I just installed Windows XP and manually applied SP3. Now I’m downloading over 80 meg of updates. And that’s after trimming it down to the bare essentials.
Is it time for SP4?
Category Archives: Platforms
Windows Media Center Edition 2005 doesn’t need wmlauch.exe
For those of you installing Windows Media Center Edition 2005 off MSDN disk 2429.4 (November 2005) and freaked out by it asking for a Windows XP Service Pack 2 (Windows XP SP2) disk, don’t worry: Just select the “skip this file and continue anyway” option because the install doesn’t need wmlauch.ex_ or wmlauch.exe – and I’m lead to believe that Windows XP SP3 will add it, or if not, Automatic Updates will. Just relax, and go with the flow.
I think that’s enough keywords, searching ought to find this now. Oh, hang on: Windows MCE 2005.
BTW, your XP Professional disk with integrated SP2 doesn’t hold the requested file, so don’t bother looking.
Coles runs on Windows
The other day a McAfee stuff-up led to thousands of Windows XP machines getting a virus data file which deleted SVCHOST.EXE, a vital part of the operating system.
As Ed Bott remarked: I’m not sure any virus writer has ever developed a piece of malware that shut down as many machines as quickly as McAfee did today.
In Australia, one high-profile company hit was Coles, with around 10% of registers knocked out of action causing a number of their supermarkets to have to stop trading while they fixed it.
Yes, Coles runs on Windows.
About 12 years ago Coles ran a project (which I worked on for a short time) to move off NCR cash registers in favour of Windows-based POS systems (then on NT4) developed in-house for the company, with the initial rollout being in Coles. The plan was to subsequently roll it out across other then-subsidiaries such as Target, K-Mart, Myer and so on.
They did a fair bit of interesting workflow analysis, for instance coming up with the Windows Start Menu-style interaction for the cashier to select which fruit/veg they were putting on the scales. It was all designed to cut training requirements and transaction times, and improve backoffice operations, as well as freeing them from dependence on NCR, which at the time had told them support was ending for the registers they’d been using.
Obviously Thursday’s problems showed a down side of the plan!
Perhaps the lesson here is that if your Windows PCs are secure (you wouldn’t imagine they’d allow people to slip in a disc or USB stick and run any old program on them) and fundamental to your company operation, you shouldn’t allow any automated updates onto them (not McAfee, Microsoft, nor anything else) without verifying that it works okay first.
Windows 7 temporary user profiles
Windows 7 has impressed me, with one exception: it periodically logs in using a “temporary user profile”. This seems to happen only after a previous user has logged off.
Various people around the Interwebs have had the same problem. The only firm answer I’ve seen so far is that it appears to relate to Google’s automatic updates services for Chrome (and possibly other software).
So if it’s happening to you, get into the list of Services, and disable anything to do with Google updates. Seems to work for me — though at one point I thought I had it licked, with the Google Update Service disabled, but it started happening again. I took another look and from nowhere, the Google Software Updater had arrived on the scene, and had to be disabled separately.
(I wanted to post a picture of the error message, but that, like everything else to do with the temporary profile, has now disappeared into the ether.)
Windows 7 compatibility
I’m quite impressed with Windows 7’s compatibility settings. They seem to have made it possible to use software which the official Upgrade Advisor says will require purchasing a later version, even without resorting to XP Mode, which being Virtual PC-based, would surely be a good deal slower. And of course some applications just work as-is.
Some of the old software I’ve tried so far.
Office 2003 — works fine as installed.
Pinnacle Studio 10 — install the software, then the 10.8 patch for Vista from Pinnacle. Set compatiblity to Windows Vista, and it works fine. (The Windows 7 Compatibility Center recommended paying for an upgrade on this. I wonder who provided Microsoft with those details??)
Auran Trainz 1.3 — install, then set compatibility to Windows XP.
Kahootz 3 — install, works fine.
As I get around to installing other stuff, I’ll update this post.
Midtown Madness 2 — seems to work okay, though it defaulted to the wrong audio output device. I’m not sure; it seemed to set the correct directory permissions on the Players directory (within the program files), which it didn’t used to do under WinXP. Or maybe my fiddling with it trying to get the sound working did it. Either way, it doesn’t seem to need the Compatibility setting set on.
Traffic Giant (Gold Edition) — worked okay except the title and cut-scene videos, which required setting compatibility to Windows XP. And the settings (eg graphics resolution) wouldn’t stick permanently without all users having write-access to the program directory.
The Movies (and Stunts and Effects expansion pack) — Apart from having to manually start the installation (the auto start just generated an error), and telling it not to install Media Player 9 or DirectX 9 (which seemed to cause another error), it seems to work okay.
iPad thoughts
Some thoughts on the iPad.
It looks like a giant iPhone. Having no lid to cover up the screen seems odd.
Some are ripping into its faults, including no iBook feature outside the USA (at least initially), no camera, no USB port, no memory card reader, no Flash support, no multitasking. Yikes.
But I do love the comments about the screen being bigger than an iPod/iPhone, like this is some revelation nobody thought of before.
“A larger screen means that games can be more immersive, as well as allowing for higher detail and bigger animations,” said Peters.
A bigger screen! Amazing!
You mean… just like every other notebook or desktop computer out there?
But hey, it does look pretty nice. I bet lots of people buy them.
