In the last two days I've received viruses over MSN messenger on two different occasions. Both times, they seemed to come from friends of mine. The first one was in the form of the following message and came with a simple link:

Vote for me:
http://22460.vasedrunjinsaterfuns.com/2215/67179/

At the time of this writing the link above still works and downloads a file called vote.zip. The file is not actually a ZIP archive, instead it's a simple Windows executable. Now, I don't know how people are supposed to be tricked into executing it, because simply double clicking it obviously won't do any damage, but maybe something to do with MSN users' habits of renaming .exe to .zip before sending them?

A scan of the file with the pretty good multi-engine scanner over at Virus Total found a Stration worm, which originated as an e-mail worm and is now apparently broadening it's infection horizon.

The second one was a little trickier, it actually managed to infect my boss and a co-worker of mine from whom I then received the following message, immediately followed by an incoming file request for images.zip:

Sup, seen the pictures from the other night?

A few things were obviously suspicious here:

• My friend just doesn't talk like that. As a matter of fact, few people use uppercase in IM nowadays and I think the last time somebody used "Sup" was last decade. (I may be wrong on the latter one though ...)
• The file was called images.zip yet contained only a single file. Nobody zips a single image because they can't be compressed anyway, and especially not one of some 40 kB.
• The "image" that was contained was called IMG34814.pif, with an extension that is more than suspicious, but might slip the eye of someone who hasn't been suspicious up until now.

I can hardly blame the average Joe for becoming infected with the second one, so the blame goes--*fanfare*--to Microsoft for two reasons.

1. Apparently, the current version of Windows Messenger is scriptable to an extent that is so obviously dangerous that I can't believe the functionality is still in there.

2. Despite Microsoft proclaiming Vista to be the most secure Windows ever, .pif files are still executed without warning.

The second point is especially grave for a number of reasons. Because of the nature of the PIF file format it does not contain any executable code but only meta information, so it could be easily be checked for authenticity. What's worse is that extremely few people have used .pif files ("program information files") after Windows 3.1, so either displaying a very obvious warning message or dropping the registration of the .pif extension altogether would not disrupt anyone.

If you want to disable .pif files on your system, you can use the following registry change to do so (or download this .reg file and double click it):

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.pif\(Default) = "piffile_disabled"

To be more precise, it doesn't suck everything. It just sucks certain messages into digital nirvana, notably the ones with links in them.

At some point in the last one or two days my MSN messenger started rejecting or simply eating messages when I sent out links to my friends. Sometimes I would get timeouts, sometimes it looked like the message was sent successfully but the recipient never got it.

Of course, at first I blamed my messenger software because I'm using the generally great Miranda instead of the highly annoying and way too colorful and animated Microsoft client. But a quick test showed that the messages get lost even with the official client.

I'm assuming it's either an anti-virus feature that Microsoft enabled (just yesterday I got a message from a friend--that he never sent--saying "vote for me" and containing a link that wanted me to download some file) or just an accidental feature that Microsoft enabled (a bug in marketing speech). If it's the first one, someone really didn't think very far, and if it's the second one, then I'm just baffled.

Either way, it strengthens my opinion that ICQ is just the better network. They've had some issues as well, especially with login stability, but messages are transmitted a lot more reliably. Obviously that doesn't help me because the rest of the world uses MSN. Yet another proof that the better product doesn't always win.

Announcing a new operating system as the "Best choice for laptops" is a pretty confident step given the last years of laptop history. I have seen few combinations of laptops and operating systems that worked properly in all situations, but I have seen many cases where mobility was greatly reduced due to bugs in the power management implementation. Especially with new systems the situation is usually a lot less stable than with older operating systems. Did Microsoft manage a surprising turnaround?

I tested Vista's power management thoroughly on my laptop and ran a quick test on my desktop machine. Here is my experience report.

