Yes, yes, and yes! Last week, I finally decided to admit defeat and upgrade to XP from Vista. The final straw in the coffin was Vista’s repeated propensity for killing IBM Rational Application Developer v7. Yes, RAD is bloatware in several respects, but Vista would also kill Windows Explorer repeatedly. You would think the O/S would be able to control a key component like Windows Explorer better. Anyways, I had it with Vista and reinstalled XP on my laptop. Whew! It is good to be back to a real Operating System that actually delivers acceptable performance.

Some of the performance benefits that I see on XP include -

• The OOTB network performance is just fine. I can actually get all the bandwidth and throughput that my ISP provides.
• When I attempt to startup VMWare Server on my XP laptop, I no longer lose access to my laptop for 2 full minutes  and more before it responds to a mouse click!

I did run into this minor issue with installing XP on my laptop that XP does not have drivers for SATA. So, I had disable AHCI (native SATA support) in the BIOS on my Lenovo 3000 N200 laptop during the install – yes, I could have hit F6 during the XP install and provided the relevant drivers but did not do so as I kind of rushed my XP install. Once, I completed the install, I wanted to enable AHCI support and found that caused the BSOD (blue screen) during XP startup. I had to disable AHCI support to get past this. I finally stumbled on HOW TO switch from IDE to AHCI mode without having to reinstall Win XP (GUIDE). I followed these instructions to the core (updated the registry, copied the driver, re-enabled AHCI, and rebooted) without issues.

It is good to be free! I hope you will learn from my experience and avoid Vista – stay with XP!

Yesterday, I had the need to reverse engineer an Oracle schema in Microsoft Visio on my now not-so-new Vista laptop. While I had the Oracle JDBC drivers copied onto my Vista laptop, I did not have the Oracle client installed. I first tried to install the Oracle 9i client, because the Oracle schema was in a Oracle 9i database instance. The Oracle 9i client installer warns about incompatibility with Vista and it certainly lived up to the billing. I saw several other users with postings about issues. I saw one obvious issue with folder permissions and changed ownership/permissions on the Oracle client install folder, but that did not resolve the issue all the way. While trying to configure an ODBC data source (only for reverse engineering the Oracle schema) , I ran into errors that had again been encountered by many. The first error was “The setup routines for the oracle in orahome92 odbc driver could not be loaded due to system error code 126″. Clicking ok on this error resulted in a secondary error alert – “Could not load the setup or translator library”. At this point, rather than spend more cycles on the issue, I switched to reverse engineering the schema using the eclipse plugin – Clay. Clay worked just fine for reverse engineering the schema (took all of 5 minutes), but the issue with it was that it did not allow me to move the foreign key connectors to make them route better. At this point, I was back looking at the Visio route and the solution was extremely simple!

All I had to do was -

• Uninstall the Oracle 9i client (more on this later)
• Install an Oracle 10g client that was supported for the Vista platform; download the client from here. I had to make sure to install the Oracle ODBC driver in this step.
• Launch the Oracle 10g Net Manager
  • Create an Oracle TNS listener
  • Configure a net service name for the Oracle schema that I was trying to reverse engineer. I had to check the checkbox for Use Oracle8 Release 8.0 Compatible Identification so that I could specify the SID. I tested the service to ensure I had it right so far.
• Create an ODBC data source where I specified Oracle in OraClient10g_home1 as the driver. When I did this, I got a few alerts for an unsupported operation, but it still seemed to work and brought up the dialog window for Oracle ODBC Driver Configuration. In this dialog, the key thing was to specify the correct net service name that I had configured earlier and that was all it took to get the Oracle ODBC driver to work.
• Next step was to launch Visio again, and reverse engineer using the ODBC data source that I had set up.
• And I had my desired reverse engineered Oracle schema in Visio!

All it took was the right Oracle client for Vista and me stumbling my way through the ODBC setup which does not come naturally to me! Now, you are probably wondering about my choice for my database modeling tool – yes, I am cheap – no Rational Data Architect for me!

PS: Uninstalling the 9i client for me did not work with the version of the Oracle universal installer that was installed on my Vista laptop. I ended up running the 9i client installer again to uninstall my 9i client. There must be several other solutions but this was the easiest one for me.

I just had a quick update on my Windows Vista issues in general, and my network performance in particular. As I had written earlier, since getting my new Vista laptop, I had experienced slow network performance compared to Windows XP computers with the same ISP connection. I had turned off auto-tuning by executing netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disable on a command prompt run with administrator access. This had helped, but not all the way. I was still experiencing occasional issues with using network shares at work.

Well – I tried turning off Remote Differential Compression based on some reading that I had done. However that was to no avail. Then I went ahead and downloaded a Vista hotfix – http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/931770. The hotfix describes symptoms on a Windows Vista-based computer, wherein when you try to copy files from a server on a network, the copy process may stop responding (hang), and you may receive a message that resembles the following:

Calculating Time Remaining

0 minutes remaining

Well, this was very similar to what I was experiencing – so I went ahead and applied this fix. And voila, my performance went up dramatically – I started getting about 4-5x the performance accessing the LAN file shares.

Also conincidentally, just before I applied the fix, I was trying to burn a DVD using the Vista built-in DVD Burn utility and was it slow! Applying the 931770 hotfix seemed to improve the speed of burning a DVD as well. Of course, I don’t recommend that anybody else suffer through using the Windows Vista built-in burn utility – I switched to Nero myself!

Hopefully this is the last of my network performance issues on Vista!