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Archive for January, 2007

Hello from Vistaland

January 29th, 2007

Windows Vista officially goes on sale tomorrow, Tuesday, 30 January 2007–but thanks to the awesomeness of Newegg.com, I had an OEM Copy of Windows Vista Home Premium last Thursday. I’ll admit: I’m an unrepentant early-adopter. Naturally, that’s gotten me into some annoying fixes in the past…and it’s done so again. Yet, amazingly enough, I ran into far fewer problems installing Windows Vista than I’ve ever had with previous versions of Windows, including Windows XP. So here, for your delectation and possible edification, is Uncle Pegritz’s Adventures with Windows Vista!

The purpose of this article is simple: to give readers an overview of what upgrading to Windows Vista is like from a Not-Quite-Average Joe’s perspective. The ‘Net is literally inundated in Vistababble these days–a quick Google search of the terms “Windows Vista” kicks up around 240 million hits–and amid that much hubbub it’s difficult to separate the signal from the noise. Everywhere you look, Microsoft is waving its Aero-glassed wienie around, proclaiming that Vista will revolutionize everything from searching your hidden pr0n collection to making coffee. E-pundits are spitting out list after list after list of reasons (not) to upgrade to Vista. Macheads are smirking behind their overgrown bangs and whining about the innate superiority of OS X. Linux/Open-Source zealots are squealing about proprietary code, entrenched DRM, and the innate superiority of *Nix varieties. And, somewhere, John Dvorak is probably prying a ludicrous statement like “Windows Vista Ultimate is going to sell precisely 3 copies in the continental US” out of the desiccated crannies of his ass.

Well, just as I promised you no hype and no bullshit from my previous article concerning what you need to know before even considering to upgrade to Vista, once again I promise you nothing but The Facts when it comes to actually installing the damn thing. But first, a few things you need to know:

My computer is no more than six months old. I bought it back in August of 2006, and it’s a pretty current machine: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core Processor 4600+ running at 2.40 gHz, with 2 gigs of RAM, a 300gb hard-drive, and an aftermarket GeForce 7300 videocard. Not bleeding-edge, not even top-o’-the-line, but certainly a pretty beefy machine whose specs are well within those MS advises for the best Vista experience. Nonetheless, chances are good that if you have a similarly-equipped machine, your experience will be pretty close to mine. If you have an older machine…well, things will still probably work out the same–hopefully–but they’ll definitely happen slower. Windows Vista itself is surprisingly resource-friendly (very little different than WinXP), but the installation itself is a beast. Not in the difficulty sense…just the time involved, as you’ll see.

Also, keep in mind that I’m definitely not a hardcore übergeek. I can’t code a lick (hell, CSS styling code is sometimes beyond my capabilities), I’m sure as hell not 1337, and I’m certainly not an MSCE. But neither am I am clueless butt-end-user who can’t figure out what the “Esc” key is for let alone boot a Windows install into Safe Mode. The article you’re about to read is aimed at reasonably-intelligent, reasonably-experienced folks who just want to know what kind of issues they might face if they run out to the Best Buy and snag a copy of Windows Vista for their Compy386. Got it?

OK, then. Let’s see about this thang.

First things first. If you don’t want to spend the time reading the rest of this article, just grok the following conveniently-bulleted list of Important Points that will break it down for you in an oldskool fashion:

• Back up all of your documents, pictures, pr0n, etc. before you even think about upgrading to Vista. (Well, duh.)
• Run Windows Upgrade Advisor to: A) determine whether your computer can handle Vista, if you’re not sure already; and B) most importantly, discover if any of your hardware devices require drivers that will need updating to work with Vista. The Vista installation will take care of a lot of these driver issues, as you’ll see, but it’s always best to go to your device manufacturer’s website and download any Vista-compatible drivers you can find just in case.
• Don’t bother with Windows Vista Ultimate unless–seriously–you really need to encrypt your hard-drive so the Russians won’t steal your Momma’s Polonium-Filled Coconut Cookies recipe. Windows Vista Home Premium is more than secure enough by default, and it offers all of the applications and features that make Windows Vista interesting and none of the superfluous “extras” that you’ll probably never use. Also, don’t waste your money on an overpriced Upgrade version or–dear gods–on a monstrously overpriced Full version. Get an OEM version from Newegg.com. If you don’t know what an OEM edition is, read this.
• DO NOT upgrade an already-existing WindowsXP (or, gods forbid, <XP version of Windows) installation. It will only lead to tears and/or dirty, dirty swear-words.
• DO perform a clean install by booting from the colorful-swirly-holographicky installation DVD, reformatting your C: drive (or the bootable partition thereof). Seriously. Yeah, you’ll have to reinstall all of your software, and that will bring with it issues of its own, but all in all it’s a much better experience. No cussin’ or summoning of Great Old Ones necessary.
• DO NOT, for ANY reason, install any antivirus program other than the latest version of AVG Free or Microsoft’s own OneCare. Any other AV package could very well destroy your entire system and make the world end. I know this from first-hand experience.

So that’s the short version. Now here’s the long one.

