The good folks at Books24x7 are putting on a series of online seminars under the Windows Vista Essentials label. Later this week, I’ll be sitting down with my Windows Vista Inside Out sidekick, Carl Siechert, to host a 45-minute presentation on how to make the transition from XP to Vista without going insane.

We’ve put together a pretty good presentation that should work for IT professionals and power users alike.  It doesn’t cost a dime, and we’d love to have you in the audience.

Details are here (or just click the image below). You’ll need a Java-enabled browser, and if you call in to the toll-free number you can ask us questions.

To sweeten the deal, I’ve got two copies of Windows Vista Inside Out ready to sign and give away to people who respond to this post. I’ll have a drawing after the seminar: to get your name in the hat, register for the seminar and post a comment here. I’ll draw two names from the list of seminar attendees.

Yes, it’s early in the month, but I think it’s safe to declare a winner of the September Error Message of the Month competition and let the other contenders wait till October:

(Courtesy of the programmers who are building the new version of Yahoo Music. In all fairness, they have labeled this a beta, so a bug or two should come as no surprise. And apparently this is a JScript .NET error specific to Microsoft Visual Studio 2003/.NET Framework 1.1. But still…) 

Last week, I was baffled when Word 2007 began crashing each time I closed the program. This was happening on a secondary system running Windows Vista Business, so I made a mental note to look into it more closely when I had a chance.

Today, I ran across a new Knowledge Base article, 940791, which described a set of symptoms that were a perfect match for mine:

You install an automatic update for Microsoft Office Word 2007 on a Windows Vista-based computer. Additionally, the computer must be restarted after the automatic update is installed. However, if Word 2007 is running when you restart the computer, you may experience the following symptoms:

• The mouse does not work when you use Word 2007.
• You cannot open a Word document from the Search window in Windows Vista.
• You cannot open a Word document from Windows Desktop Search.
• Word crashes when you try to start or to exit Word.

The article doesn’t say which update is to blame, but my money is on either 939159 or 933360, both of which were released on August 29 and rated Important. A quick look at the Windows Update history pane shows that those two updates were applied to my system on August 29, and Event Viewer’s Microsoft Office Sessions log confirms that was the date the Word crashes began. Word 2007 had indeed been running last week when those updates were applied. I remember because I noted that the unsaved document I had been working on had been automatically saved and was automatically reopened after the system restarted.

The fix is fairly simple, As explained in the original article, just delete the following Registry subkey:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Data

Mystery solved.

In the last three days, I’ve heard no less than five complaints about the hassles of reinstalling Windows Vista. And those complaints are right on. It is a major PITA to reinstall Vista. A clean install means you have to update drivers, reinstall (and reactivate) all programs and go through the tedious process of resetting preferences. An upgrade install can take hours and still leave you with a lot of work to do.

But there’s a much better alternative: Create an image-based backup of your system drive. If anything goes wrong, you can roll back to that “good” configuration quickly, with all drivers, software, and settings intact.

Drive Image used to be the gold standard (for me, anyway) followed by Norton Ghost. Then Norton bought Drive Image and mashed the two products together into a horrible mess. (I see that Symantec introduced a Vista-compatible Ghost 12.0 upgrade earlier this year, but I haven’t tried it yet.)

At any rate, I’ve been using three separate image-based backup systems for the past few months. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses, but one will probably work for you. Note that the first is Vista only, but the second and third options in this list work equally well with XP.

• Complete PC Backup This option is included with Vista Business, Ultimate, and Enterprise editions. You get to back up to a local hard disk or to DVD only (there’s a hack that lets you back up to a network drive, but we’ll ignore that for now). In addition, you must back up all system drives; if you have a dual-boot system, you can’t back up the two system partitions separately. Backing up non-system drives is optional. I typically back up to a removable USB hard drive. To restore from a Complete PC backup you boot from the Vista DVD and follow the prompts. Backups are very quick (I just backed up two partitions, containing more than 80GB total, in roughly 25 minutes). Restoring a backup is fast as well.
• Acronis True Image Home I’ve been using this program for almost a year; they were Vista-compatible long before any of the competition. I routinely take snapshots of full drives so that I can restore a given system configuration as needed. You can do a full backup over a network, to a local (internal or external) hard drive, or to removable media. To run a restore, boot from the Acronis CD, which includes drivers for just about any backup media. You can get a free trial here; if you have a shrink-wrapped version, make sure you download the March 2007 update, which adds some important bug fixes and supports Vista x64. The bootable CD will work on any system without requiring registration or activation.
• Windows Home Server I wrote about this at length while it was in beta (I also put together an image gallery that shows the product in action). I’ll have a follow-up review shortly, once the product is available for sale, but let’s just say that I still absolutely love this product. It does full image-style backups over the network, and in a multi-PC household it’s extremely efficient with data storage. I’ve had to restore backups from a Windows Home Server several times, and the process is very easy and straightforward.

If you even think you might someday have to reinstall Windows, you really owe it to yourself to choose one of these options (or an equivalent imaging solution). You’ll thank me later.

I have a new post up at ZDNet:

What you can expect in Vista SP1.

A few months ago, my buddy Robert McLaws smacked Microsoft around for its almost paranoid veil of secrecy about Windows Vista SP1:

Hey Microsoft, we all know it exists. It’s time to quit playing dumb before you start looking stupid. You’re gonna have to let the cat out of the bag sometime. And June sounds like a good month to do it.

Apparently someone at Microsoft thought August was an even better month, which is why they just got around to providing some much-needed details. I’ve got some answers (like why the stand-alone service pack installer is a hefty 1GB) and my colleague Mary Jo Foley has some additional info.

Charlie Owen notes that Windows Media Center is now five years old.

Here’s a little history.

In honor of the occasion, I put together the pictures and descriptions of my new Media Center setup, which is working spectacularly well.

Read all about it over at ZDNet :

Vista Media Center takes over my living room

And check out the pictures, too:

Image gallery: Using Windows Vista as a home theater hub

The good folks at LG Electronics have been kind enough to send me a combo HD-DVD/Blu-Ray drive (but I have to send it back in two weeks). And the good folks at Netflix have been kind enough to take my $16.99 and send me two HD-DVD movies and one Blu-ray disk, all scheduled to arrive on Thursday.

So maybe I don’t have to take sides.

Oh, and in that same post I said:

I was an early adopter of Betamax…

I believe that with those words I officially classified myself as old. If you are also old enough to remember when Betamax hardware and Beta movies were actually new, then you too are old.

I’m reviewing the Drobo right now and am looking for some real-world user experiences. Besides your overall impressions, I’m especially interested in learning how you’ve used this device and whether you’ve noticed issues with noise.

If you’ve got a Drobo, leave a comment here. If you’d prefer to communicate offline, drop me an e-mail message: ed[hyphen]blog[at]bott[dot]com.

Bulletin in the Wall Street Journal (subscription only) just now:

Paramount is dropping support for the Blu-ray format opting to offer all its next-generation DVDs in HD DVD, further complicating the race between the competing technologies.

I was an early adopter of Betamax. Not making that mistake again.

Update: Details now available here.

I have two lengthy pieces up at ZDNet today. In one, I explain why I think Jim Louderback (who just left PC Magazine) is guilty of whining about Vista. And in the follow-up, I explain why we the Windows world would be a better place if we had more complaining (and less whining) about Vista.

Yeah, there’s a difference.