I’m having trouble to understand why there are so many good opinions about Google Reader. Often, these are opinions expressed by bloggers, and who if not us - bloggers would know better what RSS feeds has been created for.

I’ve really tried hard to get to like it, found a couple features that I’m sure you all Google Reader fans love, like for instance using keyboard shortcuts to quickly jump back and forth between the posts as well as to switch between the expanded and list view of the feeds. Obviously, there is also a way to set up folders to categorize feeds. That’s all good, but still, the main issue is, what if you have a few hundred subscriptions and don’t really have time to browse them?

The first desktop-based RSS readers, created a few years ago already contained simple mechanisms allowing to create saved searches, often called “watches”. Watches let you key in the keywords you care for, associate them with a group of feeds, and then quickly scan what’s fresh on topics that interest you. Why did Google forget about such a simple enhancement?

I didn’t give up and tried to find a workaround this issue. The basic idea was to aggregate the content by sharing a folder to the public. (You can set it up in Google Reader’s “Settings”) Then, I wanted to grab its feed and plug it in to Yahoo Pipes, create a set of filters and finally release filtered content as a new feed, which I could then subscribe to in the Google Reader.

Unfortunately, there is one major problem. The way Google exports the aggregated feed is by placing only 25 newest items in it. So if you have 1000+ messages in your folder, you end up with a mix of messages from the last few hours! There seems to be another workaround for it (which I won’t describe in this post just to keep it short), but hey, this is supposed to be easy!!!

Let’s hope this problem will soon be solved by Google engineers, in the meantime, we’re left with desktop-based tools, such as the popular FeedDemon. This piece of software actually has a free web-based viewer which the main program synchronizes with, but its functionality is limited.

So recently I’ve been forced to get Vista, like many other new PC buyers… I’ll attempt to provide an objective breakdown of main pros and cons of this new masterpiece from the Redmond giant’s labs.

At first, I was a bit excited that now even the average Windows guy like me can get his own piece of “Mac” to play with, but not until a few minutes later when some serious issues started appearing out of nowhere. Finally, after wrestling with it for the whole weekend I yelled “No, it is not possible that any firm including Microsoft could release a mass product of this kind that simply does not work!”. My brand new computer kept getting Blue Screens of Death every hour. It wasn’t until a week later when a fresh-released system update downloaded from the net took care of the problem. Keep in mind, I’m not beta testing the OS, it’s been long months since the Microsoft started selling this thing.

OK, I’m going to try to be objective here. Issues are gone, so now I just want to become another happy Microsoft’s customer…

In a nutshell, after a few weeks of use, here are the good and bad things.

Pros:

- “Start Menu” got a great usability enhancement: just start typing the name of the program you want to open and it will be found in… 5 seconds. OK, it’s a bit long, but still useful. The feature also looks up the commands that were executed. (Such as for example names of computers that you tried to access on the network.)

- Generally, search works much better now. Microsoft finally learned from Google that indexing is the way to go.

- [Alt]+[Tab] is now more visual - you get thumbnails next to the names of open applications when you hold the two-key combination. The nice thing is that you can simply click the application you want to switch to, as opposed to hitting it tens of times hoping the cursor would land on that one icon you have in mind.

- Nice screen fade-out effect when switching to “Standby” mode. It seems like standby is also more dependable now. As soon as you press the sleep keystroke on your keyboard the screen fades out and a few seconds later your machine is in the “Standby” mode. I have never had any problem with bringing the computer back on, unlike on XP, where I lost my work more than couple of times after trying to come back from the “Standby” mode.

Cons:

- Speed of operation. This has obviously been the most well-known issue with Vista. It is really slow, even with the top of the line hardware: dual-core processor and 2GB RAM. Sometimes you have to wait 20 seconds for the system to get ready for deleting a single file from the drive. Other times, it takes forever to pop up a context menu or a drop down box with the list of folders. The speed of operation is truly limiting.

- Security features. Vista wants you to reconfirm that you want to open a program you just chose to open. It takes 3-5 seconds for the screen to fade out and present a special dialog box with confirmation. And if that wasn’t enough, the same thing happens when trying to delete/move files from folders such as “Desktop” or “Program Files”.

- Compatibility issues. Another known problem is that many applications will not work on Vista. Personally, I was having problems with Quickbooks, Instant Messaging and VPN software. I’m sure you would have lots of similar issues of your own.

- Many devices won’t install. My USB 2.0 card reader, that always installed in just a few seconds on every XP computer takes 20 minutes to install on Vista. This is how long it sometimes takes for the OS to search through its driver database.

