I've decided to give Windows Live Search a good try and see if it will make a good subsitute to Google for me. There are already 2 things I dong like about the Windows Live Search interface, but I will give it a fair chance to just test how well it performs in returning useful results for what I'm looking for. The way I'll judge this is by seeing if I can find everything I am looking for without having to go look in google. This is not a formal experiment but just an attempt for me to convince myself whether or Windows Live Search is worthed.

The things I dont like about the interface are the fact that the search box is at the top of the screen. Why do I have to move the mouse all the way to the top of the screen to type a search query (and yes I know you can tab into fields and not have to move the mouse but to get to the search box thats another 4 tab clicks) Again I think the first tab order should be the box. The other thing is the number of search results that show on the page, in google I can see more results on each page and the WLS page displays sub results of listings from the same site (the indented ones) thats a waste of space IMO it would make a lot more sense to me to see top level listings as this will reduce the ammount of scrolling one has to do.

Anyway, I will ignore all those annoyances and see if I can really rely on the results returned by WLS for the next 2 weeks without having to go to Google.

Update: I just noticed that you can control the depth of the search for an entry using this thing: available at the top right corner

the further left you pointed the more results displayed with less descriptive detail. That kindof solves one of the two things I reported not liking.

This is just evil. Thanks Mauricio for the heads up.

Update: Here's Brian Jones' - MS program manager in office - post about this.

I've previously blogged about having some trouble getting ASP.NET and IIS working on Windows Vista. I dont know if I was doing something wrong when trying to set them up, but I had trouble with Vista Builds 5308 and 5342. On the first I couldnt even get IIS to install and on the second I managed to get IIS setup but had problems with building and running ASP.NET 2 applications.

Well now I've got Windows Vista Beta 2 installed on my machine and I installed VS, WinFX Beta2 ..etc yesterday and it all finally works...

Time for some real playing with development on Vista.

Following on from my previous post about the new changes in Microsoft Office and Windows Vista. The post by Leonie proves my point. When you are soo used to something it is hard to change to something new.

So the question is, will this major change push people away from Windows? While it provided a good incentive for Nic and Leonie to consider a MacBook. I think the answer is still 'No'. For the normal user it is no because again the problem of learning something different. Now for Leonie maybe she already uses Mac so the transition will not be painful. But for others (someone who never or rarely used a mac) I think it will be less effort to learn the new features of Vista than to move away and use a Mac or Linux. Which leaves that user with 2 options (keep what I have now or go ahead and make the effort to upgrade).

As for corporates, I think it's only a matter of time till corporates invest in Vista and here's why : Microsoft's mainstream support is for 5 years, see here and support for Windows XP will end around 2009 see here. So by then Microsoft will not support XP and therefore it might be another reason why all corporates that use Microsoft software would consider the upgrade. So whether the user likes it or not, we have to get used to new ways of doing things, and if we will have to do it anyway then probably better to be ahead and do it now!

The other thing is the opportunities arising for the software sector, go read Rod's post on this.

I dont know if this is just me. But I ran into something yesterday that got me thinkinig. Now the new Windows Vista and Office systems have changed massively since their previous versions and part of that change is for the purpose of improving usability.

Now raises a few questions. I am sure that all of you will agree that the changes in the new versions are significant (I'm only talking about UI  stuff here) such as the introduction of the Office Ribbon and the getting rid of the menus thing.

I think this pauses a major problem for the average user of both systems (Resistance to change). Put it this way, after using the office system for instance for about 10 years or so. Would you be prepared to start to 'learn' a new environment (which will make your life easier - provided you do the effort) I think giving the new system to an office secretary for say will cause some frustration for a while before the person can get around to finding their way. Coz not only did the layout change but some functionality changed place too!

In Office 2003 to enter a header/footer for a document, you go to View-Header and Footer. I went into 2007 beta 2 to try and do this and hmm... couldnt find it, so had to look around and then found that it now residers under the 'Insert' tab. This comes interesting especially when you want to edit the header! You go to the insert tab again to select header and footer and then edit... 

If you are not sure whether or not your pc hardware can utilize the full potential of Vista. The hardware requirements have been specified here. When I first installed Vista a couple of months ago I was missing the AERO graphics as my Video Card did not support WDDM ... but I couldn't resist not having it showing so I went and bought a new graphics card. Hopefully not many people will need to do that!

Tim posted about Live.com saying why he 'doesn't' like it here.

Here's my take on the topic.

While Tim sees 'no compelling reason' to use it. I think I've found a few...

I do agree with Sean that it live.com makes a great homepage; while this depends on how you customise it
here is why it works great for me.

Live.com allowed me to group a lot of my online usage in one place; which saves space and memory!

Here's how:

Every morning here are some of the things I tend to do online

- Check my email accounts
- Read blogs
- Read news from several news sites
- Check the weather
- View stock information
- Search for stuff online

Using live.com  I managed to group most of the above in one place.

And here's why.I dont have to open Sauce Reader to read blogs;open news sites in several tabs/browser windows to check latest news for each ..etc
I also dont have to open hotmail...

The advantage in the bit above that you get from live that I can see 'parts' of each section before I decide to read news so that if there's nothing new; then I just wont read...

So overall it does reduce work by having things grouped.

The things I dont like about Live.com
-------------------------------------
- It's slow; on broadband it takes more than a 5 or so seconds to load!
- The above become more of a problem with more usage! The more I like live.com the more I'll add stuff to it the slower it becomes :-(
- I also dont like the current UI - The previous one (where you could customise border colours was much better IMO
- I REALLY would like to be able to access ANY email account I have through live and not just Hotmail.

It's been a while since I last posted but here I am posting again. I've deliberately delayed posting till I get something done (which I still cant do) but now decided to post anyway.

I've been using Windows Vista now since build 5308 was out and as I mentioned in some of my previous posts I am generally very happy with my experiences. Recently I've tried to setup WinFX, VS 2005 ...etc on Vista and here is where I am having some very annoying issues.

I can get WinFX working just fine on Vista but ASP.NET just doesnt like me, on build 5308 I failed several times to get IIS7 installed but after I installed build 5342 this has not been the issue and I ran into another problem. Windows Vista just wouldn't allow me to run aspnet_regiis even if I am logged on as Administrator stating an access denied error - anyone know how to fix this?

Also, trying to build any ASP.NET app in VS on Vista always returns a 'Error loading config file ....'

I was hoping to get all these sorted before I post, but I looks like this wont happen.

Any pointers appreciated.

And on a side note; I've recently started another blog on Geekzone which I aim to keep focused on security related topics so drop by there if you are interested in security stuff...

 

Following this

Apple have just released a piece of software that allows people to run XP on their intel based machines.

All future versions of the Mac OS will include this software.

More details here