As usual, there’s no reason not to be proud to be from New Hampshire.

Firefox 3, hot off the press!

I’ve been using it in beta for a while and was quite pleased. Today it was released in finished form, and developers are hoping for a record. So download it and give it a try. Internet Explorer users, you won’t be disappointed! (And it can even import your bookmarks and settings.)

I just noticed that Piriform has released Defraggler, a free defrag tool. You may not recognize the name Piriform, but many will recognize CCleaner, their most popular product.

Defraggler seems a little spiffier than the standard Windows tool, though I’m not yet sure how it compares with Diskeeper, a commercial solution I’ve used in the past. Since I’d deleted many gigs of junk (the Vista “upgrade” kept around my old XP stuff, which still lives on another drive, and I wanted to start fresh, so I deleted my ~10GB in Windows.old), I figured a defrag was in order.

I’d actually downloaded AusLogics Disk Defrag, which claimed a 10% speedup after running, although it didn’t give me a lot of information. It mentioned that I had lots of ‘junk files’ or whatnot, so I went to get CCleaner, and that’s when I noticed Defraggler. So I downloaded that… I still had 15 fragmented files, although that’s not many. One novel feature of Defraggler is that you can defragment a single file if you want.

Of course, my paging file is in about 90 pieces, which seems to always happen to me. (I don’t actually use the paging file often, but I digress.) Enter PageDefrag, a free tool from SysInternals, now owned by Microsoft. It will check fragmentation of various software and let me schedule a boot-time defrag of those files, since they normally can’t be touched while Windows is running. (Aside: you should do a “normal” disk defrag first, so that PageDefrag has better odds of having a big, contiguous chunk of disk space to use.)

The wall I’ve currently run into is that PageDefrag doesn’t run on Vista. (I’m not sure I buy it, but a case could be made that a fragmented paging file isn’t necessarily bad: if you’re not writing anything too big, it might be beneficial to have a ‘nearby’ sector to write in.

For a really long time, I felt like all I ever did was bash Microsoft. Not so much because I’m mean, but because I really didn’t see them doing anything terribly creative. I was somewhat impressed with Vista, mostly because it’s a ‘fresh’ attempt at Windows, one without all the suck. It seems like they got a lot of things right this way. But still, it was just an extension of existing technology, even if it was optimized under the hood.

I just plugged in a solid-state USB drive (a 2GB CF card from my camera), and Windows popped up with its usually little dialog asking if I wanted to import the pictures or AutoPlay or whatever it usually asks. But I noticed there was an additional option, to use it as a ReadyBoost drive.

I did some reading up on it, and it essentially uses solid-state media, which has super-fast seek times, as a ‘swap partition’ (or whatever Windows calls it). When you run out of RAM, your computer will normally “swap out” (hence the name ‘swap file’ in Linux circles) the least-recently-used stuff from memory to your hard drive to free up some room for newer stuff. But hard disks are slow, especially compared to RAM, so this results in a major performance hit. (And eventually, you’ll have to read it back in, which slows things down again!) So Windows allows you to offload much of that to solid-state storage, which makes the moving of data much quicker.

This, in and of itself, isn’t entirely a ground-breaking idea. It’s just generally accepted that you want your swap partition in Linux on your fastest drive, and it’s not entirely unheard of to do stuff like have a big ol’ IDE disk, but use a 9GB, 15K RPM SCSI disk (or similar) for swap and the boot partition, to speed things up. Doing it on solid-state media has surely been done before Windows implemented this feature.

But I remain impressed, for a number of reasons:

