Windows XP Rocks / Windows XP Sucks

Over the years I have been annoying people around me with stories about what I love and what I hate about Windows XP. To stop these people from nodding off I have decided to put it all in this blog post that I will update regularly whenever I get frustrated and need to tell someone, anyone.

 

Windows XP Rocks

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Let’s not make it too negative. Windows XP works fine most of the time. Application and hardware support is excellent, performance is OK most of the time and I haven’t seen the Blue Screen Of Death in years.

 

Nothing has increased my productivity more than MSN Desktop Search even though it has a couple of annoying bugs.

 

I have no particular love or hatred for Microsoft, I don’t think they are evil, but I also feel their products are not as good as they could be.

 

 

 

 

Windows XP Sucks

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On with the more negative stuff, always more interesting. Please note that I am not running all kind of third party ‘Pimp-up Windows‘ applications such as Window Blinds and similar applications. The problems described below have been encountered on a number of different systems including freshly installed ones. A full list of the software isntalled on my system can be found here.

• Window Focus problems: These really annoy the hell out of me. Windows 95 suffered from this badly, every application thought it was the most important and focused itself whenever someone farted. Luckily the situation improved tremendously in Windows 2000, I guess the OS was managing things better. However, I am not sure if Windows XP is buggy in this area or if application developers have found ways around this, but the situation seems worse than ever. Every application is trying to get on top when you are working on something else causing you to type in the wrong window. To make matters worse, quite often when you want to focus a window it simply refuses to do so. MSN Desktop search seems to be suffering from this particularly.

 

• Offline files: I absolutely love the offline files functionality in Windows. Files you mark as offline will automatically be synchronised to your system. The cool thing is that they still appear in the same place, e.g. \\someserver\someshare\somedirectory\syncedfile.doc, when you are offline. The problem however is that the implementation is so buggy that this functionality can almost be considered broken.
• Every 30 minutes or so offline files says you are no longer connected to the server even when you still are. This means that your printers can no longer be accessed and neither can files that have not been marked as offline. The only workaround seems to be to always keep a lock on at least one file on the server.
• More often than not the file synchonisation task prevents Windows from shutting down and pops up a useless ‘I am stupid, please click me away’ dialog box.
• When you are offline and not even connected to any network, it quite often claims that the server is available to connect to. Yeah right
• When you are offline it insists on syncing with the server. For some reason this takes forever. How bloody difficult is it to see if a server is available and skip the whole process if it is not.
• For some reason it seems that offline files checks your entire local offline file repository when you start up. In my case I have more than 1GB of files marked as offline. The problem is that booting Windows becomes extremely slow as it is constantly banging away on the hard disk

 

• Swapping out when copying large files: Another idiotic decision by some Microsoft engineer. To improve performance considerably Windows implements a file cache. Most of the time this works quite well, but when copying a lot of data the file cache keeps growing and growing and my applications are swapped out. The result is that after copying that 1GB AVI file, which you do only once, it takes forever for my applications to become responsive again while they are being swapped in. Surely it would make sense to implement some limit and only use free memory as a temporary file cache.

 

• File explorer: Sigh, where to start on this one as there is so much wrong with it, moronic search facility, annoying dialog boxes that only allow you to cancel an operation, not ignore or retry…. My main gripe is that everything seems to happen on the same thread; when you pop in a CD the entire explorer locks up until it has identified the CD, when you browse the network everything locks up until the operation is done etc etc. I am not going to waste more pixels on this one.

 

• Browsing other machines on the network: Why oh bloody why does it take forever to access a share on another machine. There is only one cable between the two machines, the CPUs are doing nothing, there is no network traffic, there is no disc activity and I am just sitting there waiting…waiting… pulling my hair out…AAAAAaaaarrrggggh. God I am really getting worked up.

 

• Emptying browser cache: This one I really don’t get. My browse cache is relatively small, 100MB, yet it takes forever, minutes, to empty it. What the hell is it doing? Just delete the bloody files at least as fast as the floppy disk on my old MSX. The situation has been ‘improved’ in IE7 by deleting the cache on a separate thread so the UI doesn’t lock up anymore, however it seems to take just as long as on IE6.

