Posts Tagged ‘Windows 7’

Fix Slow WebDAV Performance in Windows 7

By Chief Oddball on December 18th, 2009 at 8:39 pm

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I have an iPhone file storage app called Air Sharing that uses a WebDAV server to let you connect to it with a PC. For some reason, a few weeks after installing Windows 7, file transfers to or from this (or any other) WebDAV server became incredibly, mind-numbingly, literally-33.6K-dialup slow. And yet, from all my other computers in the house, even those still running Windows XP, file transfers over the LAN to my iPhone were as fast as you’d expect.

Today, finally, I got so sick and tired of it that I — gasp! — searched for a solution. To my embarrassment, I found the answer in just a minute or two, illustrating quite succinctly just how much time I had been wasting just “putting up with it.” Oddly, the culprit is none other than Internet Explorer 8. Quite simply, all you have to do is turn off IE’s automatic proxy settings detection. Here’s how to do that:

  1. In Internet Explorer, open the Tools menu, then click Internet Options.
  2. Select the Connections tab.
  3. Click the LAN Settings button.
  4. Uncheck the “Automatically detect settings” box.
  5. Click OK until you’re out of dialog hell.

Immediately after doing this, file transfers to my iPhone graduated from CompuServe Modem Simulator to Transwarp Conduit Simulator. It was that much of an improvement.

I found the answer on this Microsoft Technet discussion, incidentally. The solution was posted by “Daniel CD” about two-thirds of the way down the page. Props to that guy.

Gotta love Intarweb collaboration.

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Review: Windows 7 Enterprise Edition

By Chief Oddball on August 10th, 2009 at 10:55 pm

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Okay, so this isn’t exactly the typical Oddball Review…no Asian horror or computer games in sight. However, after installing the final version of Windows 7 Enterprise Edition this past weekend (courtesy of MSDN), I am finding it significant enough to warrant a review of its own — particularly in light of certain earlier posts I’ve made here about Microsoft’s operating system.

In fact, it’s my opinion that Windows 7 is a slam dunk for Windows users, particularly in light of what an utter abomination I found Vista to be in many respects. It builds upon the behind-the-scenes changes in Windows Vista and simultaneously attempts to correct the egregious user interface catastrophes that product introduced. The result is what Windows Vista should have been, which might make you understandably annoyed had you paid for both. Being an employee of a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner who has access to these things as part of his job, it was not so difficult for Redmond to redeem itself in my eyes. In fact I will be happy to forget the Vista fiasco ever occurred.

Trivia: Windows 7’s name is rooted firmly in marketing, and may be perhaps its most disingenuous aspect. Just as CPU clock speeds were put forth as the primary means of differentiating the power of two systems in the old days, the big, shiny “7″ on this operating system’s box art is meant to propel you into the next generation of Windows computing, forgetting whatever came before. In actuality, this version of Windows is not 7.0, but 6.1. Since Windows Vista was 6.0, this means the much-vaunted Win7 is merely a revision!

When you think about it, though, this makes perfect sense. Windows XP (version 5.1) was, after all, “merely a revision” of Windows 2000 (version 5.0). Yet look what a success XP was, and how long it stuck around. Windows 2000 was only on the market for a year or two. See any parallels?

It seems to me that Microsoft can be counted on to get an operating system really right only on the first revision of a major release. (That being the case, we might all want to sit out whatever really ends up wearing the Windows 7.0 badge.)

Anyway, enough semantics: On with the review.

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What a Pain

By Chief Oddball on July 29th, 2009 at 10:26 pm

Filed under Journal, Rants ··· 2 Comments

I thought I’d wrapped up all of my side jobs, but one came back to haunt me this week in the form of some changes that needed to be made to something I did a couple weeks ago. A whole lot of changes.

Actually, let’s just say that the client’s entire frigging site design is broken — and was from the get-go — and I must fix it. By the end of the week.

I’ve been trying to put in a couple hours on this job each evening this week, at least since Monday when I received the changes. I’ve made some progress, but not nearly as much as I expected given the nature of the changes. On any normal website, these tweaks — “fix gaps here,” “align these blocks there” — would have been fairly simple. But on this website, they’re not simple. Because the site was designed in ImageReady (yeah, that old Photoshop companion program before it was merged into Photoshop itself). And then cut up into ImageReady slices. And then saved automatically into HTML by ImageReady.

If you’re not a web designer, you won’t understand the significance of what I just said. Let me put it into layman’s terms: What I described was an old-fashioned way for inexperienced people to quickly throw a web page together. The problem was, the method resulted in a badly-coded web page that was assembled using the most inflexible HTML known to man, and which looked fine as long as you didn’t touch it, but which quickly went to hell in a handbasket once you started trying to fiddle around.

Worse, somebody started fiddling around before I was even brought on board with this project (yes, the design and its assembly have been done by someone else who remains unidentified). So what once probably looked like a very nice design on ImageReady’s canvas has already been rendered a jumbled, gap-filled mess. Now the client wants me to fix all these little things.

That’s hard enough on the face of it, but there are additional factors working against me, to wit:

  • I’m having to make all of my changes in a Remote Desktop session where I have access to only Notepad. (This is because the site has built-in ASP.NET dependencies that have stymied my efforts to get a local copy running on my machine.)
  • I don’t know what the original design looked like (in ImageReady) before it got sliced up, nor do I have access to the master files.

I’m rapidly discovering that this is going to take a lot more time than I’d hoped, to the point where I’ll likely need to spend Thursday and Friday evening, followed by all day Saturday, to meet the deadline. I am also starting to think that I should email the client tomorrow and let him know that the hours involved are going to result in what may be a bigger charge than he thought. This guy is usually very laid-back when it comes to money, however — being rather flush with it himself, as I understand — so that probably won’t be a concern, but I don’t want to drop a bomb on the guy.

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