I installed Vista Ultimate & Office 2007 on my main home machine (A Dell 8400) last weekend.  I went the chickenprudent route and bought another drive to install it on, leaving my XP Pro drive as an intact safety net should things with Vista not work out (But I’m sure we could have still been friends).

Well, I’m happy to report almost everything is running great, and most of my ‘critical’ XP apps run just fine under Vista.  It has been a bit of a pain installing applications every time I need to do something (Like view a PDF for example, print a document, or compile code :-)), but this happens anytime you do a clean install, so I can’t blame this on Vista.

I’m still getting past the Vista learning curve on a few things, but once I figure something out once, it does seem like a much more productive OS, and it has that new car smell that feels oh so good.

The only two three memorable issues I’ve had are:

• Cloudmark Desktop Spam – does not work in Vista/Office 2007.  It seemed to work in some of the beta releases, but not in RTM, go figure.  I sure hope this gets fixed soon!  As a stop gap, I’ve simple installed it on one of my XP/Office2003 machines.  Since we are on Exchange, it will sync (or unsync as the case may be) any deleted spam to all my computers (but push email to my Smartphone seems to get the spam before Cloudmark has a chance to sync up the deletion, oh well).  As a side note here, NewsGator Inbox for Outlook , my other ‘I can’t live without it’ Outlook plugin for RSS feeds is working great on Vista / Office 2007.
• VPN Connections – This is a must have for me (and also the only way I can get a remote computer to sync up with Exchange the first time over RPC/HTTP).  Out of the box it just did not work.  I copied the connection settings verbatim from my XP machines, and when that didn’t work, I tried every possible permutation of settings – still no joy, and a rather uninformative 919 error constantly.  After doing a fair amount of research, I decided to run Vista under full admin mode (very bad – note to self, fix that this weekend), still no luck.  I remembered seeing something about Vista being very picky on encryption for (PPPTP) VPN connections, and figured maybe the configuration on the Win 2003 Machine I was connection to was not up to snuff.  I realized I had VPN setup as a “Incoming Connection” as opposed to full RRAS on the server.  I decided to disable incoming connections, enable RRAS and get to work on tweaking the profile to see if I could get a valid Vista connection.  Fortunately I decided to test the connection before I made any changes to RRAS, and it just worked – woohoo!  So, if you are VPN’ing from Vista to Win2003, make sure you are using RRAS and not incoming connection on the server, problem solved.
• Microsoft Office Keyboard – The new MS intellipoint mouse / keyboard drivers do not support this keyboard.  The XP drivers have not supported it for a while either, but I have older copies archived that have always worked.  Unfortunately, no amount of tweaking got the full keyboard working, namely the scroll wheel.  I’ve tried all of the keyboard options, and it still doesn’t work.  This really stinks.  I love this keyboard, when MS quit making them I bought a whole case so I’d have one for a while.  Anyone know how to get this thing going on Vista??

So, if you have access to Vista & Office 2007, and a fairly current PC, I’d give two thumbs up to installing it ASAP.  If this is your main/only machine, I’d add the caveat to install on a fresh drive – I’m still keeping my XP drive around a while longer, just in case!

Congratulations to the winners of the Forms2Base contest at GottaBeMobile.com

Three winners each won a copy of the Tablet PC forms automation software, Forms2Base Pro, valued at $499 each:

• gamecockdoc
• timbo
• bsmithers

These winners each won a Forms2Base polo shirt:

• garysolomon
• dkwdds
• lostman

It seems that I have won an award in the 2nd Annual InkBlots, sponsored by Warner Crocker over at Life on The Wicked Stage.

The InkBlot awards are presented annually by Warner for various categories related to Tablet PCs and Mobile Computing – as well as a few comedic categories thrown in for a good chuckle.

My award was for “Best New Tablet PC Developer”, for the work I did on Ink Blog Plugin and Ink Search Tools.  The ‘New’ part may be a bit of a misnomer – I wrote my first Ink-Enabled apps in the 90’s, starting with the Apple Newton, and then moving to, wait for it, Windows for Pen Computing! (Incidentally, these apps eventually became order entry products for the SD module of SAP R3, but were eventually moved over to mobile phones with WAP). But hey, I’ll take any award I can get! 🙂

A big thanks to Warner for taking the time to put these fun awards together, and congratulations to all the other winners!