I have been tempted to move to other OSes, but unfortunately those OSes have their own problems  and the chance that I’ll be as productive as when using Windows is minimal.

 

Naturally all of this will be fixed in Vista…..yeah right.

 

Oh my god, I am rambling. I doubt anyone is reading this. Please leave a comment when I have left something out.

 

Let’s get the word out to Microsoft and Digg this story.

Wii, Virtual Bob Ross, iPOD prequel & Caprica

Today a bigger update than usual as I had no time to post anything yesterday due to a frantic work schedule till 4am, but it is was worth it (Cheers Marco).

 

Right, first things first. There has been a lot of buzz around the net about Nintendo renaming their Revolution console to Wii. Not sure what to think of it, all I know is that this will never take off in Germany… Oh hang on that was WW-II.

 

 

Terragen is a photorealistic scenery generator that puts the late Bob Ross to shame. Check out these images (link, link).

 

iPOD Prequel.Cool

 

The new Battlestart Galactica, and for that matter the original one, is one of my all time favourite Sci Fi series. The good news is that like the previously mentioned iPOD, Galactica is getting a prequel as well named Caprica.

 

BBC 2.0, Super Mario Bros DS & Switching to OS X

The website of the best broadcast corporation in the world (BBC) will be completely revamped. The changes will be radical and one of the key features is the BBC iPlayer, which will allow you to catch up with all programs that have been on in the last 7 days.

 

I am counting down the days until the all new Super Mario Bros will be released for the DS. New gameplay videos will be released every week until the release on the official website.

 

 

Are you planning to switch from Windows to MAC OS X? Check out this guide that will make you feel right at home. Recently I had to use a MAC and as a very experienced Windows user I felt completely lost when using a MAC.

 

Whitehouse.gov, BitTorrent clients, Euphoria & Multiple RD connections to the same XP box

The website of the ‘most powerful’ nation in the world is pretty bad so Andy Rutledge is proposing a makeover. An interesting read, especially when you care about web design.

 

Confused about the sheer number of BitTorrent clients available? I know I am. Gomeler.com discusses and compares the most common clients.

 

The upcoming Indiana Jones title is using new technology called euphoria to simulate the world of physics in a realistic fashion. Check out this article or jump straight to the videos. Very impressive considering this is not based on motion capturing.

 

 

Ever tried connecting with more than one Remote Desktop session to the same XP machine? It can’t be done. Or can it? Riccardo Raneri explains how.

 

 

The God of War 2 game trailers for the Playstation 2 look excellent (and violent), check them out.

 

 

Update: With regards to multiple remote desktop sessions, a patch is available for both Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. This patch removes the limit on the number of concurrent connections.

Find your golf ball, preload images, Unreal 2007, 3D video…

Engadget reports about a new device that can help you locate you golf ball. I am skeptical, but if it works it should save me a lot of time. The problem is that on my golf course there are a lot of ‘lost’ balls so it is still difficult to identify which one is yours.

 

 

When I was doing a lot of web programming it was essential to preload mouseover images using JavaScript. Specere Software reports that the same can be achieved with CSS.

 

Unreal 2007 gameplay footage looks awesome, I will never own a computer that can render this game at more than one frame per second so I have to rely on these awesome videos (video 1, video 2) to drool over.

 

Students at the Technical University of Delft in The Netherlands have created the largest 3D screen in the world.

 

Saatchi & Saatchi are doing a cool marketing campaign for a coffee company using steaming manhole covers in New York.

 

Using the new Intel based Apple Macs and virtualisation software it is now possible to run mutiple different operating systems simultaneously in full screen mode. PCs have been able to do this for years, but the cool 3D flipping effect in this video puts the icing on the cake.

 

.net Compact Framework 2.0 SP1 & How Microsoft stole my product

Ok, so Microsoft may not even have been aware of my product that integrates the Windows Performance monitor with Pocket PC devices, but they have now included a utility with .net CF2 SP1 that basically does the same thing as my product.

 

Don’t get me wrong, this is a good development and I am very happy that Microsoft is now officially offering this functionality so I no longer have to maintain it myself.

 

The Moth reports that highlights of this service pack are:

• Support for Windows CE 4.2
• Support for headless systems
• and the aforementioned remote performance monitor

The beta of the service pack is available here.