On Thursday, when I received my Vista DeeVamaDee in the mail, the first thing I did was back up all of my data. I’ve read quite a few accounts of people performing clean, fresh installs of Windows Vista and either A) having no problems at all or B) having nothing but problems…yet I haven’t read that much about folks upgrading existing installations of, say, Windows XP to Vista. I decided to do that for two reasons:

1. I really didn’t want to spend the time and hassle reinstalling all of my software and my ten-friggin’-thousand VST plugins onto a clean install; and
2. I wanted to see how well the upgrade process would work so I could report on it for some friends who’d asked me about it.

Well, friends–and Faithful Readers Who Don’t Actually Know Me–don’t bother upgrading a previous Windows installation. It is a Major Pain in the Ass.

I initiated the upgrade process from within WindowsXP and was immediately treated with a warning that “the upgrade process may take a few hours. Please be patient.” What the F? A few hours. I remember when I upgraded to WinXP from Win98: the install warned me that the upgrade process would take about 45 minutes to 1 hour depending on the speed of my machine, but the process only took about half an hour. Perhaps this warning was merely an “average” estimate much like that. My computer is a pretty hefty beast, though, so I didn’t actually expect the upgrade process to take more than…oh, about an hour.

Wrong. Try three and a half hours.

After the first hour, I got to wondering if something was wrong…yet the little percentage ticker kept counting up another digit every five or ten minutes and I hadn’t been alerted of any errors. After the second hour, I began to ponder what the hell was going on in my computer. The hard-drive light was running incessantly, as was the DVD-drive activity light. Was the Vista DeeVamaDee restructuring spacetime within my computer’s case? Was the new Vista DRM underpinnings based on some kind of nanowiring schema that was currently being generated by assemblers grown from the surface of the disk itself? Damned if I knew! By the third hour, I was in the kitchen grubbin’ on some popcorn and reading the latest issue of Computer Music–when, suddenly, I heard a DING! that sounded rather officious and came back into the Lab to discover the upgrade was done and my computer had booted into Windows Vista successfully.

The first thing I noticed was that Windows Defender, Vista’s little built-in antispyware service, had blocked all of my startup programs–effectively rendering my scanner and printer and a bunch of other devices useless. That was easy enough to fix (I just opened the list of blocked programs and checked off their boxes to permit them to run, then rebooted)…but then I discovered that two of my external hard-drives weren’t functioning. They were both connected via FireWire cables to the FireWire port on my SoundBlaster X-Fi Platinum soundcard. So that made sense: I just needed to install the new (beta, but still functional) Vista-compatible X-FI drivers that I got from Creative’s website and the FireWire port would be good to go again. Nope. I installed the driver and once again had sound…but the FireWire port would not work. Windows Vista kept giving me a “found new hardware” dialogue begging for a driver for a completely “unknown device”, which I assumed to be the FireWire port–although I never managed to actually figure out what it was, since even the Device Manager only described it as “Unknown Device”. OY!

Well, I supposed I’d get that figured out eventually. In the meantime, everything was running as it was before…oh, except for the printer, whose driver’s Vista had apparently forgotten to load or update. I reinstalled the printer drivers easily enough, but Vista still kept giving me an error message that it couldn’t load printer drivers at startup…even though the printer showed up right there in the Printers Control Panel and spat out every test document I sent to it from Word 2007. Huh. Weird.

Everything so far was…kind of unusual, yes, but neither particularly frustrating or unexpected–I’d run into issues just like this when I upgraded to XP from 98, so I knew something of the sort would be likely to happen this time around as well. All of my software seemed to work just fine, so I wasn’t about to fret it. I left the OS to sit overnight and observe just how it would behave after a few hours of steady uptime and went to bed.

The next morning, I came blear-eyed down to the Lab to find the power light on my computer glowing a sullen and–dare I say it?–almost infernal orange rather than its customary chilly robotic blue. Damn it, I thought: Power must’ve gone off overnight. But…wait. The computer’s fan was whirring faintly and the orange light was pulsing. What the….Then it hit me. Sleep mode. My computer had simply gone to sleep.

Now, this was a bit surprising, because I never let my computer go into sleep mode. I have never, ever had a computer that could reliably go to sleep and wake back up again. That particular power-saving technology has been around how long and it still doesn’t work for crap? That’s a whole ‘nother issue, though. Suffice to say, when I bought my computer back in August of 2006, one of the first things I did was disable any and all possibilities of it going to sleep.

But, apparently, sometime in the three-point-five hours Windows Vista had needed to install itself, it had forgotten my power-management settings. Ach, du. Perhaps it would wake up alright, though. I hit the spacebar…the keyboard it up…the Eye of Sauron turned to its customary Colgate Fresh Gel blue…and then–

Blackness.

And the return of my BIOS screen.

I really didn’t know what happened–had the computer actually been asleep, or somehow half-shut-down due to a power failure?–until Vista booted up and handed me a warning that it had recovered from a serious error (defined, simply, as “BlueScreen”). BSoDed! My Windows Vista installation wasn’t even 12 hours old and it had already coughed up its first BSoD. No reason to get excited, though: Windows XP used to freak and mook out BSoDs anytime it went into sleep mode, as well. I looked at Vista’s “Event Viewer” to check if, indeed, the BSoD had originated in a fit of computerized sleep apnea, and yep–there is was: confirmation that the computer had choked trying to wake up. No problemo. I simply loaded up Power Settings and disabled sleep mode again. The end.