- User Interface got very difficult to understand. Control panel now has many categories and no easy way to use keyboard shortcuts to jump between icons. Names of options are not very intuitive either. For instance, I used to press “n” keystroke in XP’s control panel which did highlight “Network Settings” immediately. Not anymore. More over, I feel like the beautiful graphics made everything more cluttered. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for aesthetics, but why do the desktop icons have to be five times bigger? The ones on XP were big enough and allowed to fit more information on the screen.

- Windows Explorer is now difficult to use. I was trying to be patient about it - I thought MS’s usability engineers must have had reasons to design it this way, but I’d really like to find out why they decided to get rid of the “Up arrow” button allowing to step up one level higher in the directory tree. Moreover, by default there is no top menu that everybody was used to. Instead, there is a toolbar at the top of the window designed to navigate between folders. I’ve tried to use it for a while but couldn’t get used to it. I don’t see any benefits of it.

To sum up, with exception of few good ideas, Vista is a big “no go”. Hopefully Microsoft realizes, that they are better off spending their money elsewhere.

The current model of personal computing almost guarantees frequent occurrences of serious software-related problems. Spyware infections, mysterious application freezes, endless configuration issues are just a few examples of what happens to a regular PC user every day. Unfortunately, I’m afraid we won’t see much improvement in this area until the whole software world moves back to the hosted model, where programs are maintained by the vendor in a secure, controlled environment. It seems like we are slowly moving that way, but so far nobody has proven that hosted web applications can deliver the same level of functionality, user experience, and hardware connectivity as the desktop applications do.

While we can’t do much about it, let’s at least deal with the problems in the meantime. Software issues are fixable, but what it comes down to is time needed to patch things up. It normally takes anywhere from a few hours to 2 days, even for an experienced technician, to reinstall all applications and redeploy data on a single PC.

There is a shortcut though. I while back I wrote two articles on the topic: The first one describes how to initially setup the PC file system so that it can later be backed up very easily, the second one is on performing the actual backup/restore procedure.

The idea is based on the first drive in your system storing only installed programs and their settings, when the second one stores all of your documents. If you set up your PC this way, the backup creation/restoration process is very easy and will take minutes.

As in the previous article on this topic, I recommend Acronis software. The program is called Acronis Trueimage Workstation. I found it very powerful as it is able to back up the entire partition (including the system partition) to a single file on the fly, even without having to restart the computer. The user interface is very friendly and self-explanatory.

User “Backup” and “Recovery” wizards accessible from the main panel. It’s best when you save the image to another physical drive, e.g. to an external USB 2.0 device.

Here is what I think is the most efficient way of setting up an XP-based PC so that the future maintenance becomes quick & easy.

Partitioning the Hard Drive

First, you will need to change the file structure to the following (or similar):

• C drive - Windows files, “Program files”, user profiles (”Documents and Settings”), drivers, etc.
• D drive - “My Documents”, “My Pictures”, “Desktop”, “Favorites”, E-mail data files, all other documents.

If you need more partitions that’s fine, you can have as many as you want, the crucial part is to leave all of the operating system files on one drive and move all of your documents to the other drive. This way, if anything goes wrong with your system drive, you’ll be able to restore it from the saved image without even touching your documents.

Most brand new PCs come only with one partition. What you need to do first is get a piece of software that will let you resize that partition so that there is enough space to create additional partition(s). The most-known programs that do that are Acronis Disk Director and PowerQuest Partition Magic. I’ve had positive experiences with both of these packages and I can highly recommend them.

After you install one of these packages, get in, right-click the C drive, choose resize and proceed until you end up with enough of empty space so that all of your documents will fit. Then, create a new partition out of the free space. You’ll normally want to create a “logical” partition with NTFS file system. Some programs will require a restart in the command line mode to complete the operation. The recent Acronis software does that on the fly - no restart needed.

Once you’ve gotten through this part, you’ll need to move the documents. Right click your “My Documents” folder in Windows Explorer, go to “Properties” and then click “Move” to point it to a new location. That was easy. Now, open “regedit” in “Start Menu” > “Run” and go to:
HKCU > Software > Microsoft > Windows > CurrentVersion > Explorer > Shell Folders
Next, move the files from Desktop, Favorites, My Pictures and My Music to new locations (most likely drive D) and update these paths in the registry. (Note: There is a similar folder called “User Shell Folders” in the registry. It is sufficient that you only update the one above.)

Update: It is also possible to move your whole user profile from the “Documents and Settings” or even the “Documents and Settings” folder to another drive. The process is more difficult and you will likely have to use the Windows “Backup” utility, which can “shadow copy” all files, even the system ones files being in use. When you think about it though, it doesn’t really make make that much sense. The goal is to be able to restore the system drive with all application settings without touching documents residing on a different drive. This process will be described in the next article.