 

C# Refactoring with Resharper 2.0

Ward Bekker is singing Resharper’s 2.0 praise on his blog. I have heard really good things about it as well, but as I no longer do much development, other than small proofs of concept, I have never really looked into it, especially as Visual Studio 2005 was supposed to have excellent refactoring support.

 

JetBrains – the company behind Resharper, also develops IntelliJ, widely know as the best Java IDE around – know what they are doing so I have complete faith in Resharper’s abilities.

 

 

Anyone developing applications larger than a simple ‘Hello World’ should at least evaluate this tool. According to Ward the main advantages are: (List blatantly copied from Ward’s blog)

• See compile time errors while typing. Resharper checks if your code can be compiled while you type, and informs you when crap was entered (Red), or correct code (Green). This is an incredible timesaver because fixing them by doing multiple compiles is incredibly slow, especially with big solutions that contain 1000+ files. I tried other products with this a similar feature like XDevelop, but no could match the precision of Resharper.
  
• Excellent refactoring, especially compared to the sluggish and incomplete VS 2005 default refactoring options. Saves a lot of time for those tasks like renaming, defining fields, creating properties and constructors etc. (VS 2005 by default needs to re-compile your whole solution first before enabling you to rename. Whoops!)
  
• When you have a 1000+ file solution, easy navigation becomes quite a problem in VS. Not with Resharper however! Just find the class by typing Ctrl-N and enter the name of your class. Want to do it by file name, then use Ctrl-Shift-N. Derived method? Type Ctrl-U for going to the base definition and CTRL-ALT-B to go to whom may inherit it and much more..
  
• I should not forget to mention their Live Template system. Remember the fuss about the VS 2005 new code snippet system? Well, it looks antique compared to the Resharper Live Templates, in features but also the in the way you create them (Resharper enables you to create / edit them in a smart UI, VS2005 codesnippit editing intelligence does not go further than notepad’s features). For example, if you defined an generic list of strings and in the next line you type foreach-[TAB] to trigger the live template. Resharper prefills the statement for iterating the just defined list (or any other iterable collection in the scope of the method / class).

The latest 2.0 build for VS2005 can be downloaded here.

Update: Elliot installed Resharper for VS.NET 2003 and he found it quite slow. Also after uninstalling it VS.NET 2003 lost its intellisense. To restore it, go to Tools > Options > Text Editor > C# > General and check "Auto list members" and "Parameter information" checkboxes.

Blog Mad Rocks

After posting my previous negative Blog Mad related message I was contacted by them to try and resolve the situation. I had hoped this would happen as they know how to use tools such as Technorati to check where and how people talk about their product.

 

 

The situation has been resolved and I have even received a number of bonus credits. So, for now Blog Mad rocks again.

 

Blog Mad sucks

I use Blog Mad to drive traffic to my blog, which is a system that works quite well. I have been saving up credits (about 1000 or so) to drive traffic to a new blog that I am about to launch.

 

 

Unfortunately someone at Blog Mad messed up and corrupted their database. All settings, credits and statistics seem to have been lost and they couldn’t even be bothered to send an email around or correct it.

 

Shame on you Blog Mad.

Weekend update

While away on an excellent weekend trip to Holland for an old friend’s wedding in the neighborhood I grew up in, which I hadn’t visited in 15 years, I was told off for not posting as much as I used to. The reason is simple, busy busy busy.

 

So I decided to list a number of telegram style updates:

 

Dan Brown’s latest novel, The Solomon Key, has been pushed back from late 2006 to 2007. Bummer!

 

Check out this cool emergency escape elevator. (Click on the video link)

 

Cool rainbow pictures. It actually hits the ground and guess what….. no bloody pot of gold!

 

Xbox live arcade to get MAME and SEGA games. Ahhhhh….nostalgia…. running the original PAC Man on this supercharged 3D work horse… excellent.

 

I have always been intrigued by Escher’s deceptive creations. Someone has re-created the famous waterfall in a scale model. A shame the video quality is a bit rubbish.

 

Advanced Sudoku strategies. I will need to play around with these.

 

Weird Japanese video showing how to put on a band aid to make it stay on all day.