So I've written a few programs, finished setting up the machine, all that. 
I've only run across a couple of annoyances so far.

One, Microsoft's ass-brain decision that the standard per-file backup 
software should skip over files whose extension they don't recognise. So you 
tell it to back up everything, and it skips .exe files, .php files, etc. It 
only backs up "documents".  Huh?  Makes it utterly useless and to be coded 
around. So I wrote a script using vshadow.exe and robocopy to back up my 
home directory. Unfortunately, it isn't integrated into the "previous 
versions" the way the usual backup is.  Weirdness.

Two, when making copies of big files (by which I mean multiple files of tens 
of gig each), it'll sometimes just ... stop for a couple of minutes. It 
always comes back, but for a few minutes it'll putter along at 3MB/sec or 
so. Fortunately, the built-in resource monitor will tell you which processes 
are reading from or writing to which files and at what speed, and the task 
manager will tell you which services are running in which tasks. (Annoyingly 
(but for understandable reasons) you can have one process running a dozen 
unrelated services.) In this case, it seemed to be the "superfetch" service. 
I think there's some sort of priority-inversion bug, whereby you start 
reading a big file and superfetch comes in and says "Let me read-ahead that 
for you", but superfetch runs at a low priority and you wind up waiting on 
superfetch. "net stop superfetch" before starting backups seems to 
completely cure the problem, but it certainly took a while to figure out 
what was causing it.

Three, if you have two screens configured, and your video game starts up 
full-screen at a smaller resolution on one of the screens, it seems to punt 
your icons and taskbar around to undesirable places.   I never used dual 
screens under XP, so I don't know if this is usual, but I almost never had a 
screen-size change (via RDP for example) mess up my icons on XP.

Four, the new Media Center is in some ways more annoying and in some ways 
less annoying. I can't tell if it's just because I haven't used it enough to 
learn where everything went or whether it's just not meshing with me.

Five, as everyone says, tracking down how to set up your internet connection 
manually is rather a PITA. So far it has been a dozen clicks thru screens to 
try to guess whether it's "configure network hardware" or "set up a network" 
or "create a connection" or what. WTF guys?

Six, after you do something system-maintenancy (like chkdsk), stuff can get 
a bit ... slow. I think chkdsk does something like writing a bunch of 
changes to the journal on the disk, then finishes, and lets the next sync 
take care of dumping gigabytes to the disk or something. This, of course, 
makes the system rather unresponsive if you're trying to do something else 
disky. But, really, that's only after as administrator you say "go repair 
something", so it would seem to be pretty OK, if you ask me. BTW, if you 
plug an XP external drive into a Vista system (via USB, say), it'll be 
read-only until you run chkdsk /f on it. If you plug from Vista back to XP, 
it'll thrash a while, because XP doesn't understand Vista's volume shadows, 
so it goes through and deletes them.

Seven, some of the stuff you'd think would have a progress bar annoyingly 
doesn't. Apparently it's because the algorithms have changed and they can no 
longer figure out in advance how long something will take, but it's still 
annoying. :-)

Otherwise, so far, I rather like it. I have the task bar on the right edge 
of my left screen, and the sidebar on the right edge of the right screen, 
and I get plenty of room for everything. I can see why people like 
dual-screen work. I'm hoping I don't get durango-neck. (Program on one of 
these http://www.sydex.com/durango/durango.html for a week, and you'll see 
what I mean.)

I need to see if Second Life stops sucking when you get a high end computer 
with high-end graphics, or whether the problem really is their bandwidth.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
   see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.

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Oh, and it looks like the CPU clock speed gets turned up pretty much 
instantly when you start a compute-bound process, so unless Tom's Hardware 
was running performance tests on a laptop without setting it to "high 
performance" first, it looks like that wasn't why their tests showed it 
CPU-slower.  Why it would be, I don't know, except I had a bad combination 
of drivers that was making something in the audio system suck up like 7% CPU 
time, audio conflicting with disk drive RAID or something weird, but I'd 
think they'd have looked at the performance of an "idle" system and said 
"Gee, there's something odd there." Or at least have mentioned it, if they 
didn't take time to fix it first.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
   see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.

Post a reply to this message

> One, Microsoft's ass-brain decision that the standard per-file backup 
> software should skip over files whose extension they don't recognise. So 
> you tell it to back up everything, and it skips .exe files, .php files, 
> etc. It only backs up "documents".  Huh?  Makes it utterly useless and to 
> be coded around. So I wrote a script using vshadow.exe and robocopy to 
> back up my home directory. Unfortunately, it isn't integrated into the 
> "previous versions" the way the usual backup is.  Weirdness.

