Comments on: How’s That New Version Going, Bill Pt. 2

By: Bryan

Bryan — Mon, 14 May 2007 18:34:38 +0000

Welcome back to the slog of blogs. You really don’t want to know want they don’t do for the people who use Cyrillic or other alphabets.

By: Mitch

Mitch — Mon, 14 May 2007 08:50:06 +0000

Duh!!!! I am a beta tester too and my version of Premium Home Edition is in French, so NO hope for me!

By: Bryan

Bryan — Mon, 07 May 2007 05:46:00 +0000

I’m still using Office 2000 because the “improvements” didn’t do anything for me. It’s the same with the move to Vista, and don’t need or want any of the “improvements.” More features does not a better program make. They put some effort into those feature on Outlook to wipe out Lotus Notes. Don’t expect much now that Lotus is fading away.

I still have some DOS programs that I use because I’ve never found adequate replacements. The big thing is that they product pure ASCII output that any platform can use. That isn’t an option in the programs designed to replace them on Windows.

By: Steve Bates

Steve Bates — Mon, 07 May 2007 05:33:15 +0000

As you know, I followed through on my “threat”: I’m typing this comment on a brand new machine with Windows XP SP2. I refuse to be Bill’s beta tester for Vista unless he pays me to do so. And not surprisingly, none of my clients are committing to Vista either. I’m beginning to believe Microsoft has made a serious mistake.

I cannot quite give up Microsoft Office yet on at least one desktop machine. I’m too heavily committed to a few things, especially Outlook’s features other than email. I don’t care what email client s/w I use; I keep most of my email on the web service on which I receive it anyway, and view it with their webmail. But calendars and notes and phone lists and task lists are not as easy to replace as browsers and email clients. I wish Mozilla would create such things comparable in quality to Firefox and Thunderbird… or at least good enough to allow me to replace Outlook.

Oh, and my billing is set up in an old Access 2000 database. In good times, when I have more than a trickle of work, I rather need that. 🙂 OpenOffice.org 2.1 covers many needs, but their database just isn’t quite up to standard yet for my purposes.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Sun, 06 May 2007 02:40:39 +0000

If you have a matched system, it should go fairly smoothly, but if you have a mission critical program that isn’t from Microsoft, you may have problems.

People/clients who have upgraded an older machine have lost speed because of the size of the OS.

Good luck on swapping houses. I have friends in California who have been in your position, a house in place and their job in other. It’s a drag. Two may live as cheaply as one, but not if they are maintaining two households.

By: Rook

Rook — Sun, 06 May 2007 02:28:26 +0000

I’ve got to be honest, I have Vista, and I am not having all that much problem; actually, none at all. Of course, it’s the Premium Home Addition and I do not have to use it in conjunction with a Network server program such as Novell, so I don’t hit all the bugs. And I am basically getting all new software to go along with it.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Sat, 05 May 2007 18:24:12 +0000

The multimedia issues are the most vexing. If they get a deal over Quicktime, it becomes less of an issue and leaves Windows media behind, but Apple isn’t very open about anything.

That ‘trusted hardware” is a big problem for a lot of sys admins. It’s hard enough trying to track down what users are doing without having the the damn OS changing things behind your back. It would be one thing if you could rely on the OS making good decisions, but it has been a long time since I’ve trusted anything stamped Microsoft, DOS 3.1, as I remember.

By: BadTux

BadTux — Sat, 05 May 2007 16:37:46 +0000

Vista is the main reason my next laptop is going to be a Macbook. What a disaster, in so many ways. The whole “trusted hardware” thingy, for example, is just a nightmare. Either people will firewall their systems so they can’t “phone home” to Mommy Microsoft and thus can’t get virus updates, thus making Vista so virus-riddled that it’s unusable, or you allow your system to “Phone Home” and Mommy Microsoft can turn off parts of your system at any time if they decide your hardware is no longer “trusted”. What a choice.

And no, Linux isn’t there yet on the desktop. The biggest issue is with support of Quicktime and Windows Media video, both of which are proprietary protocols that the respective owners (Apple and Microsoft) refuse to open up. My advice: If you’re making downloadable video of your own, make it either in RealPlayer or FlashPlayer format, both of which are well supported on Linux.

-Badtux the Computer Penguin