Lenovo ThinkPad T60

Exactly because power management is such a difficult and hardware dependent topic let me state for the record that I'm using an up-to-date Lenovo ThinkPad T60. Some of the described issues may be and probably are at least partly due to Lenovo bugs. Nevertheless it will be interesting to see all the regressions since XP, which ran, slept, and resumed quite well on my machine.

Stand-by: One of the first things I noticed after installing Vista was the extended stand-by mode. No, I'm not talking about the new hybrid sleep mode, but about something that I call coma sleeping mode: hit the stand-by button and your computer sleeps--with a 1:4 chance for good. In some cases the only chance of getting it back to life is pressing the power button for a few seconds or removing the battery pack.

Another feature that I've come to like is the so-called backpack heater mode. It works like this: You're at the office, it's 7pm. You decide to go home and grab some dinner on the way, so you put your computer to sleep. You stuff it in your backpack and get going. Later that night (usually when you get home), you start unpacking your backpack and discover that it's quite warm. What happened? After a certain (random?) amount of time, Windows decided to wake up and hung during the attempt. Not only is this sudden wakeup a great idea when you're biking home and your laptop gets shaken around, it's also nice to discover that your battery is suddenly empty.

No updating of BIOS and drivers or changing of settings seemed to help make suspend mode anything close to usable. Don't get me wrong, though. Some things work, just not stand-by.

Hibernate: Hibernate is very reliable on my machine. It takes ages (maybe one minute) to actually write the entire state to the hard disk, but at least I lose no data. And the first phase of the wake-up, i.e. reading back the state from the disk, is quite fast. The second phase of the wake-up is not as convincing, though. It easily takes another 30 seconds to unlock the screen and often the fingerprint reader doesn't react at the first time.

Ironically, hibernate has become a little faster when I upgraded my RAM from 1 GB to 2 GB--a highly necessary step. There's more to write to the hard drive but the unlocking seems to go a little faster.

Unlock: Not strictly part of power management, it is still closely related because the computer is locked after resume from stand-by or hibernate. For example when you go on your lunch break, do you suspend your computer or do you just lock the screen? Hibernate is pretty much out of question and with a broken stand-by mode there's not much choice left. So you hit Win+L and leave your desk. So far so good.

The annoyance starts when you get back from your break. On Windows XP it was easy: Enter the password and start working. Occasionally, there were a few seconds delay caused by hard disk activity, but in general it was fine. Windows Vista doesn't just lock the screen; it suspends the current user session and displays the "Switch user" screen. With my initial 1 GB of RAM Vista would take up to a minute (!) to recover from a locked screen. The hard disk was going crazy and even the mouse wouldn't respond. Got back from your break? Go take another one.

Who's to blame for this? A new technology called SuperFetch. (You can read some interesting things about SuperFetch in an article called Why Does Vista Use All My Memory?.) I find the following excerpt from a Microsoft feature highlight very ironic:

"In previous versions of Windows, system responsiveness could be uneven. You may have experienced sluggish behaviour after booting your machine, after performing a fast user switch, or even after lunch."

If anything, SuperFetch made this effect worse on Vista! If you have 2 GB of RAM it's a little less severe but I'd take the old XP behavior back any day. This incredible delay is also great for security. I routinely used to lock my computer when I would go away from my desk, just because it's good practice. Since I installed Vista I simply stopped doing that, I just don't want to wait that long when I get back. The "Most secure Windows ever"? You be the judge.

USB and stand-by: When I was still trying to get the stand-by mode running I noticed some interesting behavior with USB devices. Unplugging the mouse after suspending the laptop just woke up the system again. And at least once my mouse didn't work anymore after the system resumed from stand-by. I had to unplug it and plug it again.

Screen blanking: Vista blacks out the screen after the computer has been idly running on battery for a while. Previous versions used to do that too, so nothing special about this. What's really annoying about it on my computer is that every time I touch a key and the screen comes back, the screen brightness drops to some medium default level and I have to turn up the brightness again to see something.

Desktop machine

The other day I installed Vista on a desktop PC that is maybe two years old, just to see how Vista performs on a desktop. So far it looks quite okay, but power management looks similarly broken.

