My Vista nightmare loop
Posted on November 9th, 2007
Mostly a rant …. one of those days ;-)
So we all know that networking in Vista is screwed up and I am amazed that 1 year after release it still doesn’t work. What happens to me? well after about 8 hours of use most applications loose their internet connection (wireless and lan) – Most? you ask … yes – things like outlook still get/send mail, IE/FF stop working, chat stops etc. maybe office just “wishes” the data over the air 
So I need to reboot to get back my connection – great, here is the problem. After getting the “logging off” and then “shutting down” for an un-determined amount of time my machine just blue screens … awesome.
That means for one I can never “shutdown” as the blue screen causes a restart. Now lets compound this – if I resume from Sleep or Hibernate I get an ACS (acs.exe??) crash and guess what – no internet. So I need to do the above BSOD sequence – (left eye twitching).
This is Vista certified hardware from Lenovo – “certified” I guess means Vista will run … what it does while running isn’t “certified” but at least I know my drivers are pretty good.
So once or twice a day I must force a BSOD to keep surfing, I can’t resume,sleep,shutdown or restart with a BSOD so installing updates is fun.
Boot-> Trash Network-> Reboot-> BSOD-> Recover-> Shutdown-> BSOD-> Recover-> Work-> Trash Network-> Reboot-> BSOD and so on …. how much asprine can you take in a day? ;-)
Tags: Bad Code, Vista
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Quick performance tip for VS 2005
Posted on November 6th, 2007
As I’m sure we all know Visual Studio 2005 as great as it is isn’t the fastest application on the planet. The good news is there are a multitude of things we can change to speed it up. Now firstly let me just state that I’m not a fan of just linking to other people’s blogs or regurgitating their information however I have posted the links to Scott Guthrie’s blog below for reference.
The tip I wanted to add was a really quick and easy performance boost for Laptops. I guess you could also apply this to a desktop using the same logic. As you will see below having the OS on one hard drive and apps on another drive gives a huge performance increase in VS but what if your system is already setup? I had this issue with my laptop. The easy fix is to add a second drive to your laptop and move the OS paging file over to this drive. I also moved the SQL databases to this drive since that is easy enough. I noticed a remarkable improvement in visual studio performance and I didn’t have to go through the headache of moving source code, IIS settings or VSS settings. The paging file is the biggest one by far.
Scott’s Links for VS performance tuning:
Tags: .NET, Performance, VS 2005
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What is wrong with Verizon?
Posted on November 2nd, 2007
I’m sure we all have complaints about our wireless providers but I just wanted to vent publicly about these guys. Why? well because I think they’re loosing out and could offer so much more.
Verizon is a company that is either run by lawyers or greedy old men. It’s as simple as that. Why would a company that has such marketplace dominance be so slow, so backwards and so greedy? Think about it. They probably have the best wireless coverage of any provider in the US yet instead of rolling out WiMax they fight continuous legal battles to block other companies from doing so. If you aren’t going to roll it out some else finally will and you’ll get left behind. You guys have plenty of towers to get some extremely advanced technology rolled out, DO IT!
What about the lack of new device support? I thought that maybe they were just really careful about testing and always wanting to release a quality product but I actually think the delays are because it takes a long time to “remove” features …. yup – rather than make even more money just selling us what we want as consumers they force so many to switch networks just because they feel we don’t deserve the features our phones offer. Un-freaking-believable. Don’t you fools realize that there is an entire base of users who will upgrade no matter what new phone becomes available ….
I want a blackberry with a camera, with MMS support and a phone that can freaking read HTML emails. Although the latter is probably RIM’s fault … another mind blowing oversight. What really drives me nuts is that I can buy a phone for $30 that has all that and VZNavigator, VCast and a host of other features yet when I spend $300 on the phone and $140 a month I get nothing … just plain email and they lock everything else.
Well, not for much longer. Hello AT&T. Probably the bastard child but it will make me feel great to say goodbye and thank you for nothing you old buggers.
-c
Tags: wireless
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