james kahn's scratchpad
a blog on technology – cloud computing, software and strategy

If you’re in IT, Windows Vista is the biggest thing to arrive since, well, since the last version of Windows. It’s huge, it’s redefining the Windows desktop, and you’re not going to be able to avoid it. If you haven’t noticed it’s release, you must’ve been living in a hole. If you haven’t seen it, you’re behind the times. And if you don’t think it’s a major improvement over any existing operating system, you’re a luddite.

Here is where I must admit that I absolutely love Windows Vista. It’s a major step forward in Windows computing. I love the way it looks. I like the fact that there are oodles of improvements under the hood. I think the extra group policies, deployment tools and security are fantastic from an enterprise point of view. And it really is a pleasure to use the operating system.

So why are so many people on Internet forums criticizing the improvements (most noticeably, the luddite zone, slashdot)? Sadly, too many people that work with technology are small-minded, hate change and think that making computers pleasant to use shouldn’t rate highly on software company’s targets.

The biggest complaints I’ve noticed are:

1. The hardware requirements are too high! I’m going to have to spend $3000 on a PC to run the thing! Boo, yah!
2. User Account Control (UAC) is a pain in the ass! I want security to be seamless, yet still useful!
3. I don’t want all this eye candy, it slows my computer down! Why’d they have to go and change how things look!?
4. There’s not enough here to make upgrading worth it! It’s more of the same, in a different shade of blue!

Unfortunately most of these complaint are misguided, either from a lack of understanding or from stubbornness.

The Hardware Requirements are too high!

It’s amazing that this is seen as an issue. At work, I’m running Windows Vista on a notebook that is 3 years old. I’ve upgraded the RAM from 768MB to 1.5GB to make it run a lot faster with all the eye candy turned on, but other than that, it’s excellent. At home I’m running it on notebook I bought from Dell a year and half ago, and it runs fine. Windows Vista is an operating system released in 2007, for the computers of 2007 and beyond. If you want to run a computer from 2001, run an operating system from 2001. Or alternatively, run Windows Vista and turn all the eye candy off. It would be ridiculous for an operating system vendor to release a new operating system that runs on old hardware. New features take more processing power and system resources. If we’re ever going to reach the stage where computing can be like Minority Report, we have to keep moving forwards.

User Account Control is a pain in the ass!

One new component of Windows Vista is called User Account Control. Pretty much, it asks for your permission before doing something that requires administrative permission, so you know if something could be destructive to the computer. It works in one of two ways:

1. Either, you’re running as a standard user account, and when you want to do something that requires administrative permissions it pops itself up and asks for your credentials; or,
2. You’re running as an administrator, it just asks for your permission – you don’t have to enter a password

The whole point of User Account Control is to protect the computer from potentially harmful operations. And it does this by running everything with standard user permissions, even when you’re logged on as an administrator. It’s a great idea – administrator rights aren’t required for 99% of things that you’d do with your computer. Without any extra effort, it protects the computer and your data from accidental or malicious damage. There is always a trade-off between security and convenience, and this a couple of dialog boxes every now and then is not a major one. If you still don’t like it, you can turn it off.

Admittedly, there is one annoying characteristic about UAC – it should cache your credentials for a number of minutes when running as a standard user, rather then making you type them in every time. But remember, even if you’re running as an administrator, you’re actually running with standard user privileges most of the time – so why not do that?

This eye candy slows my computer down! It’s a waste of system resources!

This kind of comment really boggles my mind, because it’s usually from someone that considers themselves “technical”. I’m in front of computers for 8 – 12 hours a day – I want things to look good, and I want the experience to be as pleasant as possible (well, except for the 8 – 12 hours a day bit…). Unless your computer is drastically underpowered, or part of a grid computing cluster, your CPU is probably not doing much most of the time. Let it use some of those spare cycles to make things look better.

Or hell. If it bothers you that much, just turn off the pretty stuff!

There’s not enough new stuff in Vista to make upgrading worth it!

Again, this kind of comment is usually from a “technical” person who knows less than they think. It’s usually made by somebody with enough knowledge to install and configure an operating system, but little else. And it’s usually combined with a complaint about how all that was changed was the way things look.

What a load of bullshit.

Massive amounts of changes have been made to the core operating system architecture in Vista. Oodles of security enhancements. More secure networking, with firewall profile zones. A new driver architecture to increase system stability. A graphics card driven desktop environment – faster and slicker. IPv6, and a rewritten networking stack. Fast, I mean really fast, desktop search. That’s only a few. There are loads of new features in Vista, and it’s well worth the upgrade.

So why do so many technical “gurus” in forums complain?

Simple – they’re either Luddites, or they don’t understand what improvement is. Or perhaps they just don’t like change.

I discovered something interesting today about Citrix Access Gateway Advanced. I’m working a project where as part of it, we’re publishing a list of both intranet and Internet company-related websites.

The intranet sites worked fine. When opening up an Internet site, the navigation portal would first try to open the external site internally, display a “Page cannot be displayed” message, and then open up a second browser window and redirect the browser to the correct site. The sites worked, but it wasn’t pretty.

It turns out that I’d included the web resources in two access policies – one that said it should bypass the web proxy, and one that left that setting unconfigured. I changed the access policies so that the Internet-based web resources were only in the policy that bypassed the web proxy, and removed them completely from the other access policy and ta-da – they work fine now.

Well, I was wrong about that. I initially thought that had fixed it, but for some reason I wasn’t paying attention and the problem was still occurring.

In order to get around a lot of IE7 hassles, I had added the Access Gateway’s URL into IE’s trusted sites. This worked fine when accessing internal resources. However, in IE7, trusted sites need to operate in a separate browser window to non-trusted sites. When clicking on an external link, a new window would open up to the web proxy redirector at the AG Advanced portal, which would redirect to the untrusted external link, which would open up in yet another browser window.

To get around this behaviour, I needed to remove the Access Gateway from trusted sites, and change the IE7 secure option “Automatic prompting for file downloads” to “Enabled” to allow the Web Interface to work correctly.