When I send the computer into stand-by or hibernate mode, it seems to work, but as soon as the suspending process is complete, the system wakes up again, without any keyboard or mouse interaction at all.

A little bit of searching the web turned up a lot of other people who have similar problems and one resolution that seems to help for some of them: Uncheck the "Allow this device to wake the computer" box for certain devices (network adapter, keyboard, mouse) in the device manager.

In my case I needed to uncheck the function for both the HID Keyboard Device (a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000) and the HID-compliant mouse (a Logitech MX900 Bluetooth mouse).

Of course, this "fix" effectively ruins the comfort of being able to wake your computer without reaching the power switch under the table. Even installing the latest drivers from Microsoft and Logitech didn't help.

Bottom line

The rule that the latest operating system is the worst in terms of power management stands strong. While Microsoft had some innovative ideas (i.e. the hybrid sleep mode), the current state of power management in Vista is worse than XP in every respect.

I sincerely hope that the first service pack will take care of this, and that hardware manufacturers keep fixing the bugs on their side. It would be a shame if laptop users would have to wait for a second service pack to make the most basic and most required power management features usable.

Until then it's hibernating, waiting, and the occasional cursing at a computer that refuses to wake up from its nap.

For reference, here's a list of links to the other parts of my Vista review:

• Windows Vista: User interface (Part 1: The Good)
• Windows Vista: User interface (Part 2: The Bad)
• Windows Vista: User interface (Part 3: The So-so)
• Windows Vista (Part 4: Explorer)

If you think your Vista is too slow, be sure to try the following:

1. Make sure your computer has at least 2 GB of RAM and 20 GB of free hard drive space.

2. Get yourself a copy of VMware Workstation and install it.

3. Install Windows XP in your virtual machine.

There you go. Even faster than when you installed Windows XP on your old computer five years ago. ;-)

Imagine that there was a product that made its users so mad that they dedicate a lot of time to highlight its faults and share their pain with the rest of the world.

But there is! Here's only a small section of what you come across when you search the web for the magic words "Lotus Notes sucks":

• Lotus Notes Sucks: an entire website dedicated to poor users
• Survival of the unfittest: a look at how a bad piece of software can be so successfull
• Interface Hall of Shame: Lotus Notes

Let me finish my little Notes intermezzo with a quote I found on the first of the above sites, so that even if you've never been forced to use Lotus Notes yourself, you will be able to visually associate something with it:

"[Lotus Notes] is death by a thousand tiny annoyances--the digital equivalent of being kicked in the groin upon arrival at work every day."

Imagine a world where people would find information that other people wrote.

imagine a world where people would find information they wrote themselves five months ago.

Imagine a world where the word "usability" means more than the word "disportendbonnectnutaliates".

Imagine a world where people call their e-mails "e-mails" or "messages" like the rest of the world and not "memos".

Imagine a world where bits would be indivisible units and negative bits would not exist.

Imagine a world where people could switch to a different PC and their bookmarks and address book would still be there.

Imagine a world where people wouldn't have to care where their e-mails are located, what an archive is, or what the hell a replication policy is.

Imagine a world where people who receive e-mail from you would be able to make immediate sense of a forwarded e-mail.

Imagine a world where people could work on something else while their computer is busy working.

Imagine a world where people wouldn't have to think about the duration of their calendar entries before they open the window to enter the data.

Imagine a world where, if someone told their system once that their office is in Taiwan, it wouldn't constantly try to access data in the USA or Switzerland when it's available at a much higher speed locally.

Imagine a world where 0% doesn't mean 3/4 full.

Imagine a world where you could choose whether your e-mail client lets other people know if and when you read their message by ticking a checkbox instead of installing a highly complex script.

Imagine a world where there would be a fair choice for document management systems with some actual competition and where CIOs wouldn't have to say with a shrug of their shoulders: "Sorry, we have to stick with the system we chose twenty years ago; we can't switch because there's no way to import and export data."

That world has a name. It's the world without Lotus Notes.