I bet it could be almost as successful as the Apple Newton. *grin*
Google Chrome on Linux: slow, memory hog
I’ve run the Google Chrome on Linux beta since it first become available, and my impression is: slow. I might be unusual, in that I typically have dozens and dozens of tabs open, and that may break Chrome’s model of shoving each page into its own process, and this PC has “only” a gig of RAM, but it’s slower than FireFox for the same task. Things were a lot worse before I loaded AdBlock and FlashBlock for Chrome. Now my CPU isn’t pegged at 100%.
Embedded JavaScript is affected by this performance hit, so that particular tools that I have help do my stuff, well, don’t anymore.
Most annoyingly, it seems, although I haven’t confirmed it, that the back button causes a page reload: it doesn’t come out of the cache. Or the slowness could make it look that way. But how long can it possibly take to render a page anyway?
On the upside, it hasn’t crashed, and I would have expected FireFox to mysteriously die without any explanation by now (a sign that Firefox is going to die soon is that tab-swaps/page loads become very slow, indicating a similar root cause which I’m guessing is memory exhaustion). Firefox has always done the mysterious death thing, and I was hoping that upgrading to 3.5 would fix things, but no dice.
I’m trying to decide whether it’s preferable to have my browser snappy, but occasionally fall in a big pile and get back up again, or a laggard that rolls with the punches. Perhaps I’ll split my browsing between them simultaneously; vital stuff on Chrome and throw-away stuff on FF, but that’s going to be a bit tough on my brain.
[UPDATE]
Well, it turns out that Chrome is a memory hog. I bought another gig of RAM, and wouldn’t you know it, the PC is flying. My suspicions were tripped when all of the RAM was in use, most of the paging file and the little orange disk activity light was slowly burning a hole in the wall on the other side of the room.
Chrome for Linux now in Beta
Chrome for Linux now in Beta, which I’m sure is all over the place, but go here: http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/w00t.html to fetch.
[update]
You can’t change spell-check languages. But it seems to crash less than Firefox, so I’m switching. I’ll give you a yell when I figure out why this was a bad idea
Getting used to the Mac
I usually use Windows, but I’ve been using Mac OSX a little bit, on a new iMac in the office of an organisation I do some work for. It’s nice, lovely design, though I think it’s pretty funny that it’s so damn streamlined that the On/Off button is hidden away at the back, so consequently there’s a PostIt note on the front of it to help people find it.
I’ve got used to having to go to the menu to properly shut a program. I’m not really clear on why clicking the red dot on the window doesn’t do it. But that’s okay — another PostIt note reminds us Windows people of that.
So far there are two main things I can’t get used to on the Mac (apart from the lack of tactile response from the keyboard and the feel of the mouse):
Command-Tab switches applications, but not windows. I can’t figure out how to get around the various open windows of an application without using the Window menu, which is cumbersome.
Differences with navigation around a document, at least how it appears to me so far… maybe someone knows better.
| PC | Mac | |
|---|---|---|
| Go to start or end of document | Ctrl-Home or Ctrl-End | Home or End |
| Go to start or end of line | Home or End | Command Left or Right |
| Go up/down a page | Page Up or Page Down | Page Up or Page Down |
| Go forward or back a word | Ctrl-Right or Ctrl-Left | Option-Right or Option-Left |
But the thing that really keeps catching me out is that Home/End/PgUp and PgDown move you around, but don’t move the cursor. So you think you’re at the end of the document, but you start typing and it jumps to back where you were. At least, that’s what it does in Apple Mail. Very irritating; seems you have to click at the end to tell it you want to start typing at the end.
Is there a better/quicker/easier way?
Snow Leopard – Intel only
It had to happen, right? Mac OS Snow Leopard is out today. It’s the first version which doesn’t run on PowerPC Macs.
“Snow Leopard is an upgrade for Leopard users and requires a Mac with an Intel processor.” — Apple Store
I suppose it’s been about three years since Apple stopped selling PowerPCs. I wonder how many 3rd party software vendors are also abandoning them. I know my sister has a PowerPC Mac laptop from circa 2004, but I wonder how many others are still out there in regular use. Perhaps the more significant issue will be how long patches for newly discovered vulnerabilities will be supplied.
Perhaps it’s no biggie, but I’m just imagining the fuss that would be made if Microsoft made a new operating system that didn’t work with four-year-old PCs.
Pac-Man Championship Edition for mobile
Turns out I don’t need an XBox to play the new(ish) Pac-Man Championship Edition; it’s also available on mobiles.
I’ve had a go of it… great graphics, and the gameplay is a really clever twist on olde Pacman. Very cool. Though oddly the sound doesn’t seem to work…
The problem is the controls. You can either use the phone’s numeric keypad (2/4/6/8 for up/left/right/down… pretty logical)… or the directional buttons. But on my Nokia N95 phone, it’s hard to find the right numerics to direct Pacman, and if you use the directional buttons you’re at constant risk of pressing one of the surrounding buttons, some of which will unceremoniously throw you out of the game.
I expect I’ll get used to it.
Windows users: Stop buying Apple products
Funny: Danny Katz’s hilarious call for Mac users to rise up and rebel at the legions of Windows users buying iPods and iPhones.
But then in 2002 along came the Apple iPod and oh, how quickly did their attitudes shift? Suddenly PC people all wanted to strap an iPod to their jogging arm AS IF THEY WERE ONE OF US. Then in 2007, along came the Apple iPhone and ah, how quickly did their Mac contempt wane? Now they all wanted an iPhone to flash around among their doofy mates AS IF THEY WERE BORN OF OUR ILK.