After six years of living in Bethlehem, PA, USA, I am moving away. I have accepted a job as business consultant in Berlin, Germany. I will remain a Ph.D. Candidate here at Lehigh University as I will finish up my degree over the next two years.

My girlfriend and I are moving together. We are both extremely excited and are looking forward to our new life in Berlin.

This move is keeping me quite busy right now, so updates to my blog, forums and RibbonCustomizer will be sparse over the next few weeks. When I find some time, I will work on adding macro functionality to RibbonCustomizer though. I have parts of that already implemented.

Back to the move. The packers are coming tomorrow…

(Scroll down for English)

RibbonCustomizer V1.1 ist nun auch in Deutsch erhältlich! Sollten Sie eine deutsche Version von Office 2007 installiert haben, dann wird RibbonCustomizer automatisch in Deutsch für Sie erscheinen. Ansonsten ist das Programm wie bisher nur in Englisch. Das Setupprogramm und die gesamte Dokumentation sind allerdings vollständig in Englisch. pschmid.net Ltd. bietet jedoch kostenlosen technischen Support in Deutsch und Englisch an.

Falls Sie bereits V1.1 von RibbonCustomizer installiert haben, dann entfernen Sie diese Version bevor Sie die neueste V1.1 (1.1.2691.28115) einspielen. Falls Sie kein Interesse an der deutschen Benutzeroberflächensprache haben und bereits V1.1 verwenden, besteht kein Grund diese neue Version zu installieren.

V1.1 mit deutscher Sprachunterstützung herunterladen (englische Webseite)

Parallel zur Verfügbarkeit in Deutsch ist nun auch eine dt. Übersichtsseite für RibbonCustomizer verfügbar. Diese Seite kann bequem via http://ribboncustomizer.de aufgerufen werden. Die englische Übersichtsseite ist äquivalent direkt via http://ribboncustomizer.com aufrufbar.

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RibbonCustomizer V1.1 is now available in German! If you use a German Office 2007, then RibbonCustomizer will automatically appear in German for you. Otherwise, the program is in English as before. The setup program and the entire documentation are only available in English though. pschmid.net Ltd., however, offers free technical support in English and German.

If you have already V1.1 of RibbonCustomizer installed, then please remove this version before you install the newest V1.1 (1.1.2691.28115). If you have no interest in the German UI language and are already using V1.1, then there is no reason to install this new version.

Download V1.1 with German language support

Parallel to this, there is now also a German overview website for RibbonCustomizer. You can get to this page easily via http://ribboncustomizer.de. Equivalently, the English overview page can be reached directly via http://ribboncustomizer.com.

RibbonCustomizer V1.1 will soon be available in German. The program has already been translated completely into German and is undergoing testing in German currently. The German Customize Ribbon dialog will look similar to what you can see in this screenshot:

How will you be able to switch RibbonCustomizer between English and German? You won’t and don’t have to. RibbonCustomizer will automatically use the same language as your Office User Interface. That means, if your User Interface language is German, RibbonCustomizer will be in German. Otherwise, it will be in English.

In case you didn’t know: Support for RibbonCustomizer is available in English and German. Even though this entire website is in English, I do speak German as well (German is actually my native language).

Besides adding German as UI language, I have also started working on V1.2. As previously announced, I will make frequent beta builds of V1.2 available. Please keep in mind though that beta builds are inherently unstable and have not undergone significant testing. I will try to make sure that the beta builds won’t crash right away, but I can’t guarantee anything. If you want a stable and reliable RibbonCustomizer, please stay with V1.1.

I posted the first beta build (1.2.2686.6056) on the beta program page today. This build already features the German UI language. If you only want RibbonCustomizer in German, please wait till V1.1 will be released with that. The first new feature in this beta build is that you can edit tab labels of Microsoft tabs.

Lastly, I wanted to point out that you can become an affiliate of pschmid.net Ltd. As affiliate, you offer RibbonCustomizer on your website and receive a commission whenever someone buys it via your site. The work for you is minimal (mainly place a link on your site) and you will not be responsible for support, but at the same time you can earn some money. If you are interested, please check our the Affiliate page.

