Doesn’t work. Unusable.” So I tried anyway. And you know what? It works. In fact, it works exactly as advertised and it’s a real timesaver.

Like I said, don’t believe everything you read.

Update: I’ve now upgraded this system to 6GB of RAM. Windows recognizes and uses the entire amount.