I experienced something similar in an old version of Windows (can't remember 
which one), now I have a directory full of old programming projects (for 
some old Borland IDE) with no built .exes to run :-(

> Two, when making copies of big files (by which I mean multiple files of 
> tens of gig each), it'll sometimes just ... stop for a couple of minutes. 
> It
...
> superfetch. "net stop superfetch" before starting backups seems to 
> completely cure the problem, but it certainly took a while to figure out 
> what was causing it.

Aha I'll have to try that, maybe it's also why when copying big files (like 
2-6 Gig for me) to a memory stick or from one partition to another it goes 
*really* slow too.

> Three, if you have two screens configured, and your video game starts up 
> full-screen at a smaller resolution on one of the screens, it seems to 
> punt your icons and taskbar around to undesirable places.   I never used 
> dual screens under XP, so I don't know if this is usual, but I almost 
> never had a screen-size change (via RDP for example) mess up my icons on 
> XP.

I think it depends on the game, some games seem to happily use a smaller 
resolution and your desktop icons are fine, others will somehow (I guess) 
change the desktop resolution as a way of using a smaller resolution 
themselves.  I'm sure it's in the MS knowledge base somewhere about the 
right and wrong ways to do it.  FWIW my DirectX programs I've written that 
run full-screen don't mess up the icons, maybe it's an OpenGL problem?

> Five, as everyone says, tracking down how to set up your internet 
> connection manually is rather a PITA. So far it has been a dozen clicks 
> thru screens to try to guess whether it's "configure network hardware" or 
> "set up a network" or "create a connection" or what. WTF guys?

Oh I never had to mess about with that yet, I just double clicked the 
wireless network icon down the bottom right and it asked me which netowrk to 
connect to, and then for the password.  Has worked flawlessly since.

> BTW, if you plug an XP external drive into a Vista system (via USB, say), 
> it'll be read-only until you run chkdsk /f on it. If you plug from Vista 
> back to XP, it'll thrash a while, because XP doesn't understand Vista's 
> volume shadows, so it goes through and deletes them.

Hmm interesting as I was thinking of getting an external USB drive, is this 
formatted with FAT32 or NTFS, does it make a difference?

> and I get plenty of room for everything. I can see why people like 
> dual-screen work. I'm hoping I don't get durango-neck.

I have two screens, but one is connected to my Vista machine and the other 
to my XP laptop.  I use a program called Input Director that allows the 
mouse/keyboard to work on both like it was one machine - even copy & paste 
works across monitors which is really cool.

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"Darren New" <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote in message 
news:49380a3f$1@news.povray.org...
> I think there's some sort of priority-inversion bug, whereby you start 
> reading a big file and superfetch comes in and says "Let me read-ahead 
> that for you", but superfetch runs at a low priority and you wind up 
> waiting on superfetch. "net stop superfetch" before starting backups seems 
> to completely cure the problem, but it certainly took a while to figure 
> out what was causing it.
>

You may also want to disable the indexing service. It makes searching faster 
but just about everything else slower.

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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gail [mailto:gail (at) sql in the wild (dot) co [dot] za]
> You may also want to disable the indexing service. It makes searching
> faster
> but just about everything else slower.

I'm thinking about disabling it anyway... it doesn't search particularly 
fast as it is.

...Ben Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

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"Chambers" <ben### [at] pacificwebguycom> wrote in message 
news:0EB3F944497E4F269DF0B8D18BDA05AC@HomePC...
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Gail [mailto:gail (at) sql in the wild (dot) co [dot] za]
>> You may also want to disable the indexing service. It makes searching
>> faster
>> but just about everything else slower.
>
> I'm thinking about disabling it anyway... it doesn't search particularly
> fast as it is.

I've had it off for quite a while, and the searching isn't noticably slow 
without it.
But then I don't often do searches over large parts of the drive.

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> In this case, it seemed to be the "superfetch" service. 
> I think there's some sort of priority-inversion bug, whereby you start 
> reading a big file and superfetch comes in and says "Let me read-ahead that 
> for you", but superfetch runs at a low priority and you wind up waiting on 
> superfetch.

  Only remotely related, but one thing which annoys me a lot in XP is that
the search function of Windows Explorer just doesn't work.