As I mentioned yesterday, I was going to give Pay Per Post a go, and see how the experiment went.

I’ve already had a few good comments, and Loren thinks I need to have a box or dashes around any pay per posts – I think he is probably right.

My intent had been to clearly identify PPP in the subject or first paragraph of the article, but having a box probably makes more sense, and gives me a chance to learn CSS, one of MANY things I am not good at 🙂

Until then, I will clearly identify any PPP posts. (assuming I continue with the whole PPP experiment).

I’ve done two things recently that have made email far less of a chore and time-sink than it used to be.

These are both common sense solutions, and things most people probably know (and have written about), but I bet many of you are like me and think “I don’t have time to mess with my email, it works, and I have more important things to do”  Well, let me tell you the time you save in just one day will more than make up for the 10 minutes these two tips will take to implement:

Get a GOOD Spam Filter – We use Exchange server, and have long used a server based solution(GFI) for dealing with SPAM and Viruses.  It is a well known and recommended solution, so I *assumed* it was state of the art.  GFI has done a great job with Viruses, but has only managed to scrub half of my spam.  Well, a little more than a month ago I read a review about a product called CloudMark Desktop and it received very high praises for dealing with spam.  Since I was dealing with 50-200+ spams a day from my various email accounts, that were slipping past GFI, I decided to give it a try – it is free for 15 days.  I hoped and expected for it to cut my spam in half –  but it has MORE than exceeded my expectations and gets near 100%.  In fact, I am actually shocked when I see a spam message now – pretty amazing stuff!  And, I have only received a small number (2 that I know of) false positives in the month+ I’ve been using it – I figure I accidentally deleted far more than that when I was manually dealing with spam.  I just can’t say enough about this product, so I’ll stop here and recommend you just download the free trial and judge for yourself. If you decide to purchase it, it is $39.99.  They also make a server product for Exchange, a little pricey, but probably a great product too.

Turn off the Toaster – I have always used the little Outlook popup (toast) alert that shows when you have a new message, and never thought much about it.  After I conquered my spam issues, I realized I still get a TON of legit email, many times rolling in at a rate of several per minute.  I just don’t have the will power to not look when it pops up, and many times I feel the need to respond right away.  What a productivity killer!  I turned this, and the new mail alert sound off as an experiment last week and have been loving it.  When I get to a natural stopping point, I tab over to Outlook and respond to what’s waiting – simple, easy, and I am not working in a reactive mode all the time (well, at least when it comes to email! 🙂 ).  If you are not already doing this, try this for a week, I think you’ll be amazed at how it helps your ‘flow’.  To disable this, simply click on the little down facing triangle in the upper right corner of the pop up, and select ‘disable desktop alerts’.  You’ll get a message box telling you how to re-enable it should you change your mind (you won’t) after the one week experiment.

I hope this makes some of you more productive.  I’d love to hear your thoughts and tips!

I’ve been debating on the PayPerPost concept, but finally decided to give it a whirl.  For those of you unfamiliar with the PayPerPost concept, it is a service for bloggers that allows you to pick up some extra cash (or donate to your favorite charity) just for blogging about certain topics.  Seems pretty cool (or at least interesting).  Once you get an account set up, you can view opportunities, and choose topics to blog about.  Obviously these are paid for by advertisers, hoping to draw viewers to their site.

While I can certainly see some controversy here, I think as long as there is full disclosure, (and interesting content) for such posts, it is really no different that using other ads on your site.  So, I’m going to give it a try for a while and see how it does – heh, something needs to pay for my latte habit!

My Pay Per Post Promise:

• I will disclose all PayPerPost Posts  (For example, this is a PPP – see the link above)
• I will keep these on-topic and in areas I actually understand, and can discuss (semi)intelligently.  For example, there was a very high paying opportunity on Rodeos and Bull riding I just saw – I’ll skip it.

Is anyone else doing this on tech blogs?  I’d love to hear how it is going.

Enough said…