Adventures in home working

Out of the box I had a few issues with my Thinkpad X60T running Vista:

1. After a morning working by the beach the wireless network was often disabled when I plugged in at home,  I needed to do a “Diagnose and repair” to re-enable it
2. After a not so useful windows update I found that my display was often switched off when I resumed from sleep,  I had to cycle through sleep again to get it back
3. Active rotate has never worked reliably and now doesn’t work at all

The first two of these are now solved - or at least I have a workaround

1. For wireless, go into the advanced power settings and configure it so that the wireless adapter isn’t powered down.  What seems to have been happening is that if available battery power dipped below some value the wireless adapter was disabled.  Now if I want to save power I use the mechanical switch to disable wireless, but I hardly ever need to
2. For blank screen, I found out that provided I suspend BEFORE I close the lid, when I resume the screen is always on.  Slightly annoying but much better than before.
3. Fix to get Active Rotate working reliably anyone??

I’m a fan of Vista 64, it’s had a big impact on the stability of my desktop PC.  I still use Vista 32 on my laptop.  I don’t think there’s much information to help people make a decision, so its nice to see this useful contribution by Kristan.

I’m running Vista on my Desktop and Tablet and will be running Windows 2008 Server on my lab soon.  My wife and 3 of the girls are running XP and my eldest daughter is running Windows 2003 Server on their laptops so I feel a bit like a small business!  But back to the post.

I’ve done quite a few enterprise operating system upgrade projects, and one thing I’ve learned is that whenever I started one of these projects I always pushed for the latest operating system available:

1. NT 3.51 instead of Windows 95 (I think) , this was considered a very big risk
2. NT 4 instead of NT 3.51, not so much of a risk
3. Windows 2000 instead of NT 4, this was considered a big risk
4. Windows XP instead of Windows 2000, this was considered a very big risk at the time

and always got the same pushback:

1. Wait for service pack 1
2. Driver supports terrible
3. None of our applications will work, and even if they do what about vendor support
4. Who will support it, no ones trained
5. etc

However what people always seem to forget is that enterprise deployments take a long time to plan and execute and that the world moves fast.  In every case mid way through the deployment it seemed unimaginable that we could have been deploying anything but the latest version and all of the issues had faded away. 

I think it’s the same with Vista, my view - get on with the planning, it will take you longer than you think and in 9 months time when you start volume deployments you won’t understand what all the fuss was about.

That said - please don’t think of your programme as a Vista upgrade.  Instead:

1. Model your workforce in terms of their workstyles
2. review the appropriate solution for each workstyle, looking at the many highly differentiated options for desktop and application delivery including consumerized/Linux solutions for some user segments
3. rationalise down to a few desktop/OS and application delivery technologies (not one per workstyle) to keep control of cost and complexity and increase flexibility
4. try and leverage the change programme to achieve some significant business improvement, cultural change and productivity improvements
5. Architect your solution to loosen the coupling of the desktop operating system to the applications, to make future change easier.

I don’t run Linux on a day to day basis, but I was interested to see the sparring between Joe Wilcox and Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols both from eWeek both trying to make the case for the superiority of Vista and Linux respectively.  My own take, I’m with Joe - I think XP is the competition for Vista and like Joe I think Vista is improving steadily as Microsoft drip feed us updates on a regular basis.  I’m lucky though - I don’t have to wait for these updates because on my Desktop (I don’t stress my laptop) I run Vista 64 and it’s already rock solid.

For me Vista is approaching the level of reliability of an appliance, it just always works.  I’ve not had an operating system crash, or problem that forced a reboot for nearly 6 months.  Applications still crash, but they seem to crash just as often when I run Linux.

Steven has a point though, disruptions start small and at the extremes.  Linux is powering along replacing Unix Workstations and we are seeing a lot of activity in handheld, low end (kids) laptops, thin clients and low end PCs.  Microsoft need to watch these under and over served Windows user populations. 

However I’m confident that Microsoft understand disruptive innovation very well and I think it’s unlikely that they don’t have contingency plans, one example might be the re-architecting of windows to allow several different variants of windows (probably including the mobile ones) all to run off a single (micro) kernal.