Time to take a deeper look at the single Vista application that holds Windows together and that no one can avoid: Windows Explorer. I've already written a few things about its usability in part 2 of my Vista Review; in this article I'll cover the topic of stability and other misbehavior.

Stability

With Explorer being what 99% of Windows users perceive as "Windows" one would think that Microsoft puts considerable effort into making it stable and eradicate its well known bugs. Fat chance. Vista comes with the most unstable version of Explorer since ... well, since Explorer was invented. Not only did most Explorer bugs from XP safely make it into Vista. In the cozy environment of what seems to have been a poorly coordinated effort to make Explorer more usable they multiplied. Since I've installed Vista I don't think I've had two consecutive work days without Explorer crashing at least once. Let's look at a few occasions where Explorer regularly crashes:

• Opening folders: No kidding, but quite often all it takes to crash Explorer is open a folder, either by navigating to it or by typing a folder name into the Start|Run dialog. It especially (but not exclusively) happens when folders containing video folders are involved. And what's more is that the crashes are not strictly reproducible. The next time you navigate to the same folder it usually works.

• Doing nothing: Yes, Explorer can crash while you work on a Word document, develop in Visual Studio, or do something else that is completely unrelated. You notice it by the crash dialog that suddenly pops up. And before you can shout "Shoot! My Word/Visual Studio/whatever crashed!" you notice that it was "just" Explorer.

• Creating shortcuts: Creating links to programs or directories can either crash Explorer five times in a row, or just work. It's really a gamble, so if you're looking for an adrenaline kick, open a bunch of Explorer Windows, navigate them carefully to the locations you need for work and arrange them on the screen just the way you feel comfortable with. Now, create a few shortcuts on the desktop and pray.

• Creating new folders: The above game also works with creating folders. On several occasions I've seen Explorer hang after I tried to create new folders. At least once it recovered after a few minutes. But let's face it, who wants to wait for that long? So, what does the adept Windows user do? That's right: kill explorer.exe, submit an error report to Microsoft, and try again.

A bug named Methusalem

Many applications have learned to crash "gracefully". You restart them and within a few seconds you can get back to the state you were previously in and continue work. Not so with Explorer. While Windows is nice enough to automatically relaunch it for you, it doesn't let you get away that easily.

In the best of cases, after Explorer crashes, it slightly rearranges maybe four or five of your desktop icons and shortcuts (in a more or less consistent manner, so the cleanup becomes a habit after a few days). In the worst of cases Windows completely shuffles your desktop icons by rearranging them alphabetically or in some other seemingly random way.

There are some tools out there that can save and restore the location information of the Windows desktop icons (like Ultramon, which I have installed anyway), but even those don't seem to be able to correctly restore the order of the previously mentioned "slight rearrangement". After a few weeks even the toughest of the tough give up and accept that Vista has broken their will and ability to control the location of their desktop icons. A truly sad moment.

By the way, the desktop icons not only get "slighly rearranged" on such "rare" occasions like Explorer crashing, but also on such uncommon tasks like connecting or disconnecting a second monitor or projector, something that I do at least twice a day.

Remember when Windows 95 did the same thing after a system crash and we all thought "I'm sure Microsoft will fix that for the next Windows version"? Let's count: NT4, 98, Me, 2000, XP. That's over ten years of computer history. A strong candidate for the longest-lived software bug.

Leaks

A few years ago Microsoft added features to Explorer that allowed it to display file-specific attributes like author information or the length or format of media files. With the introduction of that mildly useful feature the problems started: Files were suddenly impossible to rename, move, or delete and USB storage devices became impossible to eject. The user was presented with messages like "File still in use" and "Please close all applications and try again". Of course, closing all applications didn't help because the only application that could have freed the files was Explorer--and Explorer had simply leaked the handles on those files.

The solutions to those problems reached from restarting Windows (entry-level) over killing and restarting explorer.exe (intermediate) to using the great Process Explorer from Sysinternals to selectively close the offending handles (advanced).

