Sametime 8 and Vista 64 first thoughts
I installed Sametime 8 today on my Vista 32 Tablet and it seemed to work very nicely. But what I really wanted was it running on Vista 64. That’s not supported of course so I just copied the files over from my laptop to my x64 desktop and ran them and I’m pleased to report that so far its running fine. It may well have installed on x64, but copying the files seemed like an interesting test (That’s what I did with Notes 7.02 as well which won’t install on Vista 64 but is rock solid if you just copy the files over from a Vista 32 install).
So what works and what doesn’t on Vista x64:
- Well most of the screen painting glitches that I saw with SameTime 7.51 in the chat window seemed to have gone, at least so far – this is why I gave up on Sametime on Vista 64
- The type down search now works – this is a big improvement for me, I love this feature!
- The screen capture now works on multiple monitors – nice to have
- A few of the preference panels still don’t display correctly and some are completely blank although they are fine on Vista 32 – a bit of a pain. Update – I found that if I resized the preference dialog all of a sudden the content appeared in the dialogs and I could update it just fine! See below.
- Update: I had a problem today that when I opened up a chat window I was unable to type into it, and another problem that I couldn’t open an additional chat window. I think these were “resources” related issues but other applications were working fine. I opened up Pidgin (which supports Sametime) and could open windows and type text fine even with the same “resource” usage.
I’ve only been using it for about 30 minutes so I will update this again next week.
A few things I would like:
- I want to know where Sametime 8 stores my personal preferences, since I can’t access the preference panels I need some other way to make preference changes, the first step is to find the data location – help someone please!
- I would like to be able to dock the buddy list to the edge of my monitor like I can do with Pidgin and Trillian.
Other feedback is over on Adam Gartenberg’s blog —> here
Here’s the Chat History preference page the first time I open it:
and here it is after a resize
Strange thing is if I resize again back to the original size it’s fine
Not nice, but it’s a workaround!
I’ve not had a chance to check on another machine still on 7.5.1 but I could have sworn the preferences files were in a different format and location than they are now with ST8!
Anyway, I did some digging and found a file named “community-config.xml” buried away here:
C:\Documents and Settings\\IBM\RCP\Sametime\.metadata\.plugins\com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.community.sametime\community-config.xml
This appears to contain most of my connection information, and a quick look elsewhere in the .plugins directory shows other files containing preferences. For example your location information is here:
com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.location\locprofile-config.xml
I hope that helps, though I haven’t tried messing with any of these files!
Excellent, thanks Simon!
It’s interesting to see what is/isn’t working when you’re trying to run this on Vista 64. Thanks for posting your feedback.
@Adam. It would be nice if you documented somewhere whats preventing you supporting Vista 64, is it just that the markets too small to justify testing effort, or are there known issues?
Running ST8 on Vista 32 the chat window does not come to the front when receiving a message. While 7.51 did this correctly, the simple fact that 8 doesn’t occasionally “hide” an incoming message makes it worth the upgrade. Here’s hoping 8.01 includes a fix.