• Moving your swap partition to a high-speed storage medium is akin to compiling a custom kernel on Linux: not all that hard in the grand scheme of things and quite beneficial, but also quite obscure. “Yeah, I moved my paging file to a solid-state disk!” is a conversation ‘normal people’ don’t have. Microsoft’s just made it quite accessible. No black magic is involved: plug in a USB thumbdrive or similar, and click the option that pops up.
• They apparently include some logic to move stuff likely to be accessed in random fashion to solid-state, to eliminate seek time, yet it will put big, contiguous stuff on normal disks, which have higher throughput. Sheer brilliance, and probably a bit of code that’s never been written.
• The contents are encrypted. This seems like it’s right out OpenBSD’s book, in that it’s pretty awesome security. I actually wouldn’t have done this myself, as I don’t have anything all that secret in memory, so it seems like the overhead in encrypting it isn’t worthwhile. But the fact that it’s there still impresses me.
• Some sort of compression is available as well; they cite 2:1. Much like encryption, I’m really not sure what to make of this: the whole point is to improve speed by using solid-state disks, so I wonder about the overhead here. But But then again, it means that my 2GB CF card, which matches the amount of RAM I have, might just work.
• Per Wikipedia, “According to Jim Allchin, for future releases of Windows, ReadyBoost will be able to use spare RAM on other networked Windows Vista PCs.” For a long time, I’ve thought that this would be a good idea, and something easy enough to do. (Though there is the risk that I’m going to write data to your machine, and then you’re going to shut your computer down for the night…) This is a pretty exciting future idea!

A quick tutorial on keeping accurate time in Windows… Double-click on the clock in the system tray (usually in the very lower-right of your screen). There should be an “Internet Time” tab.

• If the tab isn’t there, you’re either running an ancient version of Windows, or your PC is a member of an Active Domain directory, and the system is getting its time from that. (Your network administrator wants all the PCs to get the time from the same source, which is actually a very good way to do things… But only if they’re accurate!)
• You should have the “Synchronize with an Internet time server” setting checked. (If not, check it!) The default is usually time.windows.com. This is pretty good, but we’re OCD, so we can do better. Mine is set to pool.ntp.org, which is a huge network of independently-run timeservers. (Two of my own servers are in it.) Please don’t use the nist.gov ones for your desktop: they appear to be extremely overloaded, and should really only be used if you’re providing time to other people.
• By default, Windows will check that network source once a week. (Every 604,800 seconds.) This option isn’t presented to the user, but it’s a registry setting. (I won’t get into changing registry entries, since it’s not the most user-friendly interface, and mistakes can basically ruin your computer.) But HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE SYSTEM CurrentControlSet Services W32Time TimeProviders NtpClient is your friend here. There’s a DWORD value called SpecialPollInterval, where you’ll see the default 608400. This is how often, in seconds, it’ll query. You could put anything in here, but I’d highly encourage you to set a fairly large value. My time servers query “upstream” every 1024 seconds (~17 minutes), which keeps them within 5-15ms. Unless you need sub-second precision, I wouldn’t set a desktop machine below 3600 (once an hour). I chose 28,800, which is every 8 hours. That shouldn’t let your clock drift more than a second or two, if that. Bear in mind that you’re coming from 608,400, which is once every 7 days… Every 8 hours is 21 times as often, but still an acceptable value in my mind.
• Make sure you use the “Update Now” option to verify that your time setting works.

Obviously, this assumes you’ll be online every 8 hours… I’d imagine that Windows will just get the time time you’re online otherwise.

I’m trying to install Office now… The DVD drive sounds like a meat grinder. I popped it and verified that the disk was in properly, and that there’s no junk on it (e.g., a label only on one side of the disk). It’s also not getting scratched. All I can imagine, though, is that the disk was manufactured slightly warped/lopsided… Not enough to be visible, but enough to cause it to run off-balance and make me worry that it’s going to blow up.

So here I am, working with the pinnacles* of modern technology with one hand, and using the other to apply slight pressure on the DVD drive door to keep it in just the right position to keep it from vibrating too badly.

• This is giving my crusty old dual-core system a little too much credit. 😉

This is actually more about how I set up my system than about Vista/Thinkpad configuration in particular…

