Philoking.comfrom Jason Burns’ perspective…

I can’t say that this was an easy decision for me. I had long loved and had great affection for my self built P4 2.4Ghz box running Windows XP SP2 that I had been using for years. The computer had been rock solid and even when I brought home my new 64-bit Vista HP powerhouse, I still used the old computer more often out of comfort and familiarity.

Recently, my motherboard had started to fail and to be honest, I was starting to feel the computer’s age when compared against the newer box. Now logic might lead you to ask why I didn’t just switch to the new box and retire this box completely. The answer would be that I just can’t seem to manage on a single box, and that the new 64-bit machine, while awesome for gaming, Photoshop work, and all my media madness that my iMac doesn’t serve, just has a different bag of tricks than my development machine which I am retiring.

So early this week I placed an order to Newegg.com to replace all of the guts of this machine and make it shiny and new again. It was literally when it was time to install an OS that I made the final decision to install Vista and not XP SP3.

The new (old) box is now a 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo, 3GB Ram, 400GB HD and a nVidia GeForce 8400 GS video card with two 20" LCD monitors and a DVD-RW drive.

The build process went surprisingly smooth. I got home about 5:30PM, grabbed the old PC and the box of parts and went to the kitchen table. I removed all of the offending parts from the case, installed CPU and RAM into the new motherboard, screwed it in place, connected all of the cables and inserted the video card. Once that was complete, I closed the case, carried it downstairs, plugged it in and bam, it was ready to install Vista. I had not one single problem or incedent in the build…..amazing.

By 6:30, Vista was installed and I was updating and installing software. The entire build and OS install took an hour….wow!

It’s now 9:30 and including a break for dinner, all of my applications are installed, and updated, the OS is updated and all of my email accounts, IM, browser faves, printers and file shares are good to go. Now with the exception of two Macs running OS X 10.5 Leopard, all of my PCs are running Vista Ultimate at home and Vista Enterprise at work.

This is one computer crazy household for sure, but now the tide has definitely turned towards Vista being the dominant OS. Our household has 6 running PCs and 2 laptops (not counting work machines) and the OS split breaks down to 3 Vista Ultimate (1 64bit), 2 Windows XP and 3 OS X Leopard. Sure OS X and Vista are tied at the moment, but Dawn’s old PC is giving up the ghost shortly to be updated to a Vista machine as well.

And for the record…I am loving Vista. I kind of look at it like some people do underwear. Sure the new pairs are a little too tight and don’t quite fit your bum like the holy ones, but if you take the time to wash and wear them a few times, they feel just like they should. Give Vista a real chance on a machine worthy of running it, and I doubt you will be dissapointed.

I know it’s hard, we all do. We gather around in our little group, and everyone takes turn standing up and saying, “Hi, my name is Jason, and I am a POP3 Email user.”

The crowd welcomes you and begins to help you heal. Everyone knows you should be using IMAP, you’ve been tucking email everywhere, hoping your family won’t notice that you have 14 inboxes.

The telltale signs are all there, you stay up all hours of the night making sure your mobile devices, work PC, laptop and home computer all have the mail synced the same. You have deleted that Viagra spam mail that made it through your filter four times but still you hang on….

I kid, but seriously. I used to do this. I would use webmail at work, POP3 on two laptops, two desktops and a Windows Mobile phone. I synced my ass off and it was still always out of whack.

Unlike many of the splintered, I refuse to have fourteen email accounts. I have one that I manage well and guard against spam with an iron fist. I do have a few for specific sites, but they all forward directly into the main one. I get a lot of mail. How do I do it? IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol)

If your client is any of the following, you can too!

• Apple Mail
• Novelle GroupWise Windows Client
• iPhone
• Eudora
• Microsoft Outlook
• Microsoft Outlook Express
• Microsoft Entourage
• Windows Mail
• Windows Mobile Mail
• Mozilla Thunderbird
• Pegasus Mail
• Opera Mail

The Advantages over POP3

Connected and disconnected modes of operation
When using POP3, clients typically connect to the e-mail server briefly, only as long as it takes to download new messages. When using IMAP4, clients often stay connected as long as the user interface is active and download message content on demand. For users with many or large messages, this IMAP4 usage pattern can result in faster response times.

Multiple clients simultaneously connected to the same mailbox
The POP3 protocol requires the currently connected client to be the only client connected to the mailbox. In contrast, the IMAP protocol specifically allows simultaneous access by multiple clients and provides mechanisms for clients to detect changes made to the mailbox by other, concurrently connected, clients.

