I tell you, some days I love Vista and on others, well not so much.

 

One feature that seems cool but doesn’t really prove useful is the Flip 3D feature.  Apple has one on their system that makes a lot more sense – press a button (or squeeze the side buttons on the Mighty Mouse) and you’ll get Expose.  This shows miniature versions of all open Windows on the desktop at once.

 

Well, it turns out that Bao Nguyen has created Switcher, a program that pretty much does what Expose does.

 

I just installed it and I’m very impressed.  Give it a shot.  It’s free, small and easy to work with.

 

PS: Let’s hope this posting makes it up without any typos. <sigh>

I’ve been using Vista on my desktop since it was officially released at the consumer level.  I didn’t blog about it, but my upgrade on my desktop workstation did not go well.  Generally, unless you have a large IT department doing the work, my advice is get Vista with a new machine.

 

Yesterday I caved and purchased the new Apple aluminum keyboard and a Mighty Mouse.  These two things are pretty expensive considering that they are both wired, but I absolutely love the feel of the flat keyboard, and I thought I might as well make it a matching set.

 

The important part is that I wasn’t originally planning on using these devices on my Vista laptop.  Rather, I was going to use them on my Mac Mini which I keep around just to be cool like Steve Jobs .  However, at some point last night I decided to plug them into my laptop to see if they would work.  Well, Vista picked them up and they work quite nicely.  Without installing any software the keyboard is working, and the mouse and its weird buttons and scroll ball (on top) are working fine.  The special function keys (volume, etc) aren’t working yet, but I believe Apple has a driver out there somewhere.

 

After that went smoothly, I was playing around with Flip-3D in Vista and I noticed that when I did it, my MSN Live Messenger window automatically indicated that I was ‘busy’.  This isn’t a Vista feature, but it’s a nice bit of integration between Vista and Messenger.  There is a setting that you can turn off that prevents the ‘busy’ flag from being set whenever you are running a full screen app (which Flip-3D apparently counts as) or in presentation mode.

 

Finally, things like the breadcrumbs in Explorer, the search in the start menu (I haven’t organized the start menu ever – no need, just type a few letters), the previews in the task bar and the previews when using Alt-Tab just make Vista a nice place to spend time.

 

Maybe another day and I’ll post about the Vista annoyances… can you say UAC?  I knew you could!

The (in)famous Ted Pattison has just announced that The Ted Pattison Group will be hosting a new training class for Sharepoint 2007, starting August 27th.  This class will focus on creating solutions in Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server, without using programming.  See the details at: http://tedpattison.net/Courses/SSE301.aspx.

 

I’ve been to Ted’s training and found it very helpful.  If you use Sharepoint 2007 in your business (either Sharepoint Services, or Sharepoint Server), I strongly recommend you take the time and go to one of his classes.  You will learn a lot, and by taking the four days out of your schedule, you’ll be able to focus on Sharepoint, and not the daily interruptions that plague us all.

 

Have fun!

When I say "in your hard drive", I mean that quite literally.

 

We are destroying some drives for a medical customer.  Since we do not have the proper SCSI card to actually connect the drives, we’ve decided to physically destroy the drives.  One of them had a stripped screw, and we ended up folding back the metal cover over the drive platters to get access to them. 

 

Amazingly, when we flipped back the cover, we saw that one of the drive platters had a large X written on it with a black marker!  See the attached photo.

 

That’s the strangest thing I’ve ever found *in* a hard drive.

 

Recently, while installing CRM on a client’s server, we discovered a "broken" SQL Server installation.  Enterprise Manager wouldn’t run, and certain SQL Services were no longer working.  In order to clear this up, I tried to do an uninstall and reinstall of SQL Server.  Unfortunately, during the uninstall, it errored out.  So I was left with a SQL Server install that wouldn’t uninstall, and wouldn’t run.  In trying to reinstall it, it would not allow an installation as the default instance.

 

Fortunately, Microsoft has a document on how to repair a disaster of this level.  Take a looksee at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290991 and follow the instructions very carefully.  After doing all those things, you too can have a working SQL Server 2000 installation. 

I complain so often about poor customer service that I thought it would be worth it to call out a company that takes servicing their customers seriously.  On June 20th I ordered a new Thinkpad T60 from Lenovo, with some very high end specs.  It shipped on June 22nd from Hong Kong and was at my door on June 25th.  That’s only two days in manufacturing, and 3 days to travel half way around the world!

 

Later that day the docking station I ordered was delivered.

 

Two days later another docking station was delivered.

 

Two days later another Thinkpad arrived.

 

I just found out that another docking station shipped today for delivery in a few days.

 

Yikes!  While I enjoyed having a spare Thinkpad and docking station laying about for a few hours, a quick call to Lenovo took care of returning it (they did charge my card after all!), but I’m hoping they the airdrops of new and expensive equipment stop in the near future!

 

In all seriousness, kudos to Lenovo for delivering so quickly, and handling the return of the unordered equipment with absolutely no hassles.

 

The machine kicks some serious ass too.  A Core 2 Duo 2.33ghz processor plus a 7200 rpm drive and 3 gig of RAM makes Vista a very happy OS, and the machine beats the tar out of my old and full sized HP XW6200 workstation with a 3.2ghz XEON processor and 2 gig of RAM.

 

In short, the Thinkpads are still expensive, but hopefully worth it, and Lenovo’s customer service (so far) seems to have stayed top notch.