I updated my Meditations on Vista page because, frankly, I can’t take it anymore. I lasted all of what… two weeks? One of those weeks I wasn’t even home. Vista is crap, folks. I’ll just wrap it up for you here and now.

Nothing to see here, move along.

Now from the Don’t Knock It Til You Try It Department comes word that I’ve fallen upon a copy of Windows Vista to try it out (yes, legally).  So I will do so on the primary x86 machine at home.

This will be, of course, the final determining factor about what I do… either branch off completely to the Mac or stick with Windows/PC.

Here’s to hoping it’s a good experience… cough.

So I’ve pulled down the latest Parallels software and thrown it on my Mac.  My first action was to do a leap of faith and blow away the VM of Windows that I’ve had for some time and reinstall it as a Boot Camp’d partition.

Then, I fired up Parallels and told it to use the partition.  Shockingly enough, it works… and it works well.

It’s scary for Microsoft when software has advanced so far that they can corral Windows into a window or a partition, either way… with little user effort.  VERY little user effort.

It’s pretty sad when you title a blog post just so you can jog your memory about what you’re going to say, just in case you go onto a long-winded schpeal (sp).

Exchange Tears

Okie, if you’re an Exchange admin – particularly an Exchange admin – even more particular an Exchange admin of a large enterprise – if you’ve not been paying attention to the disaster that Satan doth bring upon you known as Daylight Saving Time 2007, you should be fired from your job.  You should be setting expectations of your users right now.  Their calendars are toast, friends.  Toast.  Those three weeks during the delta period, they are toast.

So I’m a little undecided on Office 2007. The ribbon thing is… well, cartoony. The blog posting is nice, especially if this one succeeds.

So, just as soon as I spread my wings on Ubuntu one more time, it smacks me down like the bitch I am. For some odd reason, directories just began to disappear from the disks. Disappear! Can you believe that? I first noticed it when network mounts weren’t coming back and there were long, odd pauses on the desktop when it loaded.

Back to Windows again. Sigh.

I had a problem in Windows over the past two months – it was a problem so annoying that it drove me to try Ubuntu again. I had a problem where everytime the computer toked on the hard disks or the network, it would pause. The mouse would stop moving – just enough to annoy. On first glance, it’s easy to think… okie… my hard drives are messed up (especially after what Ubuntu did!) – but then, I rolled back to some ancient revisions of the SATA driver and the problem went away. We’re talking… ancient as in 2005.

I’ve already been asked my opinion 3 times on Vista – once by a power user and twice by “typical home users” who are eying some low-cost computer out there with Vista running on 512mb of RAM.

No, that’s not a typo.

I’m going to start pointing people to this URL, where I heartily recommend they run screaming from Vista and get a Mac.

I will also note that since I will not be going Vista and I’m getting off the Windows bus, I will not be supporting friends and family who get Vista, then expect my help when it screws up.  Sorry.

So the negative spin last night and this morning on Vista is Microsoft’s decision to enforce the notion of the “upgrade version.”  You cannot install Windows Vista without Windows 2000 or XP already installed on the system.  This bucks the previous process of installing Windows from scratch, but proving you own the prior version by inserting the disc for verification.

I’m going to go on record as saying I don’t like this – not one damn bit, but I saw it coming.  Given the “smackdown” mentality Microsoft has gotten themselves into, this was just a natural evolution.  They’re merely enforcing what the license terms say should happen.  One item you might want to be aware of though – when reading the Vista EULA… once you install the Vista upgrade, the Vista rights/EULA completely supersedes all licensing agreements for the previous version.  This means you essentially lose your rights to even install the prior version of Windows ever again.

If you thought your Exchange deployment ever made your life miserable, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. If you’re the Exchange admin of a small business deployment, you’re likely to strut around your office and just tell people to get over it.

If you’re an admin of a large enterprise, March is your Month of Suffering. Prepare to sob like a baby.

Congress enacted this little thing called Daylight Saving Time, right? Well, then they decided to make it happen three weeks sooner in the year 2007. They passed this law in 2005.

Had a further little email chat with Jennifer about Vista’s licensing.  She pointed out this article on ZDNet, so I wanted to make sure I bring it to everyone’s attention.

It’s clear to both of us in our discussion, however… that these modifications just aren’t good enough.  It doesn’t solve the “ick” factor of knowing that Microsoft is watching how you compute – every day, every night, every boot.  To me, that makes it the ultimate deal killer.  The general distrust is the nail in the coffin.