HP's products have poor Vista drivers just like those of nVidia. As I learned when I tried to scan a page using my HP LaserJet 3015 under Vista, HP does not yet support any function other than printing under Vista for its multifunction printers. A search of Internet chatter on the state of HP drivers, revealed much unhappiness. Oh, and HP promises drivers by July!

Not wishing to wait for July, I've ordered a new printer, the Brother MFC-7820N. At $282 from Amazon, this is about $300 cheaper than Samsung low cost color laser multifunction I blogged about seeing at CES. Even so I get a few new useful features:

• Networked printing and scanning. This may allow us to get rid of not only the HP LaserJet 3015, but also a small Dell printer as well.
• Color flatbed scanner. This will serve to replace the old Agfa 1212u flatbed scanner than I knew would not function under Vista.

Given that I should be able to sell the HP on EBay for about $100 and I no longer have to spend $50 for a new flatbed scanner, and the standard price differential between networked multifunction printers and not is about $100, I'm paying about $30 (and the hassle of a hardware switch, including my time this evening trying to decide what to do, and selling the old printer) for the privilege of getting a working scanner NOW instead of in July. Not great, but not too terrible either.

Notwithstanding my desire to wait until purchasing a new PC to upgrade my home office computer to Vista, some pesky problems with ActiveSync (i.e. not recognizing my PPC-6700 after about 3 hours of troubleshooting) and the WSUS client caused me to take the plunge earlier than planned. I decided I'd rather try to upgrade to Vista to solve my problem, than go down a road I expected would have required me to reinstall Windows XP.

This move will hopefully enable me to put off the temptation to buy a new PC before (i) new, well-functioning nVidia drivers are available, (ii) there is more collective experience on stability issues associated with some quadcore motherboards. I plan to extend the activation period to up to 120 days while I wait for these issues to be resolved.

Bottom line: the upgrade went reasonably well. As I try more things in coming days I'll see if I revise that assessment.

The existence of Small Business Server 2003 on our home network has really been helpful in upgrading existing PCs and adding new ones:

• I don't have to worry about backing up key files, because they are all on the server.
• Email is all kept on the server, all I have to do is run Outlook and log on to Exchange.
• Install packages for all of my apps are on the server, meaning I don't have to carry around a bunch of CDs and swap them in and out while setting up apps.
• Many user settings are reconfigured automatically the first time I log in.

Some notable things about the Vista upgrade:

• The first attempt at an upgrade failed as checking for updates consumed several hours and I ended the attempt without fanfare. Turning off Windows Defender (which had been acting squirrelly) enabled me to perform the upgrade install in a couple of hours.
• Strangely, Vista identified Mechwarrior 3 (an app I had installed in a prior incarnation of XP home, but not the XP Pro install I was running) as a potential incompatibility, but said nothing about the 100s of other games in a similar state.
• I've ordered a new Canon scanner for about $50 to replace the old Agfa 1212u for which there are no Vista drivers. As this scanner was at least 5 years old, I'm not to upset about this.
• My SBS 2003 logon and other information was migrated to Vista without issue.
• I'm having problems with my AVG Pro 7.5 antivirus installation. It demands that the license number be entered upon each logon and the system shield does not work properly. I'll have to communicate with AVG support about this as a number of fixes I tried have not solved the problem.
• Most installation dates in the Add/Remove programs control panel applet now read the date of the Vista upgrade.
• The new Windows Mobile Sync app worked just fine. My PPC-6700 was recognized and sync'd without issues.
• The MobSync app that I use to sync podcasts to the PPC-6700's memory card (while in the PPC) also worked without issue-- to my surprise.
• GetRight was no brought over to the Vista installation, so presumably will need to be reinstalled.
• Text in some apps (MobSync, for example) appears to be blurred-- perhaps as a result of bitmapped graphics APIs being scaled in Vista differently from XP?

Well, for our house at least. Problems from a variety of (external) sources are combining to push back Vista adoption in our household:

• The delivery of the media center PC is being delayed by Microsoft security issues, much to the annoyance of Velocity Micro.
• The "express upgrade" for two of our laptops may not ship for weeks.
• My replacement of my own computer is delayed pending nVidia coming up with working Vista drivers for its DirectX 10 8800 series cards, or ATI actually releasing a Direct X 10 card. NVidia's drivers are still in bad shape and ATI just delayed its R600 card until May.

I don't remember all these problems with the Windows XP, launch, but maybe that is because then I couldn't afford to try to be on the bleeding edge and buy a new PC as soon as XP came out. Now, the constraint isn't money, its product availability.

For what its worth, can you imagine how much worse these problems would have been if Microsoft had done the consumer launch of Vista back on November 30 when the business launch took place?

Those people using Vista Media center to record HD cable TV shows using cable card will face DRM restrictions on such content that prevent it from being used on any other devices (although it can be streamed to Xbox 360's running as Media Center Extenders). A side effect of implementing these restrictions makes it impossible for people to use CableCard tuners in a PC they build themselves. For restrictions that we have known about for many months, there is a surprising amount of hand wringing at the Green Button.

