Over the last month, I have had to do a lot of software testing and I have had to install Linux, Windows XP, and even Windows98, a few times on Virtual PC 2007. Undeniably I have come to some conclusions on operating system installs and Virtual PC as a testing tool. Without a doubt Virtual PC has too many flaws to be the testing tool I wanted it to be. Microsoft has taken Connectix’s Macintosh product and made it into a virtualization tool for Windows users who want to install all different flavors of Windows on their PC, but in doing so they have not improved on the product as one would imagine they would.

• 16-bit color is still really the optimal choice for most virtual machines. This is something that you run into right away when you try installing Ubuntu or Fedora, which default to 24-bit color.
• Virtual machines are not technically virtual, because there is no way to give a machine more memory than is available physically on your machine.
• Accelerated video is still missing from Virtual PC, which means your hi-end video card won’t due much for your virtual machines.

As for Linux, after installing Ubuntu, Kbuntu, and Fedora 6 and trying to setup LAMP (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP) along with Webmin and PHPMyAdmin, I started to miss Mac OS X and Windows. The package installer in Ubuntu is by far the easiest to use, but to enable extra packages and get dependencies updated, you still have to resort to the command line, and even then just to install Webmin takes more than just a couple of commands. Fedora was actually harder to use when it came to installing other software. On the other hand Fedora was faster and more responsive than Ubuntu. In the end I finally got everything setup in Ubuntu, and even resolved myself to using GNOME, and dare I say, liking some aspects of it, but as a desktop Mac OS X is so much easier to use and maintain, that I really wonder why anyone would want to use Linux or Debian.

When it comes down to it, Ubuntu and Fedora are great systems for running Apache and PHP, but their desktop use is arguably not any better than Windows or Mac OS X. Microsoft has not improved on Virtual PC, since aquiring Connectix, and worst of all they killed another great application on the Mac platform.

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Just when you think that perhaps Microsoft has learned a thing or two about interface design (after all they just released Vista, which is suppose to be their greatest interface achievement of all time), you install Internet Explorer 7 and are greeted with the cruel joke that is the IE7 Toolbars. Why did they put the menu bar in the middle? This is contrary to every other application on Windows. Supposedly it is due to Vista’s interface.

There is a registry key that you can add to force the menu bar to load on top, like it is in IE6. You will need to add the following key:

After you add the key, close IE7 and open it up and it should now look similar to this:

Reference Microsoft Developer Tony Schreiner’s Weblog.

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When it comes to Internet Explorer, there is one feature that is not particularly useful for web developers. Both IE 6 and the newer version 7, have a feature that overrides error messages sent from the web server to the browser. This feature takes effect any time an error message is less than 512 bytes long. To turn off this feature, you need to bring up Internet Options and go to the Advanced tab, under the Browsing section you will find: Show Friendly HTTP Error Messages. You need to clear this setting and now IE will display all error messages sent from the server.

Note that most web servers send 404 error messages that are less that 512 bytes, by default.

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Last week I spent most of my time, setting up a laptop with WindowsXP, and it dawned on me to put together a little document on how I optimize Windows. Once Windows is installed and you logon for the first time, I basically do eight steps:

• Run Windows Update
• Disable unneeded services
• Modify the Registry for tuning up performance
• Install Anti-Virus and Spam-blocking programs
• Install Third Party Applications
• Add some final utility programs

The Optimizing WindowsXP page goes into further detail.

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