I am still not fully back installed on my tablet after upgrading it to Vista, but I am slowly getting there. My tablet has always been on the slower size performance wise (despite 1.25 GB of RAM and a rather new 100 GB HDD). So I figured, I’ll give ReadyBoost a try. Unfortunately, none of my current USB sticks were fast enough for ReadyBoost. NewEgg however offers a 4 GB ReadyBoost-able USB stick for $36.99. The price made me decide to give it a shot. The drive came today and it is barely ReadyBoost-able. It actually took me several tests to get Vista to offer ReadyBoost as a choice for it. When it eventually did, I just allocated the entire drive to ReadyBoost.

My first impression is that my tablet seems to be more responsive now…I tried to find any information in the Task Manager telling me how Vista is using ReadyBoost. Unfortunately, there is nothing there. When I opened the Resource Manager though, I found the activity information for the ReadyBoost cache file in the Disk section. The stick has a response time of 350 to 450 ms there. I think it was a pretty good investment and hopefully this will give my tablet quite a boost when it is plugged in.

Unbelievably though, I am starting to slowly like Vista.

Update: It seems that Vista needed some time to first move stuff to the stick. The response times I now see in the resource manager are very low (right now 7 ms) and mostly below 50 ms.

I decided that it was finally time to move one of my two machines to Vista. My tablet, an Acer TravelMate C300, ended up being the victim. That particular tablet is not officially Vista-compliant, but fellow MVP Robert Sparnaaij told me during the MVP Summit that he had Vista working just fine on this particular model. So I decided to give it a shot…

The Vista Ultimate Upgrade DVD arrived Wednesday and I immediately tried upgrading my tablet. Unfortunately, the upgrade failed several hours into it and my XP got restored. I went once more through the Vista Upgrade Advisor, this time removing everything that was only listed as minor issue. Unfortunately, the upgrade failed once again after several hours with the extremely informative error message: “Windows could not configure one or more system components“. With Google’s help, I figured out that the system component in question was Windows XP’s Internet Information Service (IIS) installed due to Visual Studio 2005 being on the machine. I also found the cryptic setup error log due to Google at C:\$WINDOWS.~BT\Sources\Panther\setuperr.log. The log didn’t help at all, so I removed IIS and tried my luck with the upgrade again. This time, it went through.

Everything seemed to be fine after the upgrade…except Windows Update wasn’t working (error code 80072EFD). I went through the steps suggested in help, disabled my firewall, tried everything in the linked Knowledge Base Article, and eventually gave up and called Microsoft Support. Two calls (each 1.5 - 2 hrs), two days later and two Indian support specialists later, it came down to either installing another Vista upgrade on my current Vista installation, or wiping the hard drive and reinstalling everything. I decided to go with formatting, because while MS Support was trying to get Windows Update to work, I had discovered that my Offline Files didn’t get upgraded correctly to Vista: My Documents folder is redirected to a network share on my desktop, which automatically makes all subfolders and files of the My Documents folder available offline. Unfortunately, after the upgrade, only half of my files were actually being kept offline and I found no way to reset the Offline Files setting for that folder and force Vista to recreate it (changing the Documents folder back to a local folder didn’t help, nor did the suggestion by an MS support specialist to boot Vista in safe mode).

As I had gotten an Upgrade edition of Vista, I couldn’t just boot from the DVD and format the hard drive from setup. Instead, after backing up the few things that weren’t already on my desktop, I formatted my hard drive with an XP installation, and then did a customized Upgrade to Vista (clean install, but the current Windows folder gets renamed into Windows.old). 24 hours later, I have a working Vista on my tablet (with working Windows Update) and my Documents folder is kept fully offline as well. My 2 GB of IMAP emails are still downloading and I am probably only 25% done with reinstalling all my programs.

I know one thing for sure: My desktop will not be a straight upgrade from XP to Vista. That means, it’ll probably be running XP for at least another year…

Edit: I am actually impressed now with the Microsoft Support based in India. The manager of the two support technicians just gave me a call to find out how I was doing and how good the support I received was. I spent 20 mins on the phone with him and he promised that if I had any further issues, I could contact him directly and he would get his best technician to help me with them. That is actually very impressive for free consumer support (free within 90 days of the Vista activation).