October rant :-)

Ok so just a very quick update on Live Mesh (which will no doubt lead into my rant) - I've been using it for a while now, particularly the remote desktop bit of it. I have to say that my impressions so far are that it's a really good idea, but it falls over at the execution stage. Somewhat akin to a couple of other products that I could name (but won't)... particularly in the two areas that I think Microsoft needs to focus on the most - performance & reliability. I'm not sure why, but most things I read about Windows (whether XP or Vista or the forthcoming-and-imaginatively-and-accurately-titled Windows 7) tend to focus on how pretty/unpretty it is, what features it has/lacks, how easy/hard it is to use, how secure/unsecure it is.

 

It's probably at least in part due to Apple's marketing - including the Mac vs PC adverts that Apple started a while ago that a lot of the comparisons of Windows and Mac OS is based almost on features. Which one has a better movie maker, music player, dumber (should I say more-user-friendly) interface, better online experience and so on. Most comparisons do pay at least lip service to security... which invariably ends up being based on (somewhat skewed) statistics about infection rates. Then there's a bit about things that I find genuinely useful (shadow copies vs time machine), and about things that I guess others will find useful - like easy networking (Honestly, I personally don't really care how easy something is - as long as I know how to do it and can do it quickly), file sharing, device setup etc. The initial Mac ads were genuinely clever - gimmicky, but clever. I think most of the new ones are no longer clever – just more of the same, and actually I loved the XPS vs Mac and Thinkpad vs MacBook Air ones J. So Macs were (are) cooler - Mac users are all hip, good looking & successful people with beach houses and Windows users are short, fat, balding middle-aged accountants. And some of the ads were maybe even a little true once in a while. But I'm not going to say which - because those ads were based around Mac OS vs XP, and it's been so long since I had to use XP on a daily basis that I almost can't even remember what it was like. Sure, the interface looked like it was designed for a 5 year old - hell, Macs have always had better design (I'm talking about interface design from an aesthetic point of view, not from a usability point of view or even hardware design - I wouldn't trade my Latitude XT for any Mac) and they easily outclassed XP in a number of other areas like multimedia capability, quality of bundled apps etc. But I don’t use XP anymore and haven’t for over 2 years. So it’s not entirely relevant to me – which means I can safely ignore it J.

 

 

Rambling around, my point is that even when a prominent IT consultant / journalist like Jon Honeyball set out a wishlist for Windows 7 (and Jon is also a Mac user) it seems very different to mine. I don’t disagree with Jon’s list, but it doesn’t seem to have the two things that I would top of the list – performance & reliability. Performance is my main complaint with Vista – it’s able to do most things just fine, and I generally have about 15 icons in my notification area and about 10 apps running. 10 apps isn’t hard – Outlook (of course), a couple of browsers (only because I can’t find one that does everything I want), maybe three (Chrome for general use, Firefox – which used to be my daily use browser but got too slow, and IE for sites that refuse to run on anything else like an SSL VPN or certain Microsoft sites), Word, Excel, OneNote, a few folders and a music player will always be running on my main computer simultaneously. Then add in Adobe Reader, occasionally Photoshop or Picasa or Windows Photo Gallery, eWallet, a VPN client, a couple of remote desktops, one or two Virtual PCs – you get the idea. So Vista hosts other apps just fine – but whenever I happen to sit at a well specced XP computer I’m always jealous of the snappy user experience – there just isn’t the lag of Vista when doing anything on XP. Things are instant – click Start and the menu appears. Double-click a folder and it opens right up. Windows+E and explorer’s right there. Even Office 2007 feels faster on XP. I have to say, I like the Aero glass interface – I know I can turn it off and get a bit of an improvement, but why should I have to? I want a pretty UI – but I want it to be fast. Out of the box. And stay fast. Not just when I turn things like Aero off. This is another strange problem with being me – I would rather that Microsoft give me a fast OS than Aero, but given the choice to turn Aero off to gain a bit of speed – I won’t. I refuse to give up the gloss and sparkle – why should I have to? I’d rather drill down and turn off every superfluous service, stop things running at startup (particularly iTunes / iPod / QuickTime crap) and just generally get my machine as lean as possible. But in my mind I shouldn’t have to turn off Aero - so I won’t. And why does my Core2Duo rig with 4Gb of memory and nice quick drives take this long to startup and shutdown? Why when I press Windows+L does it pause before locking the screen, or think about Windows+D for a second before it shows me my desktop. Why do I ever see the pretty blue circular hourglass replacement when I do some of these things? This will in part explain why my desktops are never turned off. Gasp. Shock. Horror. I know, I’m likely to be solely responsible for the premature end of the world, it’s terribly irresponsible and how can I do this. I know.

