It always seemed to me that desktop gadgets were a waist of time and resources. Yes sure, the weather is a bonus but most of the rest is just inadequate, particularly in the system monitoring arena.

This was all true until I started using the gadgets from Addgadget.com. Their All CPU Meter, Network Meter and Drive Meter Windows Gadget have been of a invaluable help, particularly on Windows 2008 server I remote too. Not only do they give real time information but they do so in a friendly and intuitive manner without the overhead. These 3 gadget are also regularly updated and improved on,  the bonus is that they are free.

At least now I know something is hogging my CPU, Network Card or Hard Drive at a glance. And if you use All CPU Meter with CoreTemp you will even be able to monitor each CPU core temperature, great for those gamers out there, though it does not seem to work well on AMD chips.

Give them a try.

You can find the Gadget on Windows Live here:

- All CPU Meter

- Network Meter

- Drive Meter

Disclaimer: This is not in anyways an endorsement and you use these Gadgets at your own risks.

With a new job comes a new machine and as with all new machines an installation is required. I thought it would be nice to document it as I had done with installing a Microsoft Windows XP development machine previously, an article I seem to have lost in a blog move.

The first issue at hand is whether to use the 32 or 64 bit version of Vista, the answer is both easy and overly complicated, so let me simplify… If you have less or equal to 3GB of RAM go for the 32 bit. From 3GB onwards, the 64 bit is a requirement to be able to use the memory above 3GB. I have installed the 64 bit on machines with 2GB of RAM without any adverse effect, a good option if you want to upgrade your RAM later. As for the edition, Business will be your choice because you will need IIS and it’s only available for Business onwards and I find Ultimate bulky and gimmicky, see here for details.

For recommendations on machine specifications go here and here where I discuss this in length.

From here is my check list and installation sequence with a couple of notes.

1. Microsoft Windows Vista Business
   Don’t forget to add everything IIS but to exclude FTP as you will want to install FTP 7.0 via Microsoft Web Platform Installer, also add Message Queue Server and remove the Tablet PC components if you do not have a Tablet PC. 
   1. Microsoft Vista Service Pack 1
      To my surprise, you cannot install Microsoft Vista Service Pack 2 until Microsoft Vista Service Pack 1 is installed
   2. Microsoft Vista Service Pack 2
   3. Network drivers if required
   4. Windows updates, include the Live tools so you can Blog too ;-)
   5. Balance of drivers as required
   6. Daemon Tools Lite, very important if like me you have a ton of ISOs on a portable hard drive.

At this time an Anti-Virus is a good idea, I personally recommend Symantec’s Norton Internet Security but if you are cash strapped AVG Free will do the basics.

1. Microsoft Office 2007 Professional
   1. Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2, Service pack 1 is not required in this case.
   2. Windows updates
2. Microsoft Visio 2007
   1. Microsoft Visio 2007 Service Pack 2
   2. Windows updates
3. Microsoft SQL 2008 Developer Edition complete installation.
   1. Microsoft SQL 2008 Service Pack 1
   2. Windows updates
4. Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional
   Exclude Microsoft SQL 2005 Express 
   I’ll talk about the add-ons and tools I use for development in another post.
   1. Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1
   2. Windows Updates
5. Microsoft SQL 2008 Express Service Pack 1
   
6. Tools
   1. Paint.NET
   2. CCleaner
   3. Defraggler
   4. Virtual Box, my favourite PC emulation tool.
   5. Filezilla for FTP
   6. WinMerge for comparing files
   7. Microsoft Web Platform Installer come in handy to install all those IIS add-ons and extra apps.
   8. For PHP and MySQL installation refer to the tutorials on http://www.trainsignaltraining.com, follow the Windows Server 2008 tutorials as they are identical for Vista. These are the best I found on the net.
      1. IIS 7: Install FastCGI & PHP on Server 2008
      2. Install MySQL on IIS7 Server 2008
      3. Install PHPMyAdmin on IIS7 and Server 2008
      4. IIS7: URL Rewrite Extension on Windows Server 2008
      5. And for setting up your Wordpress blog before putting it live:
         1. Installing WordPress on IIS 7 – Part 1
         2. Installing WordPress on IIS7 – Part 2
   9. Tweetdeck for Twitter and Facebook
      

And there is my skeleton development installation sequence and checklist.

I hope this will help you.

I was very skeptical about Windows Vista, everything I read about it was rather negative. But being a good developer I just had to try... Here is my Vista story...

First I time tried to install this beast was on a respectable desktop PC, AMD 4600+, 1gig of RAM, 2x Geforce 6600 GT SLI (2x Screen Attached), Geforce 5200 (1x Screen attached), 200 Gig SATA II, SoundBlaster X-Fi, DVD-RW, DVD Combo, a Pinnacle PCTV analogue 550, a Logitech Webcam and a Logitech Cordless Desktop MX 5000 Laser (Bluetooth). All in all not a bad mobo. Well, installing Vista is easy and remarkably short. Everything when well until I had to install the drivers. Please note that all the driver I had found at the time where Beta except if mentioned otherwise. The first driver I installed was the Geforce drivers (RTM) that went rather well, then I installed the X-Fi (Beta) drivers. That's when all hell broke loose, the Geforce drivers would not initiate anymore if I re-installed the Geforce drivers, the X-Fi would not initiate, and forth and so on... Until Vista gave up and I could not boot anymore. So I gave up... That was Early February.

But I suppose I never learn, I saw an Acer laptop (Celeron based) running Vista Basic, and after having removed all the unnecessary junk that Acer loads, I was impressed by the operating system speed and usability. OK so many things have changed but was it worth a try? I have an HP Compaq laptop (Turion 64 based) and HP has all the RTM Vista drivers for it. So I launched myself and, after Ghosting the drive just in case, installed Vista Ultimate from scratch.

A week later, I have had 1 problem, and since I have not researched it I will not mention it yet. Otherwise, it's stable except for the Sleep and Hibernation modes. Those two keep crashing the OS. It fast enough, it's cool. But then again (even though I installed it) I have not used Visual Studio 2005 yet.

The fact is that most of my drivers work well and in particular my finger print reader works better with Vista.

I'll keep you updated, so far so good...