Despite the occasional kinks and weirdness, everything was running quite smoothly. In fact, Windows Vista seemed to be running a little bit better on my computer than XP had….And then I did something stupid: I attempted to install Kaspersky Lab’s latest Internet Security 6 beta, which was supposedly Vista-ready.

I had uninstalled Kaspersky Internet Security before upgrading to Vista to avoid any possible conflicts, but I didn’t feel right leaving a Windows installation of any kind sitting without any kind of AV protection–so I’d downloaded the certified Vista-capable beta of KIS, which Kaspersky noted was certainly stable enough for general usage, though it no doubt still contained some bugs here and there. Fine by me. If it worked most of the time, that was good enough for me, as I really liked running KIS under WinXP and wanted to continue to experience under Vista. Hell, I was even prepared to give them money to buy the full versions of their stuff.

All went well until KIS installed a driver of some sort into Windows’ system directly. And then–

BSoDed! AGAIN. But this was an actual Blue Screen o’ Death–a full-fledged Stop Error of the most heinous, systemkilling kind. Normally, whenever BSoDs come up, the system dumps files in memory to the hard-drive so that they can be analyzed upon reboot and a solution offered. Not this time, though….The BSoD was frozen as solid as a blue sheet of pack-ice. Well….Whatever. Reboot, see if things worked, and–if not–uninstall Kaspersky and look for something different.

When the Windows desktop rebooted, everything was proceeding fine and–

BSoD!

You guessed it: same error as before. I immediately knew that the goddamned Kaspersky Killer Driver had rendered my Windows Vista installation completely unstable. The only way to remove it would be to, probably, boot into Safe Mode and try to run the uninstaller from there. So that’s what I did: I booted into Safe Mode and attempted to uninstall the offending software package.

But…oh, what’s this? “Windows Uninstaller will not run in Safe Mode.” That was the first error I got when I tried to uninstall the damned program via the Programs Control Panel. When I tried to run the Uninstall command in the program’s Start Menu folder, I was told that “Uninstall can only work with a previously installed product.” At this point, I became irate and just clicked RESTART, thinking my logical next step would be to try a step-by-step confirmation boot to, perhaps, identify and isolate the Killer Driver.

But my computer wouldn’t reboot. As soon as the BIOS screen cleared, three dreaded words appeared in icy grey DOS-text at the top of the screen:

MISSING OPERATING SYSTEM.

Jesus wept….What now? At this point, I’m going to cut a long story short and merely note that somehow, either by booting into Safe Mode, or because of the Killer Driver, the boot table of my C: drive had gotten erased or damaged or something. I simply could not boot into Windows. So I slapped my Knoppix DVD in to attempt to access the C: drive and see what the fuck had gone wrong. But Knoppix couldn’t even mount the drive. Oh, it could mount allllllllllllll the other ones…but C: was as good as dead.

My last resort was to try to boot from the Windows Vista DVD…which I did successfully. When the boot screen came up, I spotted a small link to restoration and diagnostic tools in the lower left corner. Clicking that brought me to an extremely useful collection of utilities designed to help repair damaged Windows installations. The item most relative to me proclaimed the ability to fix problems that are keeping Windows from starting. So I clicked that…and it found no errors to repair.

Yet, when I rebooted anyway…LO! Windows restarted. It even made it to the point where the desktop came up. I immediately tried to uninstall the goddamned Killer Driver and guess what?

What’s blue, screen-sized, and indicative of massive system hemorrhaging?

At this point…I gave up. I’m leaving out a LOT of details above, but take it from me: the whole process of trying to exorcist the Killer Driver from my little silicone Reagan’s bits and bytes took nearly three hours and involved plenty of horrific blasphemy (on my part), pea-soup-spewing, and the deaths of not one but two Catholic priests who came by to assist in the exorcism. After the ambulance took the bodies away and the police took my statement…I decided the only thing to do was to treat my computer like a prize-winning horse who’d broken all four of its legs.

Want to know what happened next? This part’s actually happy and fun! The Rebirth of Vista.

Reinstalling Windows Vista–that is, performing a completely clean install by formatting my C: drive and installing Vista Home Premium 100% free and unfettered by any leftover XP weirdness–took less than an hour (25 minutes to be exact), and was easily the least eventful OS install I’ve ever done. Quite simply, it went swimmingly.

To start with, the install was ten times faster than the upgrade: Vista just reformatted the hard-drive (thereby fixing its mysterious Missing Operating Systemness), plopped its files on there, and configured itself with no fuss, no muss, and–amazingly enough–no driver problems.

One of the reasons that I wanted to try the upgrade method first was simply that I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to track down all of the necessary drivers for the hardware in my machine if I had to go the clean-install route. When I bought the machine (it’s an HP Pavilion, by the way), I knew it was full of fairly generic, common parts…yet, nonetheless, finding the proper drivers for devices whose manufacturers you can’t even begin to identify isn’t an easy proposition. I went to the HP drivers page for my computer’s specific model, but there were only a few drivers there for things such as the modem (I didn’t even know there was one in this machine), the onboard RealTek sound system, and so forth. Nothing that looked helpful to me.

