I’ve wrote previously about my Vista woes along with perhaps 99% of the rest of the planet’s population. Four weeks ago, I pieced together (literally) some older and newer components to build a new machine. Although on paper, its not all that much, but it blows away the old machine. Continuing the Vista plunge, I decided to put Vista 64 on it. Primarily because I had it and would have had to purchase XP 64.

I also had the option of putting Server 2008 64 on it, but decided not to go there yet. I’m sure you’ve seen the Server 2008 Workstation. One day I will go this route as it is something that intrigues me.

Back to Vista 64. This thing screams! Seeing it easily access more than 4 gigs of RAM while crunching a big fat 3DS Max scene was awesome. What’s really telling is that I can throw a lot of apps at this thing and still have a hard time getting over 4 gigs of memory usage.

As I am running a GeForce 9600GSO card now, I am enjoying the full Aero interface without any hiccups. I’m also getting around 55fps in most of my games playing at 1600*1200.

It surprises me sometimes that so many Windows programmers are not using the .Net InterOp classes with MS Office. InterOp allows you to do so many things far easier and with builtin Intellisense to boot. Using techniques like ADO.NET to examine Excel spreadsheets for example is so outdated. They were the only way to get at the data back before VS 2005, but now, lets move forward. Use the InterOP!

Check out my elegant, it is my opionion, accepted answer to an Excel problem. Experts Exchange InterOp is king!

An even more powerful example of InterOp, is my answer to the following problem Experts Exchange.

I think it is awesome that InterOp gives you finer control over controlling an Office app programatically.

I’ve been playing around with this thing for a day now. I must say that its very snappy compared to the Vista that usually resides on the box.

My opinion is still not formed on it, but, it looks very promising. Hopefully over the weekend, I can really put it to some tests. Plus, I’ll be on vacation next week, so my laptop spare drive is going to get it too. Although, it is supposed to be a low tech period off!

I finally took the plunge and did an in place upgrade of XP to Vista Ultimate over the weekend. All in all I must say the upgrade went without a hitch, other than it took hours to do it!

So much has been written about Vista performance, I won’t rehash it here. I’ve tried all the great tricks such as disabling Aero, turning off some of the animations, changing memory settings, etc. The Windowed performance is doing pretty good, got some network tweaking to do and that is my biggest grip.

I’ve tried some network tweaking, but so far it hasn’t fixed my biggest problem. I like to play two particular FPS a few hours a week. Tried playing them after the upgrade and they were almost unplayeable. I started tweaking the graphics thinking that was the culprit, and it mostly was. However, doing some tests, I see that the network performance of the new improved Vista TCP stack sucks. Pure and simple. The machine is 15% slower on the network than it was under XP, albeit, the XP tests is months old. I would almost discredit it, except playing the FPSs before upgrade, I was one of the fastest players around. Currently, I can barely move, and my avatar freezes a lot. If you play games, you know that a target that isn’t moving is easy to hit.

Will keep you up to date.

AT&T is at it again. This time, my home screen got loaded up with a bunch of icons going to their steal your money sites! Who buys that stuff. Definitely not I. I have no need for ringtones, graphics, games, and other downloads from AT&T. Some of those you can get for free from RIM anyway. They obviously make money off this or else they wouldn’t be pushing it. I deleted the crap and they showed up again the next day. This time, I just hid them all. Can’t see them and they won’t pop back up again.

Apress publishes some of the best programming books around IMHO. I’ve got a few of them sitting above me on the shelf. I’ve just discovered that they have a eBook Deal of The Day everyday. For a period of 24 hours, starting at 12:01AM PST, they have a particular eBook available for just $10. Considering that some of these retail for $60, that’s not too shabby.

http://www.apress.com/info/dailydeal

One thing that I have noticed over the last year of being on AT&T BIS network is the occasional Spam about ringtones and other things that you have to pay for. It strikes me as odd since they all are from AT&T. Never mind that with BlackBerry Desktop Manager 4.3 installed, you can create a ringtone from any song your computer can touch!

The last few days however have been ridiculous however.  I have gotten no less than 12 spam messages and it has moved from minor annoyance, to interfering with thereby causing me to get frustrated.  Please knock it off AT&T.  I will never buy anything from spam whether email spam, chat spam, SMS spam, or BlackBerry spam!

I overheard a conversation at the bookstore about the Microsoft Certified Master Program and just had to take a look. After all, I am very deep into the tech of Microsoft and figured who better to go for it.

After more research however, I’m glad I hesitated before plunking down my $125 application fee. Seems that not only is the program three weeks and lots of studying (which I would expect to pass such a course), its also $18,500. Yes, the cost of a complete year of college for a three week course.

 As you can assume, I won’t be a master anytime soon. I think that is overboard in price when the competition for a lot of Microsoft’s core product lines is fierce. I can get replacements, not just good ones, but great ones for every product Microsoft has. Which is leading to erosion of their market share everywhere, people are simply into free.

How many folks you know don’t even pay for WinZip? I know a lot! They think I am stupid for paying, they don’t understand that money is one of the things that keeps programmers coding things when they are no longer fun. I like WinZip so I pay.

The only thing thats holding it’s own and increasing its lead I feel is SharePoint. Put into the hands of a competent designer, SharePoint can do almost everything a business needs.

Anyway, I tip my hat to those going for the MCM and good luck to you. I do hope for you its well worth it.

Do you find every meeting appointment you receive finds it greedy little butt taking up space on your calendar annoying? So did we and also the guy who posted the question on Experts Exchange.

I wrote this little script that does the trick of terminating them, permanently. You have to comment out the wscript lines and uncomment the item.delete line after you have tested it.

‘Delete Tentative Appts created by someone else
‘That I haven‘t accepted
Set app = CreateObject(”Outlook.Application”)
name = app.Session.CurrentUser.name
Set nameSpace = app.Application.GetNamespace(”MAPI”)
Set folder = nameSpace.GetDefaultFolder(9) ‘folder path
Set items = folder.items
for each item in items
    if (item.BusyStatus = 1) then
        if(item.Organizer = name) Then
                        ‘Do nothing in this case since the tenative was created by the current user
                else
                        if(item.ResponseStatus=2) then
                                wscript.echo “Name: ” + name
                                wscript.echo item.Organizer
                                wscript.echo item.ResponseStatus
                                ‘item.delete
                        end if
                end if
    end if
next

I’ve been AFB (Away From Blog) for a bit now. We closed on our new home on June 12th. The time since then have been hectic with the movers, moving too much our self, cleaning, moving, removing, decorating, hanging pictures, painting, etc, etc, etc…

We are all pretty much in agreement, this is the last move! We finally have a basement and I plan on finishing myself for relaxation and just the enjoyment of creating something real, not just code!

So now I just have work, work, school, and family to eat up my time!