PEBKAC
I keep seeing these stories of Vista upgrade woes and Vista install woes and Vista "doesn't make my coffee in the morning" woes and I can't help but be reminded of 'PEBKAC'. One of these stories that most recently caught my attention was on vnunet written by Clive Longbottom. Now Mr. Longbottom installed Vista on his Thinkpad X60 (A rather nice laptop with a core duo) and he tells us that he has 1GB of RAM. Now for comparison I have Vista installed on my Thankpad T43p, a decent laptop with a Pentium M processor and 1GB of RAM... so in the end, lower specs than the X60.
So why talk about this? First because vnunet referred to Mr. Longbottom as an industry expert and being in the IT industry, I find that rather insulting. The other reason is his claim that Vista was utilizing 80% of his available memory... Now as I pointed out we have similar systems (although he has more processing power) and my system is currently sitting at 49% Memory usage. This includes the Lenovo Tools (such as ActiveProtection) installed and running. Media Center's tray application, Windows Defender, Automatic Updates, VMWare Server and Subsystem for Unix Application all running. Since I haven't actually tweaked service for improved performance, a quick look at the Resource Monitor shows me plenty of places where I could lower that memory usage. Perhaps Mr. Longbottom shouldn't be loading on so many additional applications.
Now let's look at the actual article... At one point Clive comments on his WPA settings not being remembered during the upgrade and that he had to enter them himself. I'd have to say that if that's your complaint when you finish an upgrade... your upgrade went swimmingly well.
His next complaint about the upgrade is with the Lenovo software and some of the actions that it took (offering non-Vista compliant software and his XP software not working with Vista). The first one is Lenovo's problem (and yes they have several problems but that's the joy of dealing with a not-so-great company like them). The second part is what I find interesting. For years people have complained about how much of the Window code was legacy and a lot of security flaws that have existed in newer Windows operating systems have been present due to that legacy code. Microsoft has finally decided to do something about it, ending some of the backwards compatibility (but not all of it) and now people complain about that. All because vendors couldn't be bothered to release Vista compatible applications (and they had plenty of time to do it).
In the end, Mr. Longbottom's article provides nothing relevant to any ongoing discussions regarding Vista... he points out that PEBKAC is true and that he indeed was the issue. The one good suggestion tha the makes is that a full install should be done instead of the upgrade, but he then ruins that by stating that only "techies" should perform upgrades since they'll have hours to spend on it. I find this a) derogatory to the technologically inclined and b) to be a load of crap. Technical people have always recommended full installs over upgrades, which are known to have problems... XP Home to XP Pro was a famous example... People bought machines with XP Home on them and then upgraded them to XP Pro and PPPoE would no longer function correctly.... SuSE has a long history of upgrades failing to work correctly and incorrect library versions and broken dependencies to be left behind after the upgrade is "complete".
So the ultimate recommendation: Install the software from scratch... upgrade only if you "really, really" have to. Also do some background research, don't rely on the Vista Upgrade Advisor... while I found it to be completely accurate given the software I use, others, such as Mr. Longbottom, have apparently had issues. This is to be expected... you can't expect the advisor to be aware of every application in existence and it's ability to work with Vista... So do your own research. Think of it like buying a car or a house... you're making an investment into something that you will rely and depend on... Checking to see if Diskeeper will run on Vista is no different than checking to see if the house you want to buy has gas, oil or electric heat. Do your research and if you don't, you only have yourself to blame.
Hello.
I like your blog more and more. I too find that there are too many “industry experts” out there who not only don’t understand the matter at hand, but also make bold claims on their blog, in the media, etc.
About the memory usage: it is good when it’s higher. Preferable it should be 100%. A thing that many people don’t realize is that there are several types of caches in the memory which accelerate for example hard disk operations. Modern OSs are smart enough to use all the “free” memory available for cache (so that you have a big probability of having a cache hit when doing disk operations) and scale back the cache when user programs need the memory. To put it an other way: why do you have 1G of memory? to look at it or to actually use it?