Windows Vista Chronicles
I recently upgraded my desktop PC at home to Vista and the results were rather surprising. I found XP to be getting a bit old and dabbling in some hackintosh experiments only made its age more apparent. While Apple's OS is excellent, my old graphics card died and I could never get the replacement to play nicely with Leopard. There were several other small niggles (all due to the nature of the hack) with that installation but I liked OS X well enough to consider buying a Mac.
The trouble with the current Apple Mac line-up is that I wanted a desktop machine which only leaves the Mac Pro, and that's frankly way out of my reach. The iMac is nice but using laptop internals in an all-in-one design means it is a bit underpowered for what you pay, and totally lacking in the extensibility dept. For photography in particular the 24" model is a far better bet as it uses a fancy H-IPS LCD panel. These do not suffer from contrast and colour shifts related to viewing angle changes and are better than the common 6-bit TN panels. At that price I'd rather buy a separate LCD that I can connect to other things too, thank you very much. So while waiting for the mythical midrange Mac minitower, Vista SP1 got released and my curiosity got the better of me.
Naturally, there were a few issues along the way. One of the first was a documented problem - my screen saver was not kicking in, no matter what. Turns out that this is caused by none other than a piece of Microsoft hardware! Oh the irony. Certain types of Microsoft wireless keyboard/mouse USB receivers cause this and the solution is to install the "Microsoft - Other hardware - HID Non-User Input Data Filter" update from Windows Update. Bizarrely, this is an optional update so you have to explicitly get it.
Another issue is the well publicized problem with monitor calibration settings being lost after sleep, UAC prompts, or after starting full-screen games. It seems as though the video card Look-Up Tables (LUT) get reset on any of the above mentioned events. No real solution in sight - my workaround is to place a shortcut to the spyder2express start-up item on my Start Menu and run it manually if I notice that the calibration is lost. (If you're using a ColorVision spyder product, you will find an item called ColorVisionStartup under All Programs > Startup. Just drag it somewhere convenient or assign a keyboard shortcut via its properties panel. Other calibration solutions will probably have a similar loader program.) Windows really needs better support for this - Mac OS X does it brilliantly via System Preferences, no need for proprietary utilities to load the LUT.
I do pretty much all my digital photography in Pentax’s proprietary raw format called PEF. Although my primary camera is one of the few that support Adobe’s DNG file format, the PEF format as implemented in it offers lossless compression and thus better shooting capacity. I import my files with Adobe Lightroom, and it has the option to convert them into DNG on the fly, this time compressed. I also have some Canon CR2 files from shooting with friends’ cameras which I have also converted into Adobe’s format for long term storage. So I have quite a few DNG files lying around and I was very excited to read that Adobe has released a DNG codec for Windows Vista. Such codecs allow you to see thumbnails in Windows Explorer and browse images just like any old JPEG in Windows Photo Gallery. It works well and it even reflects Lightroom's develop settings although it’s a touch slow – the rendering speed is comparable to the delay you'd get in Bridge to get a full preview.
Besides messing with your LUTs, colour management in Vista appears to work well. I tried exporting the same file from Lightroom into sRGB, Adobe RGB, and ProPhoto RGB JPEGs. All three as well as the original DNG’s colours look identical in the built-in picture viewer! On a related note - do remember to turn on colour management in Firefox 3 to get the same consistency in there as well. Of course the proof of all this will be in the printed results that I can get, but I am not there yet.
Unfortunately, I had to uninstall the DNG codec because it causes indexing to slow down to a crawl. It would appear as if the indexing service asks it to provide the metadata for each file, and the codec renders the full image in the background before returning. Took me a while to figure this one out but with a good few gigabytes of DNG files, my index was taking weeks and still wasn’t finished. I tried excluding various folders of the index until I found it was photos that were causing it. Uninstalling the DNG codec and the full index got rebuilt in a few hours. The Adobe Labs page suggested reporting any issues on their user forums which I have done – but there hasn't been any response as yet. Hopefully this will be addressed in a future release because Windows Search is proving to be quite a useful addition to the OS.
Another minor annoyance is the inability to change he menu bar colour. In previous versions if Windows, you could change the individual widgets' default colour scheme. In Vista, the menu bar is a funky shade of blue. Change the Aero colours only affects the window frames, and fiddling with the Advanced settings does not have an effect on the menu bars. (The menus themselves are gray - mmmkay?) This is especially annoying in imaging programs such as Lightroom where the UI designers specifically only chose neutral grey hues to minimize interference with your photos' colours.
I am using AVG Free 8.0 for now but the whole Link Scanner mess is very annoying. Why can't it just scan only what I actually visit? I have disabled the Firefox AVG extension which inserts yucky green ticks into your Google Search results until they back down on this silliness, or something better comes along.
All in all, I've been very impressed with Vista and the upgrade was not at all the bumpy ride that I was expecting. Its ability to auto-locate and install certified drivers off of Windows Update is just great. It saved me from installing all the crapware that comes on our HP all-in-one OfficeJet driver CD, just plugged it in and it was ready. It even found a driver for my PCI Wi-Fi card which I'd given up searching for on SMC's website. Sleep also works fine - something I could never get right with XP. It has also been rock solid which is probably the most important thing.