August 2005 - Posts

My first 'vista' on Windows Vista

posted Tuesday, August 09, 2005 10:32 PM by gux
Yesterday I received the Windows Vista Beta 1 DVD (big thank you, Ed :-)). I decided to make a dual-boot installation on my Windows XP development notebook, a HP-Compaq NC6000 with a Pentium-M processor, 1Gb RAM.

I always have a separate U: (for "User") 6-Gb disk partition to use as the My Documents folder, so I decided to use it for the Windows Vista. First of all I xcopied My Documents to partition C:, then I formatted the U: drive. I rebooted the notebook with the DVD inserted on... and the installation started. I choosed a Clean Installation on the second partition.

The installation was a no-brainer. After an hour the Windows Vista booted without asking for a user/password. Well I really love the default (and only one by now) Aero theme style, the transparency of the windows titlebars and the new Explorer (note the zooming effects!).

Everything was quite smooth except for some things:

1 - The Agere internal modem has some trouble when being detected, but after some reboots it worked automagically.

2 - With no effort I could connect to my home wireless secured LAN, but after some minutes I've got my first BSOD. After many reboots followed by many system crashes I confirmed the problem was the PC Card D-Link Airplus 650. Till now I could not solve the problem, the unsigned Windows XP driver seems to be the trouble. Not a problem by now, I plugged to the LAN hub using a chord cable.

3 - Some services in automatic start mode simply did not start. Don't know why, I executed Services.msc from the command line and tried to start the affected services without success. I decided to disable them. I also noticed some kind of Tablet PC service configured to start in automatic mode, I disabled it too.

The rest of my hardware was detected OK: USB mouse, ATI RADEON 9000 video, Soundmax audio, ethernet card.

I've also installed some basic programs and executed them OK: Office 2003, Acrobat Reader 7, MSN Messenger 7 [*], Microsoft Beta Client for bug-submitting and Virtual PC 2004. Now I can run a Windows XP inside the VPC inside the Windows Vista :-)

Finally, the new simplistic and tabbed IE7 browser seems to run more stable than the IE7 Beta 1 on Windows XP.

I became a happy Windows Vista user, for sure :-) Regards, ~gux.

[*] BTW my messenger account is gux@messengeruser.com if you want to meet me online.

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Know when you are asking the right question

posted Thursday, August 04, 2005 6:12 PM by gux
I've been OOB (Out of Blog) last weeks, the major excuse is my little baby daughter was born. Now I became a dad I can't help being somewhat reflexive about life and even technical newsgroups! One thing I've learned when talking to doctors and nurses last two weeks is how often we do the wrong questions when asking someone for help. I've made all kind of nonsense questions... I surely know due to some nonsense asnwers I received :-) Then I realized the same situation happens very often in the newsgroups I visit. Sometime ago I tried to have a Do's & Dont's bulleted list to use when posting at newsgroups. Fortunately I came to these articles: Brian Moran's "The Art of Asking Questions" and -from there to- Daniel Petri's "How to ask a question? (or - How do I ask a question on a professional forum/newsgroup without getting flamed?)". Nice to read both of them Brian's article and Daniel's article. See you! ~gux
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