  There is an option to search the contents of all the files for the
searched string. However, for whatever reason, it just doesn't work, period.
If I search for a string which exists in a file in the current directory,
it just doesn't find it.

  Maybe it just doesn't search inside files which do not have a "known
extension" (ie. .txt, .doc, etc).

  This is especially annoying when I'm trying to find which C++ source
file uses something specific. In unix I just run a grep. In Windows the
Windows Explorer is completely useless, and trying to run a for-while
command in the command prompt is really laborious (especially since
I don't have a command prompt running all the time in the directory
in question).

> Four, the new Media Center is in some ways more annoying and in some ways 
> less annoying. I can't tell if it's just because I haven't used it enough to 
> learn where everything went or whether it's just not meshing with me.

  The Windows Media Player (and I suppose they changed it to "Media Center"
later) is the quintessential example of using eyecandy at the cost of a
good user interface.

  Media Player 6 had a completely bare-bones ascetical user interface. But
it was clear, concise and easy to use. Buttons looked like standard buttons,
and their roles were obvious. Menus were standard menus, and they contained
concise and clear menu items. The whole thing had a look&feel and worked
exactly in the same way as all the other standard Windows applications,
which made it clear, intuitive and easy to use.

  But no, this is not good in the eyes of Microsoft. "This is a multimedia
player! It has to look fancy! It needs eyecandy!" The next version of the
program was just plain horrible, unintuitive and difficult to use. And from
there it went worse with each new version.

  No wonder the popular "Media Player Classic" is based on the UI of Media
Player 6. It simply didn't have any crap. It was clean and simple.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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news:49390ecc@news.povray.org...
>  Maybe it just doesn't search inside files which do not have a "known
> extension" (ie. .txt, .doc, etc).

See http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=309173
I sort of understand why they hid the feature for regular (i.e. non 
programmer) users, but hiding it so deep it that needs a KB article to fix 
is indeed annoying.

G.

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Gilles Tran wrote:

> See http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=309173
> I sort of understand why they hid the feature for regular (i.e. non 
> programmer) users, but hiding it so deep it that needs a KB article to 
> fix is indeed annoying.

Looks more like it's designed to be able to find "text" in arbitrary 
file types (e.g., a PDF document or a ZIP file or something) and hence 
needs to know how to access it. But yeah, that's still fairly dumb...

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scott wrote:
> Aha I'll have to try that, maybe it's also why when copying big files 
> (like 2-6 Gig for me) to a memory stick or from one partition to another 
> it goes *really* slow too.

I'd be interested to hear your results.

> I think it depends on the game, 

Thief 3 (Deadly Shadows) seems to do it. (All I have is the demo. Steam'ing 
it this weekend, I expect. :-)

It also takes a relatively long time to load, and it won't let you alt-tab 
out. (It iconifies, then comes back and takes focus again. Very annoying. At 
least you can save wherever you want.)  I tend to play on the PC games that 
I can play in bits while I wait for other things on the PC to finish. :-)

Maybe it's just T:DS. I've never had the problem with XP or with other 
games, so maybe it's just T:DS and not Vista.

Solution: Set the resolution of the game to match your native desktop. :-)

> Oh I never had to mess about with that yet, I just double clicked the 
> wireless network icon down the bottom right and it asked me which 
> netowrk to connect to, and then for the password.  Has worked flawlessly 
> since.

I use static IPs in my house specifically so I can connect out to my laptop 
when it's home, if I need something off it.

> Hmm interesting as I was thinking of getting an external USB drive, is 
> this formatted with FAT32 or NTFS, does it make a difference?

NTFS. Since Linux and OSX now can write to NTFS, there didn't seem to be any 
reason for me to use something else. (Of course, Linux's crufty security 
stuff makes it even more annoying that FAT32, but I only use it for 
interchange, so...)

FAT32 doesn't do shadow copies, unless you put the actual shadows on a 
different drive that's formatted NTFS, so I don't think you need to worry 
about that.  Of course, if you plug that FAT32 drive into an XP machine, 
you'll still wind up screwing up the shadow copies.

> I have two screens, but one is connected to my Vista machine and the 
> other to my XP laptop.  I use a program called Input Director that 
> allows the mouse/keyboard to work on both like it was one machine - even 
> copy & paste works across monitors which is really cool.

Funky!  I have a friend who could probably use just that.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
   see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.

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