I was worried that when I did the clean install I would discover a lot of hardware that Vista just did not have drivers to support–a repeat of the “Unidentified Device” situation earlier, only worse. But Windows Vista comes with an impressively diverse catalogue of drivers by default, and can hop online and search MS’s collection of drivers for anything even more esoteric. I was pleasantly surprised–and I do mean surprised–to find that Windows Vista managed to find drivers to support all of the hardware in my computer except for my soundcard…though, oddly enough, it did manage to find drivers for the FireWire ports on my soundcard. All I needed to do was install those soundcard drivers and it was on.

In the days since performing my clean install of Windows Vista, my computer has actually run better than ever before. There are a number of reasons for this:

• ANY clean OS install runs better than an older install that has aggregated all manner of crud in its cracks.
• I haven’t installed much software on it. I’ve taken this opportunity to streamline my software needs to just the programs that I regularly use, and to keep the number of fonts on my machine drastically reduced (from nearly 1000 fonts to just under 300).
• Windows Vista actually seems to handle memory allocation and resource management a tiny bit better than XP.

I’ve been quite impressed with Windows Vista’s performance so far. Many of the new applications that ship natively with Vista Home Premium, such as the new Windows Photo Gallery, Calendar, and Windows Mail (ok, it’s just Outlook Express Version 2, but still), are really handy, lightweight, and helpful. The new version of Media Center completely effin’ rocks, and even Windows Media Player 11–which was okay on XP, but a serious resource hog–is extremely useful and efficient on Vista (though I’ll never abandon J. River Media Center 12 for it).

Most of all, though, I adore Vista’s new pervasive search capabilities and the new navigational structure for Explorer windows. I’ll go into the usefulness of this functionality in greater detail in a future article. Suffice to say, it has become indispensable in only a few days’ working with Vista.

It has most definitely not all been smooth sailing, however. Audio applications–the core of my computer usage–do not play well with Vista yet. Renoise works perfectly, but Sony Acid 6.0 is so buggy and full of weird, unexpected behaviors under Vista that it’s virtually unusable. VST plugins install just fine, and work flawlessly in Renoise…though none of them show up in Acid 6.0 or Adobe Audition 2.0 (which struggles so badly to run in Vista that it’s almost pathetic to witness). Though this is seriously biting into my production capabilities for now, I’m not worried, as none of these issues are incredibly complex and insurmountable. Worry not: there’ll be 100% Vista-compatible versions of Audition (now called Soundbooth, I think), Acid 6.0, SoundForge, and so forth hitting the market soon enough. These compatibility issues are only slightly relevant for now, as all of the apps I use are under active development.

Still, the sooner the better….

However, I have not run into any other major installation difficulties at all. Like I said, this has been the easiest new-OS-installation I’ve ever gone through…which, despite Microsoft’s constant blather about how much of Vista has been completely recoded, is not that alarming. After all, Vista is not a revolutionary change such as the jump from Win 3.1/DOS to Win95, or even Win98/ME to XP.

So there you have it. Pegritz’s experience installing and running Windows Vista. The main lesson here is simple: don’t upgrade from WinXP to Vista. Grab an OEM edition of Vista Home Premium and do a clean install. Your computer will thank you for it. At least now I know why I haven’t read that many articles online about upgrading an XP installation….I must’ve been one of the few people stupid enough to do it!

But from the ashes of my frustration, awesomeness has arisen! I’m really digging Vista so far–particularly all its luscious futuristic eyecandy. But beneath all the glitz and the hype, Microsoft has created a solid product here, one that actually does make computerized life easier. Did I shout “WOWWA-WOOWA!” when it first booted up and the Aero interface slapped me in the face like a big ol’ Polish sausage made of crystal? No. It did let out a few, “Oh, that’s cool”s and a couple “Neato-skeeto”s, though. And chances are, you will, too.

So whenever you get around to taking the plunge and Vistafying your computer, you’ll most likely have a pretty easy time of it if you go with the clean install. And you’ll like what you see when it’s up and running.

And that’s it. Commander Pegritz of the U.S.S.A. Pegritz(.com)! signing off while grooving to I Am Kloot.

 

Microsoft Vista’s “Protected Media Path:” Cracked Already?

January 29th, 2007

I’m gonna cut right to the chase and give this stuff to y’all straight: security researcher Alex Ionescu has just published a claim on his blog that he has developed a means to bypass Window’s Vista’s “Protected Media Path” DRM scheme. Yes, this is the entrenched DRM scheme built into Vista’s very guts that I mentioned a little while ago as being irrelevant to anyone who simply avoids protected media.

However, Ionescu is a bit of a candy-ass, and is a bit trepidatious about releasing the information because, as he puts it, the open-source community has no interest in his code (don’t be so sure about that, bucky) and releasing it as an anti-DRM device would be a scaaaaaaary, scaaaaaaary violation of the Digital Milennium Copyright Act. Oooooooooh! In Herr Ionescu’s defense, however, I must note that his description of the method on his blog may very well be detailed enough in and of itself to give other…shall we say, less scrupulous researchers enough information to reverse-engineer it for themselves. Sly!

Do keep in mind, though, that refraining from wasting your cash on protected media is a much more certain and stable means of avoiding any issues with Vista’s copy-protection. Don’t make me PMP-slap you!

