I’ve installed it on both my laptop as a fresh install and on my media center of as an upgrade to vista ultimate. And at first glance it looks like miceosoft could box and ship it how it is, and they probably could. I am sure that a lot if the code is taken from vista and simply refined.

It is noticably quicker, but that could have something to do with quite a few of the standard windows applications not being included. And that brings us to my first gripe. There is a serious lack of applications here. It might just be because it’s beta and the apps haven’t been tested in-house, or maybe it was a way for microsoft to cripple it’s use as a replacemt for actially buying their retail operating systems. In any case it makes it difficult for me to use on my laptop and has stopped me from upgrading my desktop at home.

The key pieces that are missing are the mail and calendar applications. Although I noticed that windows movie maker wasn’t here either.

The upgrade on my media center went without a hitch, except that it took rather a long time. The fresh install on my laptop on the other hand was shockingly fast for having dumped nearly 9gb of data on the disk. Drivers were generally not a problem although I am not running any lthimg special on either computer. I am having a problem with the video driver on my laptop. It has a standard intel chipset video system, but I can’t get the driver to load so I don’t have any resolution choices besides the generic choice.

Initially I hated the task bar. It is setup by default with huge icons and no text so applications get lost. But after checking the taskbar properties I found I could make everything a decent size and get my text back. I also “unpinned” all the applications from the taskbar. The way I work this space is for running application, and nothing else.

There is one very new idea in the start menu to help speed up finding documents and quickly moving around the is that I feel is worth every word I can give to it. Recent documents asbota own menu is gone (good riddence in my opinion, it never seemed to work right) but in it’s place now is a recent documents flyout for each item in the start menu. For example after using the computer for a few days there is now a flyout on Internet explored that list the pages I’ve recently been to. Similarly the note I created is in the flyout on the sticky notes item.

All in all I am impressed by this beta. I haven’t had any gripes about vista, so I wasn’t really paying attention and either missed that windows 7 was this close to release or microsoft did a pretty food job keeping the lid on things.

I have often recived a call, or gone out to a site where there is a print job stuck in the print que on the server that is holing up everything. You can try to cancel the job at the printer, or at the server. You’ve tried to restart the server and restart the printer but the print job just sits there staring at you the whole time. While not quite as bad as upsetting as the famed “PC LOAD LETTER” error it can still make you want to chuck your printer and/or computer off the roof.

So how do you purge the vexing print que? Its actually easier than you might think. It only takes three lines typed in to your command prompt (you can do it through the Windows GUI too, but its easier this way).

First though, before we can execute anything you need the command prompt. And while this tutorial works for both Windows XP and Vista, the two have different ways of getting to the command prompt with the privileges we need.

Windows XP

1. Log into the computer with a user that has administrative privileges (most accounts do, so if your not sure just use the account you normally log in with).
2. Click on Start -> Run
3. Type “cmd” in the run box and click OK

Windows Vista

1. Click on the start orb and type “command” in the search box
2. Once you see command prompt in the list of results, right click on it and select “Run as Administrator“
3. You will likely be prompted for an administrator confirmation, or a password. Type your password or click Continue.

Clear the Print Que

Now that you’re at the command prompt, simply type these three commands to clear everything out of the que.

NET STOP spooler

DEL %SYSTEMROOT%\System32\spool\PRINTERS\* /Q

NET START spooler

Tada! Your printer can go back to printing now.

What does it do?

I’m glad you asked, its always good to know whats going on before you blindly type things in. Here’s whats going on. There is a service (a program that runs the background all the time) called the print spooler (or just spooler). Its job is to take print jobs from programs and send them to the printer. When you print something from a program like Word the spooler service creates two temporary files in C:WindowsSystem32spoolPRINTERS and if everything is running well, it then sends this file over whatever connection the computer as to the printer (USB, Parallel or TCP/IP).

Sometimes though (more often than it should) the spooler service gets stuck on one of these temporary files. and it gums up the whole process. Unfortunatly though if you try to just delete the files Windows wont let you because they are in use by the spooler service. So the above commands tell Windows to close the spooler service (which releases the files), then we delete all the files that are in the print que, and finally we start the spooler service back up so we can continue printing.

1983: The Nintendo Entertainment System was released, Microsoft released the Microsoft Mouse for its very new DOS, JC Penny would soon start issuing its own credit card and the first TCP/IP WAN was functional when the United States’ National Science Foundation (NSF) constructed a university network backbone.

In 1983 I could have booted my computer, and opened a document with a list of phone numbers, one of them being JC Penny. Called JC Penny and ordered a game to be mailed to me for the Nintendo, and I would have to wait probably a couple weeks before getting the game.

Now fast forward to today: You can log into Amazon.com, find a movie you like in their Unbox selection of titles and have it immediatly sent to your TiVo. Total transaction time (including time to download the movie), only a couple of hours.

Interconnected systems are here, they are what makes this world smaller and smaller every day and they will only continue to grow. Remember the old addage that your bathroom scale will one day tell your fridge how much you weigh? Expect it… soon.

Next thing you know Windows Vista will be an option on the iBook.

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