• “Fix” the file manager (as it’s been ‘broken’ in every version I’ve ever used):
  • In Windows Explorer, Organize -> Folder and Search Options, then click on View
  • I selected “Show hidden files and folders,” because it hides things I need to get into sometimes.
  • Uncheck “Hide extensions for known file type.” I never saw any benefit to having this on, but there is a big downside: “virus.jpg.exe” has a .exe file type, so it’ll “hide” the .exe. Huh, virus.jpg? Well, good thing it’s a picture file and not a program, so let’s open it!
• Download and install Firefox 3 beta
• Download and install Pidgin, a multi-protocol IM client
• Let WIndows pull down its myriad updates…
• Get the Thinkpad drivers as needed; I recommend at least getting the BIOS update (no apparent benefit, but it’s the latest), ThinkVantage Active Protection System (“TPShocks”), and the UltraNav drivers (for the scrollwheel functions). There are others, but I didn’t feel like downloading everything under the sun. The catch here: you have to actually read the directions. You can run the file you download, and it’ll seem to “install” without errors, but nothing happens. The directions explain that you need to run some additional steps, which it’ll walk you through. Oh, video and monitor drivers can’t hurt, either.
• I created shortcuts (find them in the Start Menu and right-click, “Send to… Desktop (create shortcut)” on my desktop for various programs that I use often but are a pain to find, including Command Prompt (I’m a geek) and “Computer” (the shortened “My Computer” of yesteryear).
• I’m planning on using something from Eset for anti-virus; the question is whether I want NOD32 (just anti-virus), or Smart Security
• I disabled User Account Controls and font smoothing, which is apparently ‘controversial’–it smooths text out, but makes it look blurry. At least to some people. Like me. (I re-enabled Font Smoothing, since it looks even worse turned off.)
• I set the system clock (click on it, “Change Date and Time Settings,” then click Internet Time) to sync to pool.ntp.org. (Unfortunately, you can’t give it a series of servers for optimized performance.)

When I graduated from college, I lost my license to use Office*, and had various other key things shut off. I was given an opportunity to purchase Vista (Business Edition) Upgrade and Office 2007 (Enterprise) for $20 each, so I figured I should, since I had no media for XP or Office. And then I remembered I had a spare 60GB partition for Windows on my 160 GB drive from when I’d intended to dual-boot, so I just installed it here. A few thoughts:

• The install was “easy” but frankly not that great. I’ll dock a small number of points because, unlike the Ubuntu installer, it’s not a LiveCD: I can’t use the system while it’s installing. When your installer takes 20-30 minutes, it’s very nice to have a browser or game or something going. It also seemed to take forever, and at the end, went to reboot, but gave me a “Reboot Now” option, which I took. It never ejected my DVD, nor did it tell me to, so I figured I was supposed to leave it in…
• …So it booted into the installer agian. I closed it, and got a message that I couldn’t use Windows if I didn’t install Windows. (Thanks… Though I suppose there are people who actually need that message.) And then it warned me that if I cancelled the installation, my computer may reboot.
• Of course, I wanted to reboot my computer, so I said OK. My computer did not reboot.
• Everything feels much more polished!
• It spent several minutes “evaluating [my] computer’s performance” before going away with no indication of what had just happened. (I knew enough to find it, though: a 3.1. This bothers me slightly, since it’s a fairly meaningless number, but I digress.)
• All of my text is blurry. Yes, I’m at the native resolution. (Which was detected automatically.) I assume it’s related to ClearType (or a lack thereof?), but I can’t find anything about it?
• I set up wireless very easily. (Well, after I found the icon in the tray.)
• Windows is obsessed with popping little bubbles up all over my screen. I guess it’s understandable since it’s the first time I’ve run it, though I’d be a lot happier if it didn’t offer to check GMail and my blogs for phishing attacks. Repeatedly.
• How do I get a command prompt? (No, I’m serious. Is there a ‘cmd’ in Vista?)
• The default desktop has one icon, the Recycle Bin. I like this uncluttered look.
• Now I see what everyone was complaining about. Much like it’s obsessed with bubble notifications, it’s obsessed with asking me if I want to give permission to various things. The problem is that I’ll double-click on the clock in the system tray to set it up to sync to NTP, and get asked if I want to allow access to the clock. Yes, I do; that’s why I just tried to change it. Where do I turn this off?
• Linux and Windows XP let me use the far-right of my touchpad as a scroll wheel. This feature is missing in Vista?

It’s too soon for a thorough review, but I am a fan of first-impressions things. And my first impressions are so-so. Probably a big improvement over XP, but with quite a few irritations.

Oh! I got the upgrade, which means you have to install it over an existing Windows thing. Except it was on another hard drive, so I’m using the well-known quirk where you can install it without a license key, and then “upgrade” that to the exact same version and put in a license key.

This is really pretty well-documented, but it’s easy to overlook or forget…

Skype, by default, will engage in some sort of peer-to-peer call relaying. If you ever look and see that you have a bajillion network connections open on some strange port, you can almost certainly blame Skype. (Close it and they go away.)