 

Pegritz’s 100%-Hype-Free, No-Bullshit-Allowed Guide to Windows Vista

January 22nd, 2007

Hey, folks! Guess what’s happening on the 30th of January–just eight more days into the future! Alfonso Ribeiro will be announcing his triumphant return to primetime television? Nyet. Yo’ mama will be telling you that you’ll soon have a new little brother/sister/whatever? Mmmmm…not quite. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates will finally release a statement addressing the rampant rumors that they were lovers in college, and that the long-running battle between Apple Computers and Microsoft is little more than the decades-long fallout over a reacharound issue? Nooooooo…but you’re close!

Windows Vista is finally going to be released to the general public on Tuesday, January 30th, 2007! WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

*sound of crickets chirping*

What…you’re not mad excited? You’re not frothing at the mouth and growing faint as all the blood surges weinerward from your brain at the very thought of The Long-Awaited New Version of Microsoft’s Tried n’ True Windows Operating System?! C’mon, people…y’all were queued up in Star-Wars-matinee-esque lines in front of Circuit Citys just slavering at the opportunity to rush on in the second Windows 95 went on sale at midnight, August 24th, 1995! Where’s the excitement now, huh? It’s like you’ve all…Idaknow, forgot about Dre Windows!

Well, that’s no doubt because the release of Windows Vista is quite underwhelming. Win95 really was revolutionary compared to Windows 3.1, which was just than a glorified DOS shell. All Windows releases since 95 have been little more than refinements of the basic OS model that debuted with Win95: fundamentally, even Windows XP–to date my favorite version of Windows ever–is a polished, updated version of Win95. Though Microsoft is touting that Vista is the Oughts version of Win95–the next big evolutionary step in Windows–it, too, is just another iteration of the Win95 concept. Oh, there’s plenty of stuff changed under the hood: the “Start” button has been replaced with a shiny Pokemon power ball, search is better integrated with every aspect of the OS, and so forth…but take a second and look at it, people. It’s still more or less the Windows you’ve come to know since 1995, just…prettier–and, hopefully, somewhat more secure. Sure, some items in the Control Panel have been shuffled around and now you have to give the damned thing an ultra-encrypted secure “OK” anytime you even want to move a .doc file from one folder to another, but you click the Start button Pikachu ball and there’re your programs and all your pr0n.

Windows Vista looks pretty, and some of its functionality is quite nice–but is it an absolute must-have upgrade? Will the Rapture take place on January 30th if less than 5% of Windows users rush out and snatch up Vista? Will your life become instantly richer if you plop down $150 to $250 on Microsoft’s Great White Hope? No cubed. If you’re perfectly satisfied with Windows XP, there’s not one compelling reason to rush into upgrading to Vista. Vista simply does not offer any great advantages over WinXP.

But what if, like me, you’re a glitz junkie or an early-adopter who just wants to snag the OS on Game Day because that Aero interface is so effin’ sweet? Keep in mind, folks: you will need to upgrade to Vista eventually, as Microsoft eventually begins to phase out WinXP–and any new computers you buy at Best Buy or Staples or WalMart from here on out are going to have Vista preinstalled. Let’s say you want to upgrade to Vista as soon as it’s available. What do you need to know? GASP! WILL YOUR COMPUTER EVEN BE ABLE TO RUN IT?!?!

Face it: every new version of any OS is going to be a little more resource-hungry and demanding than previous versions–it’s the nature of the beast. Win95 was a whole helluva lot more resource-intensive than Windows 3.1, and well do I remember the many, many, many articles I read before I bought Windows XP that warned how much of a system hog that upgrade was. Googling “Windows Vista system requirements” will get you hundreds upon hundreds of articles detailing just how badly Windows Vista is going to beat your machine into the ground and suck up so many processor cycles it’ll take Solitaire a week and three days to start up. Microsoft’s own breakdown of system requirements to run Windows Vista almost makes their own OS out to be some kind of Azathoth-like blob that demands at least a gig of RAM, a video card comparable to that in a Sony PlayStation 3, and a “soul co-processor” that apparently utilizes a user’s own cerebral cortex as extra swap-file space.

Don’t be alarmed. Chances are, unless your computer is fifteen years old and powered by a team of hamsters running in a big wheel connected to a generator, you’ll probably be able to run Windows Vista.

Microsoft provides a very handy little tool, the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor, to let you discover just how good your “Vista Experience” will be, as well as to get a surprising amount of useful information about possible driver conflicts and other routine hazards of upgrading to a new OS version. The Advisor will tell you which edition of Windows Vista is best for you, provide you with a breakdown of hardware that may have problems with Vista, a breakdown of software that may be incompatible with the new OS, and a list of drivers that you’ll have to update to Vista-capable ones after install. It’s smart to run this li’l beast before even thinking of upgrading to Vista, just to be sure Vista won’t render your TV tuner card useless or break your favorite programs. If that happens, put off upgrading Vista until the proper driver and software updates are available that will work in Vista. Naturally.