Access to MIME message parts and partial fetch
Nearly all internet e-mail is transmitted in MIME format, allowing messages to have a tree structure where the leaf nodes are any of a variety of single part content types and the non-leaf nodes are any of a variety of multipart types. The IMAP4 protocol allows clients to separately retrieve any of the individual MIME parts and also to retrieve portions of either individual parts or the entire message. These mechanisms allow clients to retrieve the text portion of a message without retrieving attached files or to stream content as it is being fetched.

Message state information
Through the use of flags defined in the IMAP4 protocol, clients can keep track of message state; for example, whether or not the message has been read, replied to, or deleted. These flags are stored on the server, so different clients accessing the same mailbox at different times can detect state changes made by other clients. POP3 provides no mechanism for clients to store such state information on the server so if a single user accesses a mailbox with two different POP3 clients, state information–such as whether a message has been accessed–cannot be synchronized between the clients. The IMAP4 protocol supports both pre-defined system flags and client defined keywords. System flags indicate state information such as whether a message has been read. Keywords, which are not supported by all IMAP servers, allow messages to be given one or more tags whose meaning is up to the client. Adding user created tags to messages is an operation supported by some web-based email services, such as Gmail.

Multiple mailboxes on the server
IMAP4 clients can create, rename, and/or delete mailboxes (usually presented to the user as folders) on the server, and move messages between mailboxes. Multiple mailbox support also allows servers to provide access to shared and public folders.

Server-side searches
IMAP4 provides a mechanism for a client to ask the server to search for messages meeting a variety of criteria. This mechanism avoids requiring clients to download every message in the mailbox in order to perform these searches.

What does all this mean to you?

It means that you can have your mail on every device you use, and when you make changes to the state of your mailbox (delete, send mail, organize, etc) It will be reflected anytime you access it from any other device. Central management FTW!

If you haven’t already, go to your Gmail Settings, enable IMAP support, find your client on their setup help page, and give it a test drive. You can always switch back, but why would you?

I know I posted this before, but I was leaving a comment on an article today and I feel compelled to blog my comment…

@MasterofOpera.. you WANT Quicktime? Wow…. I blogged about this awhile back, now admittedly, I work for Microsoft, so I will probably get smacked for being totally uncredible, but I do carry a Macbook Pro (even into MS meetings hehe) and I think that gives me a little credibility towards being unbiased.

I think the thing is, it’s not that Safari is a bad product, even though I won’t use it even on the mac….. it’s that it is a subversive way to try and install it. I had installed Safari for Windows on my main XP machine at home, and when I saw the update thing I wasn’t surprised. Then I went to use my wife’s computer for something and the update box was up with Safari, I thought maybe she had installed it and didn’t think about it again until the 64 bit Vista machine I had just built from a clean install asked me to install it after installing iTunes. I was blown away. Stop taking the Apple fanboy side and ask yourself this.

What would happen to us (Microsoft) today if we tried to install IE8 with the Zune software for example. Me thinks we wouldn’t get away with that one too well. So as far as I know, standards of computer etiquette are not unique to the company.

Anyone that pretends that MOST users don’t just click next on those things is fooling themselves. My mom, sister, aunt, uncle, cousin, friend next door….all those guys probably would just go, “oh, it’s an update…ok” Then they see a new icon on their desktop and go “What’s that?” They click it, and another box comes up saying “Make this your default browser?” and they go, hmmm, ok, and click that.

I am not saying these are the brightest users on the planet, but it’s a COMMON USER. Apple making this the default behavior, based on knowing research that this is a common user pattern, makes this NO different than the Browser Hijacking crap that went on 5 years ago. Seriously.

If you need an analogy to make it stick, Apple no more expects people to pay attention to that dialog as Best Buy expects you to mail in your rebates. That’s just the facts ma’am.

From this article….

I still get regular comments on this post about the DVD bug I found in Windows Vista  in January 2007. I thought it would be a good time to revisit this post and discuss this bug a bit further.

If I find it still exists, I will use my new position at Microsoft to try and get some answers for you guys.

The bug seems to have several variations but the main point is after you install Vista on a new computer, as an upgrade or clean install from a prior installed operating system, once it has finished installing, the computer seems to lose the disc drive.

The only resolution I have found so far is to put the computer to sleep and wake it back up, then it comes back. That’s hardly intuitive, so lets try and get some resolution.

The fact that my itty bitty ole blog has 28 comments on this particular post tells me it’s not a very isolated case.

I will be sending this blog post and question to the Windows Vista group at Microsoft tomorrow so stay tuned as I update the progress on it’s resolution. Let’s hope they say “Fixed in SP1!”