Although I would prefer not to see these restrictions, there are a number of reasons they don't bother me that much:

• These restrictions don't apply to all content and there is a good chance they will only apply to premium content, maybe even only to HD Premium content.
• I will be able to watch these DRM restricted files through Xbox 360 extenders on all of the other TVs in my house. I seldom really do anything else with such content, although the capability would be nice.
• Given then speed with which DRM on HDDVD and BluRay have been compromised, it is hard to believe that this DRM will last very long either. That the content will be easily accessible on a PC, can only help this process.
• I don't believe any platform other than a set top box PVR (e.g. Tivo series 3) allows recording digital cable shows, and those boxes all are more restrictive with the recorded content than Media Center.
• There is a good second best solution to building one's own PC: buy a stripped down OEM PC and then enhance it yourself.

I had my first experience with Vista setting up a new HP laptop last night. It is running Vista Business so it can connect to our home SBS 2003 domain.

Vista was preinstalled, so I was a little surprised at the 25 minutes it took running some sort of setup routine. I then uninstalled a variety of apps that HP had pre-installed. Thankfully there were not more than a about dozen of these. One that would not uninstall was the Office 2007 Activation Assistant (which refused to uninstall even after following someone's advice to install a trial version of Office and then try to uninstall it). A call to HP was of little help and ended with the heavily accented tech support person hanging up on me after insisting that this was an operating system issue and HP only supports hardware.

Outlook 2003 did not successfully deploy with the joining of the PC to the SBS 2003 domain for some reason. A couple of requests for help to the SBS Usenet newsgroup went unanswered, so I tried installing Outlook 2003 from the CD, which worked just fine.

Unsurprisingly I've discovered that Quicken 2005 won't work on Vista, so I've ordered a copy of Quicken 2005. I'm afraid that my version 5.0 of Vegas+DVD and my Paperport Pro 9.0 may meet similar fates.

I don't really mind the UAC prompts, but the new explorer I find a little irritating-- perhaps I'll get used to it.

The aero effect when Alt-Tabbing between apps is pretty cool.

Ideally, I would have upgraded all of our household PCs to Vista (all except the box running Windows Small Business Server 2003) to Vista on the consumer launch date of January 30. My That date has now been pushed back to mid-March for a variety of reasons that illustrate some of the problems with the twin perils of early adoption and letting hardware get too long in the tooth.

Here is a description of each PC and and its status vis a vis Vista:

Living Room Laptop. Newly purchased this week and running Vista. This is an HP Core2Duo with 2GB of RAM and a separate graphics card. It was purchased with Vista Business (for access to the SBS 2003 domain) installed. The normally arduous task of removing preinstalled crapware was less arduous this time by the fact that there was less of such flotsam installed. Perhaps this is a benefit of many of such applications not yet being fully Vista compatible. With the newly released SBS2003 update I hope to add this machine to our home domain shortly. BTW, how is it that it took until three months after the Vista Business launch to allow the SBS connect computer procedure/apps to run properly with Vista?

Family Room/Kitchen Laptop. This laptop is also and HP Core2Duo with 2GB of RAM and a separate graphics card. It was purchased a couple of months ago and is still running XP Pro. My intention had been to wait until the end of January and buy this laptop with Vista pre-installed, but the 4-5 year old Dell laptop we had previously was dog slow and running XP Home and we couldn't stomach an extra few months of that, so we waiting until we could buy a laptop with a free Vista upgrade and did so. That upgrade has not arrived yet and may not for another 5 weeks or so.

Master Bedroom Laptop. This laptop is also and HP Core2Duo with 2GB of RAM and a separate graphics card. It was purchased about a month ago and is still running XP Pro. It is serving temporarily as the PC in my wife's office. Her old PC was about 5 years old and didn't take well to being part of a domain (appearing unresponsive for minutes at a time while doing memory paging). When adding an extra 512MB of memory and some other fixes didn't do the trick, it was time for a new PC. The use of the laptop is only temporary-- she'll get our old Media Center Server with a clean install of Vista Business (received from MS for participating in a promotional program), when that gets replaced (see below) with a new Vista Media Center Server. This machine is also waiting for its free upgrade to Vista Business, which has not yet arrived.

My Office PC. Still a Dell 8300 running XP Pro. I've had this PC a little over 3 years and in that time have upgraded the graphics card to an nVidia 6600GT and the memory to 2GB, both to play Battlefield 2. I had planned to replace this with a new quad core box with an nVidia 8800 GTS, but as nVidia doesn't yet have good Vista drivers for this card, I am going to wait until that happens. I plan to have this machine run Vista Ultimate because, well, because it's mine!

Media Center Server. This is a Dell XPS with a Pentium D and 2GB of memory running Windows MCE 2005 that acts to serve media to the four Xbox 360's we have around the house that act as extenders. I had planned to pay some premium and replace this with a Core2Duo, 2GB dual cablecard box running Vista on January 30, but alas such systems aren't actually shipping yet. So I've ordered such a box from Velocity Micro and hope to get it set up by mid March. To join our SBS domain and use Vista Media Center this machine will have to run Vista Ultimate.