The Upgrade Advisor will also tell you what edition of Windows Vista may be best for you. One of the most deceptively annoying things about Vista is that it comes in so many different “flavors”, each tailored to a different segment of the market. But don’t let the seeming panoply of choices frustrate you, as there are only two editions that are worth having: Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate. You needn’t waste your time checking out any of the other editions, as either: A) they simply won’t apply to you (such as Vista Enterprise, which is only designed for massive corporate installations); or B) they’re not even worth considering (like Home Basic, which really isn’t Vista, but Vista’s challenged little diaper-wearing brother). Home Premium is the edition that most folks will want, as it contains the most-excellent Windows Media Center as well as all the really nifty new Vista toys and functionality. Consider Home Premium to be something like Windows XP Media Center Edition on steroids. Windows Ultimate, on the other hand, is just like Home Premium with a number of business-related networking and security apps (like BitLocker drive encryption) added. This is the edition best suited for people who run small businesses, either from home or from a modest office: you not only get all the business functionality of Vista Business, you get all of the nifty media-centric stuff of Home Premium so you can use those computers for entertainment as well when you’re not balancing spreadsheets.

Regardless of which edition you choose, though, take the Upgrade Advisor’s hardware suggestions with a grain of salt. The biggest point of controversy surrounding Windows Vista is how powerful of a video card you need to be able to run the much-vaunted (and totally awesome) new Aero interface without suffering major system slow-down. Microsoft themselves note that to get the best visual performance, you should have a video card that supports “DirectX 9 graphics with a WDDM driver, [has] 128 MB of graphics memory (minimum), [and] Pixel Shader 2.0 and 32 bits per pixel.” Hell, I don’t even know what “WDDM” or “Pixel Shader 2.0″ even is! The absolute minimum graphics capability is listed as “a graphics processor that is DirectX 9 capable.”

When you install a Windows Vista upgrade or perform a completely clean, fresh install on a newly-partitioned hard-drive, one of the first things Vista will do is analyze your hardware and set itself up to take best advantage of what you’ve got. Very few of these settings need tweaked afterward–the OS actually does a pretty good job of customizing itself to work well with your hardware–but, more often than not, the Aero interface will be turned off by default (unless you have a top-of-the-line $600 GeForce video monster) because your system “doesn’t have enough resources to run it properly.”

In a word: bullshit.

Unless you have a rusty, broken-down, 64mb-or-less El Camino of a graphics card, your machine will be able to run Aero with VERY little impact on system resources. Witness:

I’ve been running Windows Vista betas (all the way up to and including RC1) on my “test box”, a four-year-old Compaq Presario with a 1.something gHz processor, 512mb of RAM, and a run-of-the-mill, three-year-old 256mb GeForce video card in it. I decided to use that computer, an old beater if ever there was one, to test out Vista because I was more curious to see how Vista would run on an older machine instead of the still-brand-new HP Media Center titan that I purchased last August. (Also, that HP is my primary machine, and I wasn’t about to risk my data by running a beta OS on my work box.) Vista installed perfectly fine on my test box, and, of course, after completing its hardware test told me that I couldn’t run Aero. I right-clicked on my desktop, went to the Appearance tab, and selected Aero from the dropdown menu. Aero ran fine.

Now, Windows Vista on that old clunker is not superfast, by any means. In fact, sometimes, when starting a big program like Adobe Photoshop CS2 or Sony Acid 6.0, it takes quite a while to get the app up and running. But once loaded, even the biggest resource-munching audio apps seem to run fine, even on that old machine.

I did run into some hardware incompatibilities on the test box, but only because its DVD-R drive is quite old. When I upgraded the beta 2 installation of Vista to Release Candidate 1, the problem disappeared. Do be aware, though, that if you have older hardware, you will almost certainly have to go looking for newer drivers. Still, it appears to me that most of the latest WinXP drivers for common, everyday devices like CD-R/DVD-R drives, processors, network cards, and the like work just fine under Vista.

Software incompatibilities are fairly rare, but they do happen. For instance, Adobe Creative Suite 2’s file-managing apps don’t play well with the slightly-different folder architecture of Vista: trying to open a document from, say, Photoshop CS2’s “Open” dialogue causes havoc when you try to navigate from one folder to another. Or, at least, it did. Chances are that this problem has been fixed, or very shortly shall be fixed, through a simple live update of CS2. Windows Vista is not a complete overhaul of Windows, such as OS X was to MacOS: most WinXP applications are perfectly compatible with Vista. The few that aren’t will no doubt be made compatible shortly after the OS hits the streets. The best way to avoid these problems if to seek out the websites for mission-critical apps to see if their authors have anything to say about Vista compatibility.

The Intarweb has been a-babble lately with talk of all the entrenched DRM in Windows Vista. Some folks say it spells doom, doom, DOOOOOOM!!! Others…that it’s merely an annoyance. I am, of course, not at all happy with any kind of DRM, but it’s there and it must be dealt with. Fortunately, that’s easy to do: avoid any and all “protected media” and you’ll be fine. If you want to watch HD-DVD/BluRay discs, buy an appropriate hardware player and hook it up to your TV. Or install a crack for the appropriate flavor of AACS encryption (HD-DVD or BluRay), rip the DeeVamaDee, and watch it in full, unconstricted glory on Windows Media Player 11. Vista’s built-in DRM does take up resources that could be better used by…well, any and all other processes, but as long as you steer clear of protected media, its presence seems like it will be negligible.

