garan.org

Currently there's no support for Adobe's Flash plugin on the Vista 64 bit version of Explorer:

http://www.adobe.com/go/6b3af6c9

To use Flash Player to view Flash content on a 64-bit operating system, you must run a 32-bit browser. Bah.

I've been toying with the idea of upgrading my desktop machine from Vista 32 to Vista 64 for two reasons. Firstly I've got a 64bit dual core AMD processor and I want to use it! Secondly I want to be able to use all of the memory in the PC; it's got 4GB and whilst 2^32 is 4.1GB, by the time you take off the video memory and some other hardware reservations the useable memory is about 3.5GB.

So last night I took the plunge and installed from scratch. It gave me the opportunity to stripe the three disks that are in the box too. The Vista performance indicator was telling me that with a score of 5.0, the disk performance was my lowest score.

It took about 35 minutes to install Vista on top of the striped disks... and then another 45 minutes to upgrade that keyless installation with the same image to get around the limitation of only having a Vista upgrade disk. No problems to speak of so far as there are 64 bit drivers for all of my hardware but I'm not surprised to find this as for once I'd done my research before jumping in feet first.

There are drivers for my motherboard's RAID chipset, my Nvidia video cards, Creative Audigy sound card (that's about 3 years old), mouse, webcam, Garmin satnav and my Blackberry. The only thing that doesn't seem to be working is the installer for Sony Ericsson's PC Suite but to be honest I can live without that. I was only looking for the USB driver that I can get from somewhere else when and if I need it.

I've still got one unknown device showing in Device Manager but that is the Creative sound card's game port that I can happily live without.

Striping the disks has given me a performance boost. According to Vista I now have a performance score of 5.4 with the processor being the lowest score with everything else at 5.9 bar the gaming graphics score of 5.8. It isn't going to justify an upgrade to a quad core box despite the availablity of the new shiney AMD Phenom quad core chips!

I've got a shortcut to PuTTY in the quick launch area of my Windows Vista toolbar. It's always asking me if it's okay to open the file as it comes from what Microsoft would say is an 'untrusted source'. Untrusted could be said to be another word for 'unwilling to pay Microsoft' if I was being cynical.

Anyway I digress... There's a tick box with the sentence 'Always ask before opening this file' that doesn't work. I've put up with it for a while but decided to Google for an answer today and came up with this link:

http://www.robertwoodward.com/index.php/5.html

Thanks Robert for working this barmy situation out:

..you must "Unblock" the application from it's original file location. By original file location I mean the location where you downloaded it to. If you move the file before unblocking, you will never be able to unblock the file unless you delete it and redownload the file. If the file you need to unblock came in a zip, you need to unblock the zip before extracting the contents.

It seems crazy but it works!

I installed Vista on my main machine at home a couple of months ago, installing XP, Vista and Ubuntu, each on their own disk. Originally Vista was the RC2 release, a late beta that wasn't 100% stable, so last week I installed the Business edition that I've had kicking around for a couple of weeks. So far I've been fairly happy with it, not booting back into XP once since the install. There are a couple of funnies; HP don't have any 3-in-1 software for my printer/fax/scanner that will work under Vista (going to try and install the software on an XP VMware instance for those once in a blue moon times that I need it and failing that I'll borrow Jen's scanner!). The other funny is that Ultramon (multi-monitor app) has problems displaying wallpaper on screens to the right of the primary monitor. Wierd!!

Today I tried burning a CD for the first time. Under XP I always relied on Nero to burn my disks, never having had any success using the built in application. So I thought I'd try the built in functionality under Vista. Three failures later it's time to find out if Nero works under Vista!