Martin Heller
Contributing Writer

Not quite a Wow

analysis
Mar 16, 20072 mins

I took my 13-year-old daughter with me to Staples last Saturday to pick up a few office supplies. While we were there, I looked at the computers on display: I wanted to check to see if Windows Vista Home Premium can connect to a VPN. Yes, it can, as it turns out. I have Vista running at my office for compatibility testing, but only two editions: Ultimate and Business. Vista Ultimate runs on an old Compaq Presari

I took my 13-year-old daughter with me to Staples last Saturday to pick up a few office supplies. While we were there, I looked at the computers on display: I wanted to check to see if Windows Vista Home Premium can connect to a VPN. Yes, it can, as it turns out.

I have Vista running at my office for compatibility testing, but only two editions: Ultimate and Business. Vista Ultimate runs on an old Compaq Presario that I upgraded last year to have enough RAM; Vista Business runs in a Virtual PC. Neither configuration supports the Windows Aero interface: neither the old NVIDIA GeForce2 video card on the Presario nor the emulated S3 Trio in Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 is good enough. For more information about when Windows Vista enables Aero, see this Microsoft white paper.

My daughter had already played with Vista Ultimate at the office. Literally. “What’s this Purple Place game? Yuck!” This visit to Staples was the first time she’d seen Aero, however, so I showed her the cool stuff: I pressed WIN-TAB and showed her the Flip 3D mode window chooser, and I dragged an application Window around on the desktop and pointed out how the background showed up through the “glass” window border.

I was waiting for the “Wow!” I didn’t quite get it.

“Is that it?”

“Yes, that’s it.”

“Big whoop.”

Martin Heller

Martin Heller is a contributing writer at InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from his office in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2010. From 2010 to August of 2012, Martin was vice president of technology and education at Alpha Software. From March 2013 to January 2014, he was chairman of Tubifi, maker of a cloud-based video editor, having previously served as CEO.

Martin is the author or co-author of nearly a dozen PC software packages and half a dozen Web applications. He is also the author of several books on Windows programming. As a consultant, Martin has worked with companies of all sizes to design, develop, improve, and/or debug Windows, web, and database applications, and has performed strategic business consulting for high-tech corporations ranging from tiny to Fortune 100 and from local to multinational.

Martin’s specialties include programming languages C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and SQL, and databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase. He writes about software development, data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning, contributing technology analyses, explainers, how-to articles, and hands-on reviews of software development tools, data platforms, AI models, machine learning libraries, and much more.

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