And one final note: Vista’s User Account Control. Here’s another one of those hot-button issues that every Tom, Dick, and Harry has something to say about. Simply put, UAC is Microsoft’s hamfisted attempt at simultaneously locking down the OS to prevent “malicious software”–the insidious spy-ware–from installing on your machine without your permission and idiot-proofing your PC so that you don’t accidentally delete your C:\WINDOWS directory while trying to hide the tentacle-pr0n from your dad. For a user who rarely touches system folders, installs new software, or does anything more with a computer than check email, listen to CDs, and surf the web, User Account Control will be unnoticeable–but to power users, like myself, who always like to tinker with their OSes and are constantly installing new stuff, UAC is the most nagging, annoying pain in the ass you can ever imagine. If you do a lot of installing and systems-setting tweaking, turn UAC off completely for your account (you can do this through the User Accounts control panel item). But you may want to keep it active for Little Johnny’s account so the ignorant li’l bastid doesn’t end up screwing up your computer with viruses and demonic souls while trying to find porn-stars on MySpace.

And that’s it, folks. That’s all you really need to know about Windows Vista. If you have no need at all to upgrade to Vista, by all means don’t–you won’t be gaining anything vital. On the other hand, if you do want to upgrade soon, use your common sense first and foremost in order to prepare for the upgrade. That way the incidence of weird, unforeseen problems will be minimized.

Furthermore, do not believe the Microsoft hype, the alarmist bullshit, and especially don’t believe the Linux fanboys and Macheads ranting and raving about how Vista will spell the End of the World as We Know It. It’s just another OS upgrade, like Windows XP. And just cast your minds back to…ohhh, 2001 or so. Remember all the fuss being

made over WinXP’s terrifying “activation” requirements and how that would destroy the very notion of privacy? Didn’t amount to shit, did it? All the fearmongering around Windows Vista is just another iteration of that old harum-scarum routine.

Be cautious, sure, but don’t be afraid. For gods’ sake, it’s just an OS upgrade.

 

Protect Media: Avoid "Protected" Media

January 19th, 2007

A few weeks ago, my boy Jeremy sent me a link to this thought-provoking article concerning the “cost” of the content protection schemes written into the core of the forthcoming Windows Vista operating system. Don’t let the title fool you, though: this is not an economic analysis at heart, but an exposé on the various DRM-supporting components written into the very core of the OS itself. The article examines the various ways in which Vista is designed to manage “premium content”–that is, content such as high-definition video and audio “protected” by various DRM schemes–and the many ways in which the default premium-content management routines in the system itself not only put a greater strain on a computer’s CPU but also serve to drastically limit a user’s ability to enjoy media on his/her system without having to shell out extra cash for all manner of new hardware specifically designed to interact with the content-protection stuff in the OS.

What does that mean in layman’s terms? Witness:

Windows Vista is being touted as the OS of choice for next-generation media. It features built-in support for HD-DVD content (if you have an HD-DVD drive to read it, of course), for example. So let’s say you’ve purchased an HD-DVD edition of Ghostbusters–the greatest film ever made–and want to watch it on your computer. You just got your computer in Summer of 2007, well before Vista came out, and because you are quite the mediaphile (like myself) who listens to lots of music and watches movies on your computer, you invested in a beautiful high-quality Samsung widescreen LCD monitor, a SoundBlaster X-FI soundcard, and a decent set of 5.1 surround speakers to go with ‘em. Then you upgraded to Vista, bought an HD-DVD drive to replace your box’s plain ol’ DVD drive, and now you want to watch your high-def version of Ghostbusters on your computer.

Wait a sec….Why is the picture quality so fuzzy? And why does the audio sound like crap? This is an HD-DVD, for christ’s sake, not a twenty-year-old VHS tape that has been played and rewound about sixty thousand times! So…what’s going on here?

Well, it’s Windows Vista’s entrenched “premium content” protection kicking in. Read the above-linked article if you want the specifics, but here’s the gist of the matter: Vista’s content-protection scheme is designed to interact with hardware elements, such that if one attempts to play protected high-def content on a monitor that is not equipped with the hardware specs to protect the encrypted video channel, then Windows Vista will “constrict” the quality of the media. In order to properly enjoy “premium content” on your computer, you’ll need to get a new monitor with the appropriate protection hardware to sync with Vista’s built-in protection, a new set of speakers that have controlled hardware specs as well, and so forth.

This is, of course, the logical next step in the teeter-tottering edifice of Digital Restrictions Management. In order to prevent “piracy”, Microsoft has given in to Big Media and not only laced its next-generation OS with tons of content protection bloat but also established a software standard that will require hardware manufacturers to include the necessary hardware-based protection elements in order for their products to be properly considered “Vista-capable”. Will hardware manufacturers actually do this? Of course they will. Regardless of the incessant whining of Linux and Mac zealots the world over, the world of home computing is completely dominated by Microsoft. As soon as Vista is officially released on January 30th, 2007, virtually every desktop and notebook computer sold by Dell, HP, and so forth in common retail or direct-sale outlets will all have Windows Vista pre-installed…just as virtually every computer sold today has Windows XP on it. If Creative wants to continue selling soundcards for Windows machines, for example, it would be economic suicide for them not to provide their hardware with the proper measures to interact with a ubiquitous OS.