Why so many new PCs, two reasons: (i) we delayed replacing machines in anticipation of Vista and now are replacing many at one time (in fact, as note above, some didn't quite make it to the Vista consumer launch); and (ii) we moved into our new, larger house about a little over a year ago and our decorator suggested adding some additional laptops at desks in the Living Room and Master Bedroom (I was easily persuaded that this was a good idea!).

One nice thing about Steve Jobs posting on Thoughts on Music in which he states that he would like to see the end of digital rights management is the much more interesting postings by others on the subject. The two that have inspired me to write this entry are Mark Cuban's thoughts on what the music companies should do, and Randy Picker's more general thoughts on how this relates to business models.

First, Randy states that:

Jobs must recognize that the music industry is in the midst of a format transition. Music has done that before: moving from wax cylinders to LPs to CDs and now online. The music industry wants this transition to include encryption. They are stuck selling unencrypted CDs—SonyBMG’s effort to do otherwise was a smashing failure—because of the installed base of CD players, but they don’t face these backwards compatibility restrictions for online music, hence the difference in approach on encryption.

That is certainly true, but this transition is significantly different than others in that with all of the constraints on the new format (e.g. DRM, pricing, involving a PC, lower fidelity) there is no real advantage to the new format over CDs. This is why so many people (myself included) continue to buy and rip CDs rather than buy DRM'd music.

This is really more than just a format change and a more fundamental change in form. Personally consumed entertainment (as distinct from live experiences, etc.) is changing from a physical good to an informational good. (This is also happening with other things to some extent as well-- newspapers for example.) The informational good of pure digital media (i.e. computer files) is fundamentally different from the physical good (CDs and DVDs) in that it has the characteristics of being easily duplicated at very little marginal cost.

DRM is an attempt to turn back the clock and continue to infuse pure digital media with some of the aspects of physical goods in an attempt to preserve an existing business model. This is likely to be futile. DRM has proven in practice to be very difficult to implement in a way that is both convenient and truly secure. In practice it has been both inconvenient and often compromised.

For its own sake as well as that of its customers the music industry needs to try something different. Mark Cuban has some interesting ideas. I'm sure there are others.

What I find puzzling is that none of the players in this competitive industry is trying these other ideas. That fact suggests that my analysis is probably incorrect, but if that is the case I would be interested in knowing where I'm off base.

Technorati tags: DRM

It is unfortunate how many people still do not use RSS feeds, as they are a great way to keep up on blog content that may not be updated regularly. With RSS all you have to do is subscribe to the feed and then check you subsciptions to see what sites have new content. In fact usually that new content is already displayed for you. This saves the effort and wasted time of checking sites regularly and waiting for them to load only to discover that there is nothing new.

With Internet Explorer 7 now having a built-in RSS reader, there is no good reason for anyone not to be using this great technology. Here are some links that explain just how easy this is to use in IE7:

http://www.microsoft.com/atwork/stayconnected/ie7.mspx#ELD

http://www.timeatlas.com/mos/5_Minute_Tips/General/How_to_Subscribe_to_RSS_with_IE7/

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/02/02/523418.aspx

In the upper right hand portion of this blog there is now a Subscribe to RSS feed button that allows you to subscribe to this blog just by clicking on it. 

I saw couple of related posts today related to the subject of an in-house (not just a metaphor in my case) mail server vs. a hosted mail server. The Home Server Blog says that the vast majority of users are satisfied with using hosted email and the SBS Diva says that she thinks "email is going to creep into the small business marketspace more and more."

As I've mentioned, I started running SBS 2003 in our house several months ago and if money were no object I would definitely would prefer to use a hosted Exchange service. But when I looked into it the cost for our family was going to run to hundreds of dollars a year. That seems like a reasonable cost for a small business, but not for a family.

I also wanted to get some of the key benefits of an Exchange server. For us those have been shared calendars and contacts, group scheduling, the ability to set up additional email addresses for specific purposes, and remote web access.

The combination of these desires led me to make the one-time (as least until SBS 2007 comes out :)) expense of several hundred dollars for SBS 2003 (to put on an existing server box) and an investment of my time (as a hobby) to configure it.

Ideally, Microsoft would make some set of limited hosted Exchange server services available to users of Windows Home Server users at a more reasonable cost, say $50/year for five accounts. That might lead even people like me to move over.

When I sit down to use a Mac, the first thing I think is, "I hate Macs", and then I think, "Why has this rubbish aspirational ornament only got one mouse button?" Losing that second mouse button feels like losing a limb. If the ads were really honest, Webb would be standing there with one arm, struggling to open a packet of peanuts while Mitchell effortlessly tore his apart with both hands. But then, if the ads were really honest, Webb would be dressed in unbelievably po-faced avant-garde clothing with a gigantic glowing apple on his back. And instead of conducting a proper conversation, he would be repeatedly congratulating himself for looking so cool, and banging on about how he was going to use his new laptop to write a novel, without ever getting round to doing it, like a mediocre idiot.

1. Even with these restrictions, this is still an indcredibly flexible system compared to anything else on the market, e.g. Tivo Series 3, Comcast HD cable box.
2. How long does anyone think it will be before the DRM on these systems is defeated. My guess is within 2007.