Vista has improved the situation a little bit, but, from my experience especially with MPEG files involved, handles are still leaked, making it impossible to eject USB hard disks and delete files.

Everyone who knows how file systems work and how file system inconsistencies come about inevitably aches when (s)he sees someone yank out a USB key without properly ejecting it first. But those people are not to blame. For one thing, Windows doesn't explain why people should eject the device first before unplugging it and what can happen if they don't.

For another, even people who know that they should eventually get discouraged by the fact that two out of three times, Windows complains that the device is still in use and therefore cannot be ejected. To be fair, Windows is not always at fault here, there are plenty of applications and Explorer extensions (like the otherwise awesome TortoiseSVN) that leak handles. But it is up to Microsoft to do something here. When disconnecting a USB key becomes a one-minute hunt for open handles the temptation to just yank it out becomes very big. And when's the last time you actually encountered file system inconsistencies on a USB device after just unplugging it? Never? Same here.

My suggestion: Take a practical approach like disabling write caching at least for USB keys altogether and get rid of the corresponding eject function. A lot less confusion and much better usability.

While we're back on the topic of usability, in Vista the bubble that popped up in the lower right corner under XP saying that the device can now be removed was replaced by this great dialog:

That's a clear step back that makes ejecting devices even more annoying because now you need yet another click to close the dialog box. It doesn't even automatically close when you physically unplug the USB key, something that would have been really easy to add.

Working efficiently

There are two other really annoying things about Vista Explorer. One of them is about as old as the icon shuffling habit I talked about before and just as annoying.

Assign keyboard shotcuts to certain programs using the properties of a shortcut is one of my favorite features. I prefer keyboard shortcuts to lengthy program searching in the start menu or even the quick launch bar. Unfortunately, Windows Explorer has had a bug since Windows 95 that makes this feature almost unusable. Once in a while (maybe in 10 to 20% of the cases), the launching of the program has an inexplicable delay of 5-10 seconds between the time when the user pressed the key combination and Explorer actually launches the program. During that time the CPU usage stays low but Explorer doesn't react anymore (that obviously includes the desktop and the task bar with its start menu) and all your left with is a quick break.

I use this feature to be able to work more efficiently but that bug reliably kills that goal. Over the years I have used different programs to overcome this problem. The best one I've found is the free AutoHotkey.

The last issue I want to mention is the way that the Vista Explorer handles network devices. Due to the omnipresence of Explorer components in many other areas (e.g. the open and save dialog boxes) not only Explorer windows are affected but all other applications that use the common dialogs. Here's what the File|Open dialog looks like in Notepad:

The dangerous part is the navigation pane on the left side. When I captured the above screenshot it took almost eight seconds for the dialog to come up. And why? Because I have some slow network devices mapped. Note, however, that the 'Computer' entry you can see wasn't even expanded by default. Yet, the network drives were apparently accessed, which blocked the entire application for several seconds. Luckily, the navigation pane can be disabled, which seems to alleviate the problem a little bit. But every so often the delay will still occur forcing the user to stare at a frozen screen and think about the consequences of his actions (in this instance, the action of installing Vista on his machine).

Bottom line

The more you work with Vista the clearer and shorter the bottom line gets: The Vista Explorer just sucks. There is not enough eye-candy in the world to make up for the stability and usability issues. If Microsoft wants to draw more and more novice users to the computer, they finally need to make the primary interface stable. That means: Provide a decent and efficient way of managing files (remember Norton Commander?), disconnect the desktop and start menu from the file manager, and make sure that each one of them is stable. The Explorer is beyond help or fixing and needs to be dumped.

It hurts to say because Vista has a number of nice features, but the Explorer is a reason by itself not to switch to Vista yet.

For reference, here's a list of links to the other parts of my Vista review:

• Windows Vista: User interface (Part 1: The Good)
• Windows Vista: User interface (Part 2: The Bad)
• Windows Vista: User interface (Part 3: The So-so)
• Windows Vista (Part 5: Power management)