5 August 2007
Windows Vista
I’ve been quietly trying Windows Vista for the last several months. There are things in it which impress me. But overall, I am disappointed.
The install process, the very first thing you undergo, perfectly exemplifies that model. On one hand, it was significantly faster to install than any other recent version of Windows. On the other hand, there was no available clean install. Previously, the ‘upgrade’ editions were more capable than the ‘full’ version. The upgrade could do a full install, prompting only for media to confirm the upgrade was allowed. Now, the upgrade must be conducted from within an already-installed Windows environment. However, the upgrade it gave me was hardly an upgrade at all. Instead, it was a clean install, with a ‘windows.old’ folder added and my existing Documents and Settings, Program Files and Windows directories moved inside. I could not run any of those applications without first re-installing them. Great upgrade.
The installation process is not something a typical user undergoes particularly often. Yes, even on Windows, an install can last several years. So I moved on.
Home Premium was the flavor I chose to install on the HTPC. It’s hooked up to an HDTV , so the Media Center features seemed to obvious to ignore. The problems were plentiful.
All my music is centralized on an iMac. It’s shared with SAMBA as Music. So it seemed easy enough to add it to the Media Library. Some of it is ITMS-purchased content which only Windows can play. I went in knowing that was the case.
As you’re adding content to the Library, it offers to provide content from a network shared folder. Great! This will be easy. And in fact, it was. At first.
After the first 1400 songs or so were brought in, it got confused. It said it was importing music, but it had stopped. I restarted the computer. No change. So I “removed” that folder. It didn’t really remove. It did give up on trying to pull in more content, but it wasn’t getting rid of what was already there.
Eventually, Google told me that the Media Library was really the Windows Media Player library. I was able to delete the content from there and start again.
I added the folder again. This time, all the music got there. It was playable. MCE finally started to deliver on it’s reputation. Until I rebooted and it claimed the music was no longer there. It was listed, but trying to access it gave me errors. I wiped the library again.
The third time, I mounted the Music folder as a drive, and then added the content as if it was already on the computer. This was the best experience. It found, added and kept accessible all the WMP-playable songs. Even at that point though, album art was gone. My iTunes ratings were gone. Having the remote-controllable full screen music was nice, but it required me to give up too much. So I installed iTunes and accessed the music over iTune’s own shared music feature.
Media Center does have a nice video store function. And that’s about the only mark it earns.
Vista does look better than XP. And I’m not talking about Aero. It’s a 720P 32″ TV. In computer monitor terms, that’s not such a great resolution. 2′ from the screen, 30″ monitors run 2560×1600. This TV is 1366×768, which is roughly a quarter of the pixels. You’d think a pixel would therefore be very large, but from a sofa 10 feet back, text looks really small. XP and Vista both offer font-size scaling. But only Vista offers full DPI adjustments. They make using the computer far more tolerable. They have the side effect of effectivly running the screen at 900×550, which means many applications designed for an 800×600 screen just don’t fit. I can’t fault Vista for that. Vista can be faulted for not handling things better. Even some screens in Vista don’t fit in the scaled environment.
Vista is annoying. I tried to live with UAC. I really did. At work, I use XP, OSX and Linux. Two of those three have account-elevation answers. When OSX wants to do something, it prompts for confirmation. Linux may not even expose something until you attempt it with ’sudo’ prepended. Both of these solutions are tolerable.
UAC is terrible. There are something like 6 different forms of UAC, depending on the severity and trustworthiness of an operation. Some are just “Allow or Deny” operations. Some want a password. Some require you provide another account. Sometimes you’ll get one entering an operation and again on completing it. After about three weeks, I had enough. I disabled it. Vista might as well have entered lockdown. “UAC is disabled, don’t you think you ought to let us re-enable it?” Every 5 minutes. Not running UAC on Vista is even more annoying than dealing with it.
Drivers are in bad shape on Vista. This machine has an old DLink PCI wireless card in it. DLink does not provide Vista drivers for it. Vista, however, happily installed XP drivers with UAC popping up just once. The wireless configuration and network selection screens popped up. Great, it works! I opened Firefox and downloaded sound drivers. Until the first reboot. Then, while the card remained identified and Vista claimed it working, it was completly non-functional. I couldn’t connect to a network. After booting and not touching it, it claimed to be connected to a network, even the right network, but it was non-functional. Eventually, I put an ethernet drop through the wall to keep it network-connected. That did work.
Vista has a touted redesigned network interface. Truth be told, when everything is working on the computer side, it’s nice. If you used any of the Microsoft networking products 3 or 4 years ago, the new network screens resemble the software bundled with their network adapters. While trying to get things working, it’s a big pain.
Sound is one neighborhood Vista gets right. Each application connects independently to the internal mixer. There’s a global volume control. And an application-specific control They did it exactly right.
There’s a pretty generic joystick connected by USB. I plugged it in and it worked. For a couple of months. Now, Windows reads it but when trying to access it in applications, it reads the name as garbage and its completely non-responsive in use. Works find on other computers.
Windows Updates are extremely annoying in Vista. They download automatically (fine) and then tell ME when IT wants them installed. This is a HTPC. It’s not on constantly. It may go a week or more without being turned on. I don’t want the first 10 minutes wasted waiting for updates to install and Vista to reboot.
The start menu is a step backwards. Vista puts a spotlight-like (and spotlight was based on something in the original spin of Vista, fine) box on the bottom of the menu. It’s a combination of the old Start::Run function with a search bar. As an app-launcher, it’s servicable. As a search, it’s slow and has poorly displayed results. Putting the start menu into a tiny tree was a horrible decision.
I can’t sleep the computer without descending into a sub-menu.
Vista is not all bad. Sounds is improved. The control panel is actually functional when task-based. XP’s certainly wasn’t. DPI-scaling is ok. It seems to boot faster. It’s never crashed on me.
But that is a pretty basic list of stuff. When Windows Home Server is released later in the year, I think this box will be re-purposed. And a Mac mini, Apple TV or Tivo 3 Lite is likely to replace this as an HTPC. I know from experience that they actually work. Alternatively, perhaps Microsoft will re-issue my Vista license to use XP Media Center 2005. Seems like it’d be a worthy upgrade to this.