Real World Computing
Vista vices
Why does this procedure have to be so broken? Introducing clever wizards is all fine and dandy, but you have to be double or trebly sure that you know what their failure modes are, as otherwise you're condemning your users to a nightmare world of twisting passages, all alike, and that simply won't do. Unfortunately, that isn't the end of this subject, though.
One of the features Microsoft proudly displayed in the late beta stages of the Vista project was a tool it had built in to monitor system stability, which it said would provide clear information about what was going on and remove the need to be a "system sleuth" to understand problems. This tool is the Reliability and Performance Monitor, a kind of souped-up mutant child of the old PerfMon. I fire it up and it shows me a set of graphs and a reliability index that on my poor machine with its attached Oki printer hovers around 6.17, which isn't too promising. Navigating to the date of my driver horrors I found a long list of Software Install failures for the Oki 2200, plus a big bunch of Application Failures that all refer to spoolsv.exe (the Windows Printer Spooler engine). So the information is there, although it doesn't help you fix things. I'd suggest you monitor this data, and if you're running a network then collect it centrally using whatever management tool you prefer, to see if any particular workstation is giving a lot of problems or whether any specific hardware drivers are causing grief. Given the low cost of hardware, it isn't worth wasting time by trying to fix the problem: identify, blame and change is often the cheaper route.
Pile the cores high
Roll back your memories some 20 years. Back then, things were simple - you went to a high-street computer specialist store with staff who knew what they were doing, you paid through the nose for expensive hardware, and the store took a healthy 25-30% margin that allowed it to invest in its business, offer useful services such as home installation and provide proper support. Then came the computer superstores, which slashed the margins to gain market share. Then came the online vendors, which reduced margins further still, often down to zero markup where all the profit was made on the postage and packing.
But there was one last step remaining on the stairway to cheapsville. I accept that the high-street supermarkets had dabbled in computing technology, along with DVD players and televisions, for a number of years, but these had generally been low-end "cheapest of the cheap" products. So it was somewhat scary to hear that Tesco has decided to sell somewhat more powerful computing devices such as a quad-core Xeon, 2GB of RAM, 1TB hard disk PC with Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT PCI Express graphics, for example. Naturally, it also comes with a DVD burner, DVB-T tuner, Media Center remote control, mouse, keyboard and Vista Home Premium. Oh and Tesco's own-brand small office software suite, too, from Ability.
I was intrigued by its specification and stunned by the price of £492 plus VAT, and I just couldn't resist, so an online purchase was made that afternoon and the box arrived the following day. What can I say? It does exactly what it says on the tin and runs like a scolded rat on Ritalin. Build quality is adequate from the original equipment manufacturer Medion, a company not unknown to PC Pro awards recently. My HP 1U rack servers won't be worried by the build quality, but it's a cheap tin box. I'm impressed by the video outputs, HDMI and DVI, so maybe this box should be plugged into a cheap large-screen plasma or LCD 1080i/p television and used as a media centre, connected if necessary via an HDMI switchbox. It has the processing power, storage capacity, memory and connectivity to eat such a task for breakfast.
