Facticity

Overview

Ah, Windows … the OS that so many of us in the tech world love to hate. For me, it’s not that Windows is such a lousy operating system, but that it could be so much better if the folks at Microsoft got their act together and made some smarter strategic decisions. An example: drop compatibility for old, old software in their code, maybe building a compatibility engine, translator, or virtual machine to run the really old stuff. There are already open source projects, such as DOSBox, that address part of this need.

It also doesn’t help that Microsoft can be very evil, or competitively ruthless, depending on your politics. While I am admittedly an open source evangelist, I could live with Microsoft a little more easily if they weren’t constantly trying to lie to the public about their competition (especially Linux, OS-X, and other UNIX-like systems) and generally buy or crush anyone who constitutes a threat to them. They just don’t seem to understand that a company can be very successful just by writing excellent software. They don’t have to be evil. Of course, Microsoft’s idea of success appears to be world domination, and I guess they need to be evil to attain that goal.

Anyway, I need to run Windows (since it is the corporate OS where I work and my kids need it to run some of their games) and I also develop applications for it professionally, so I have become something of a minor expert on it. I’ll put lessons learned, useful tips, and recommended software up here for those still using Microsoft’s Windows OSs.

The Vista Debacle

Like many in the software engineering community, when I first saw Vista and started using it, I thought “What the hell is this?”. Indeed, Vista seems to be something that escaped from OS Hell. Microsoft had years to improve on XP and they released an OS that looks somewhat prettier than XP (for the eye-candy crowd) and is apparently more secure (at the expense of annoying you), but is in most areas a major step backward in performance and usability. It’s really a mess. I let my two boys run it because I have two newer PCs with licenses for it (bought before I finally switched to Macs) and it is more secure than XP and lets them play the web games they like in relative security.

After getting beat up for releasing an operating system that is clearly not ready for customers, what did Microsoft do to make up for it? Something good and something absurdly bad. On the good side, they released service packs that improved Vista substantially, to the point where it’s somewhat usable for the technically inclined. On the side of absurdity, Microsoft went on the offensive, paying an ad agency to interview lots of people, tricking those interviewed into thinking that Vista was a new OS called Mojave and giving them a canned tour of the flashiest parts of Vista and then publishing the customers’ oohs and aahs over the “new” OS. This would have been just dishonest marketing, putting Microsoft at the level of a beer or cola company, but the whole idea that Microsoft clearly stacked the deck in favor of the “Mojave Experience” really irritates me. When a company can’t compete without deceiving its customers, that’s a bad sign.

Windows 7

Microsoft may be on the way to partially redeeming itself with Windows 7, which might be what Vista should have been. They have lowered the price for the Windows 7 upgrade to Vista. They should be giving Windows 7 away free to Vista users, but that’s really too much to ask of such a company. Time will tell if Windows 7 is as good as XP for the average computer user. It might even be better. Stranger things have happened.