Monday, March 31, 2008

Great new laptop, but woes with Vista

dell-xps-m1330Life seems full of swings and roundabouts, or if you like, ups and downs. So I have been getting used to my shiny new Dell XPS M1330 laptop and enjoying the unbridled pleasure of being able to work when mobile. But at the same time I have been discovering how little Vista loves developers, or at least the software tools I'm using to develop in.

The problems I've had have been numerous, but I'll restrict myself to describing the ones I've got an answer for.

  • VS2008: Must run as admin
  • Indexing Service is now legacy code and not installed (by default)
  • IIS6 metabase and configuration compatibility (see here for more info)
  • Watir needs windows-pr (gem install windows-pr)
  • Watir conflicts with Office 2007 Groove
  • IIS7 suffers from the same 'usability facelift' woes as does Office 2007
  • Explorer keeps crashing ... actually I don't have an answer for this one

In addition I set the ruby.exe and rubyw.exe files to run as admin and did the same for Aptana Studio and java.exe. That was on the way to finding out that the Groove DLLs had some sort of conflict with Watir/Ruby. I also set nearly everything to run in Windows XP SP2 compatibility mode and disabled UAC along the way.

As usual, once you have everything up and running you forget about your setup woes, however the near constant Explorer crashes are getting on my nerves. It's especially frustrating when you have 2 or 3 Explorer windows open to various important directories (some on other machines) and then have Explorer crash because you opened Control Panel ...

explorer-crash 

UPDATED: Added link for IIS metabase issue.

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous11:25 pm

    You've been tagged :-)
    http://anthonymilner.wordpress.com/2008/04/03/8-little-known-things-about-me/

    ReplyDelete
  2. i looked everywhere in my town and no one had a leather professional laptop bag. it sucked!!

    ReplyDelete