Sounds scary, doesn’t it? Bill Gates can lament as much as he likes about how the current state of DRM “causes too much pain for legitimate buyers”…but the truth of the matter is: Microsoft has built Windows Vista to satisfy Big Media, which continues to believe that complex and annoying content-protection schemes are The Way To Go despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Does this make Microsoft the Bad Guy here? Not at all. Microsoft is a corporation, and its goal is to make money. As such, Microsoft is inherently conservative in its dealings with other corporations and corporate organizations–to incur the wrath of the RIAA, for instance, would substantially cut into Microsoft’s profit margins. So, they give Big Media just what it wants and sews DRM inextricably into the seams of its new operating system.

Sounds scary, doesn’t it? You’ll have to go and buy a whole new monitor and speakers and everything just to play a damned HD-DVD on your computer, won’t you? Microsoft and its friends in Big Media will completely control your computer, won’t they? Every piece of hardware you buy from Vista’s launch onward will have to be equipped to play nice with the OS’s content-protection schemes in order to properly display stuff and the Digital Rights of the entire world will be Managed through a well-locked-down delivery stream. Right?

Wrong.

This only matters if you buy protected media which requires content-protection to kick in. If you’re playing, say, a DRM-free unprotected mp3, none of those quality restrictions come into play. They may very well still be running in the background, eating up resources on your Vista machine for no good reason–but that’s a whoooooooooole different argument, there.

So how many times do I have to say it? If you buy “protected” media, you are an idiot. Period. When you buy protected media, you are supporting the industry whose grubby fingers are even beginning to intrude upon the operating systems you run on your computer.

My friend and colleague aRvin Clay, in a recent discussion concerning just this subject, noted: “So, Pegritz, you’re never going to buy another DVD?” Yes, all DVDs are protected…but that content-protection scheme was broken years ago: one need only take a minute or two with Google to find all manner of software, of varying levels of legality, that will disable DVD protection (as well as zone restrictions and many other ridiculous arbitrary market-protection locks) for any DVD played on a computer. It’s trivial to install one of these programs and then enjoy the freedom to back up your DVDs to Div-X files or other compressed lossy formats to safeguard your investment. Within the last few weeks, even HD-DVD’s much-vaunted AACS copy-protection encryption has been cracked (well, more or less) as well.

In the future, more and more hardware is going to be built to Vista specifications to take advantage of Big Media’s frantic attempts to lock down content with all manner of ridiculous protections. My response to this is simple: So what? For every hardware-based encryption system, there will be a software-based workaround. Vista can waste thousands of processor cycles locking down HD-DVD playback to “acceptably”-protected devices…but does anyone really think that this system won’t be cracked wide open within a year?

There is, however, a simple way to avoid all this hacking/cracking BS, which may be a little too sophisticated for Average Joe home computer uses to bother with. Don’t buy protected media. Tell the iTunes Music Store, Napster, any and all online music stores that chain up your purchases in DRM to go eff themselves. Shop at eMusic or any of a thousand other DRM-free online music e-tailers. And if you buy DVDs and watch them on your computer, invest a few bucks in a copy of AnyDVD to simply circumvent copy-protection. No doubt there will be a Vista version soon enough, and probably another for HD-DVDs as well.

So don’t be afraid to upgrade to Vista because of all its entrenched DRM. Yes, it’s going to eat up more processor functionality than it should–but that’s a whoooooooooooole ‘nother argument in itself…and I doubt anyone with a decently-powerful computer will notice much of a resource slowdown. Just never, ever give it protected media to slaver over, or the hidden ghost of the MPAA and RIAA living deep within Vista’s guts will rise from its tomb and haunt you!

Of course…you could also just give Vista a miss and stick with WinXP, or give up on MS entirely and switch to a Linux distro. Those are valid options. WinXP is a perfectly good operating system, as is Linux…but, no matter what the good folks at Ubuntu say, Linux is not a general-use desktop OS. Still, it is free!

UPDATE: I’ve recently come upon an extremely informative article, on the Windows Vista Team Blog, written by Nick White, one of the project managers for the division responsible for coding the above copy-protection functionality into Windows Vista. One of the things White notes very clearly is that:

Windows Vista’s content protection mechanisms are only used when required by the policy associated with the content being played. For Windows Vista experiences, if the content does not require a particular protection, then that protection mechanism is not used.

Again, simply avoiding protected media will make this functionality irrelevant. However, when asked whether all of this built-in DRM is going to have an impact on a CPU’s performance by taking up processor cycles that could be better utilized elsewhere, White answers:

Yes. However, the use of additional CPU cycles is inevitable, as the PC provides consumers with additional functionality. Windows Vista’s content protection features were developed to carefully balance the need to provide robust protection from commercial content while still enabling great new experiences such as HD-DVD or Blu-Ray playback.

Again, the resource cost of DRM is a completely different matter than that concerned in this article–but I think it fairly safe to make the assumption that the DRM infrastructure will run with a very small footprint as a background process until it is evoked by, say, plopping an HD-DVD in your drive. It may very well be completely unnoticeable on all but the oldest, most resource-strapped machines (which may not even be able to run the core components of Vista in the first place) in the absence of protected media.

Ohyeah, and Engadget today reported that, apparently, the Blu-Ray version of AACS encryption = 0) { links[i].innerHTML = 'View Comments'; query += 'url' + i + '=' + encodeURIComponent(links[i].href) + '&'; } } document.write('