 

This also explains why my laptop is never shut down either – I close the lid and it goes into standby. If the battery is going to die, it quietly hibernates. I like that – a lot. Which brings me to the reliability aspect. I open the lid on my laptop and it’s reliably awake in less than 2 seconds. Actually it used to be but now I’ve got pre-boot authentication on it so I normally forget to swipe when I open the lid and turn away, only to turn back in a bit and find it’s still waiting for my fingerprint J.  It wasn’t always like that though – my last laptop, the XPS m1330 was always reliable resuming from standby so I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why this new XT wasn’t. Until I poked and prodded and disallowed the N-Trig HID Tablet Digitizer from waking up the computer, at which point I had reliable resumes on this laptop too (I’m guessing that the laptop screen / something would shift while it was in my bag and semi-wake or wake the laptop which would then get confused and fall over... needing to be hard reset to get it going again)... but that’s still not the kind of reliability that I want – I want it to be 10 foot tall, bulletproof and invisible. I don’t want to have to know that if I open and close the lid quickly it’ll probably confuse it into a state of unresponsiveness. I don’t want to have to check the power management settings on the digitzer. Right now the reliability is good – when I open Word, Vista displays the Word window and  starts out saying “not responding”. But it’s lying – this is not a reliability issue (which an app hang would be), rather a performance one (it’s just being a bit slow to start) and a minor annoyance at most (that the OS doesn’t know to just say “Loading...” rather than “Not Responding”). But I really don’t want good reliability – I want it to be GREAT. Rock-solid. Bulletproof. Invisible. You know the rest.

 

Which (approaching the end of this crazy-long rant) brings me back to Live Mesh. The Remote Desktop app is slow at best and flaky and hang/crash-prone at worst. I know it’s only a beta, but so is Chrome (and Chrome works reliably and quickly almost 100% of the time. It’s far from perfect – the JavaScript implementation is fast but not flawless. I often have issues with sites like YouTube and Facebook. They seem to be working ok right now so maybe I was imagining it – but I wasn’t, I promise). Technically so is Gmail but that’s been in beta from day one, which was what – over 4 years ago? I know the folks at Google are constantly innovating and all that but shouldn’t they at some point declare a “stable version” and stop with the permanent beta? I don’t mean stop developing it, but just call something version 1 and let people stay at that level if they want to. I find calling something a beta a bit meaningless after being used by the public for this long. Besides, Google offer paid-for services around Gmail – isn’t there something somewhere that says that you shouldn’t pay for beta software? But then again, why call it a final version and give people the choice to not try the newer features? As this article mentions, “The "we're still in beta" excuse is a smart one, implying eventual quality without actually having to deliver it”. And it also gives Google tens of millions of beta testers for free. No, not for free – the users actually generate rather substantial revenues instead of costing money. Gotta love that business model – clever Google monkeys.

 

So, back to Live Mesh – I mentioned I’ve been using it for a while. I lied. I’ve had it installed for a while. I set up some folders to sync and I used it a couple of times to access a computer remotely. Then it sucked and then I switched back to using RDP over the SSL-VPN. Oh and I uninstalled it from my laptop. I’ve still got it running on 3 machines but I seem to have forgotten why J.

 

Phew.