Syntagma was recently 78,000 on Alexa — not a bad score given the number of sites out there.

Then, inexplicably, it started to rise. Up to 180,000.

Since I’ve switched to a Windows Vista machine with no Alexa toolbar it’s gone up to 325,282. Can this be my own doing for not supporting the number every time I go to the site?

No, Alexa is rubbish. Our traffic has risen enormously in the very months it’s gone from 78,000 to 325,000.

Why do we bother quoting these useless statistics?

It must be a quiet day for news when people start showing you pictures of their desks. It could be a lot worse, of course, so we shouldn’t complain. Duncan Riley did it yesterday, and I’ve seen any number around the blogosphere.

My excuse is that it’s been raining here for days so I can’t fulfil last week’s promise of pics taken along the Devon coast. I also get a bit twitchy when I can’t photograph anything. I know that sounds like an addiction but I call it Window-On-The-World Syndrome.

So, yes, here’s a snap of my desk in the Syntagma Towers’ office :

The box on the left is a Windows Vista machine, which I use nearly all the time now. On the right, is the old XP box. There’s still a lot of stuff left on it which I can’t move over : programs incompatible with Vista and mountains of Word and Excel documents.

Incidentally, I’ve discovered a good way of transferring material between computers without fitting a cable between them or burning a disk. Just put it in a Gmail attachment — you’re allowed up to 20MB now — and email it to yourself. Switch on the other computer, and there it is waiting for you. But I expect you knew that.

The boiling question of the day is, what does your desk say about you? Is it cluttered or uncluttered? And if you think that’s a silly inquiry, one business guru wrote an entire book about cluttered desks. I suppose it was a gap in the market.

In case you missed the first pic, here’s a wider shot showing a bit of context. Not much, but you can’t have everything :

But I’ve entertained you long enough …

We’ve had Windows Vista for a month now on brand new kit intended to replace our XP boxes here in the Syntagma office. Previous posts (here and here) described our initial experiences, so I won’t trawl through them again.

Although we still have our XP machines running alongside the new Vista boxes, the proportion of usage by time has swung massively in favour of Vista. We’re now using the V-machines for 90 percent of the time.

The exceptions are still jobs which require the printers, like accounts, stats and letters for Post Office delivery. None of our printers will work with Vista, so we’ll be replacing them very soon.

Everything else is now happily done on the much faster, number-crunching, new computers. Of course, we’d switched a lot of stuff online before moving over : all email is now done on Gmail — a huge relief on new computers — and much else too. I’ve even taken to using Google Documents for smaller jobs, but can’t quite get myself to use the spreadsheets, especially as we now have Office 2007 Excel working on Vista.

Thankfully, our desk-top-publishing program works seamlessly on Vista, but not the image-handling one. As a temporary measure I’ve been using the Office image software bundled with Windows itself. It works so well, I’ll probably stick with it for the duration.

Apart from that, the increase in performance is so good, we stifle a groan every time we have to use the XP machines.

I know a number of our readers are looking for new computers with XP pre-installed, as they don’t trust Vista yet. Let me tell you, put your doubts aside. Get as much as you can online — Google is a blessing here, buy new printers, tweak your internet connection, and you won’t look back.

Be aware, though, that the “Protection Mode”, which is the default setting for Vista, may have to be temporarily shut down while you add new stuff or get your broadband connectivity working. Thereafter, it’s surprising how quickly you will adapt to the loss af admin powers, which is what it effectively does.

Syntagma’s Advice? Go for Windows Vista now. There’s nothing to keep you on XP but your fear of the unknown.

After converting the office in one go to an entirely Windows Vista and Office 2007 environment, we are now starting to run into compatibility issues.

Some of our bedrock programs simply won’t run on Vista at all. The alternatives are to search out new versions which do — and go through yet more learning curves — or run our XP machines alongside the Vista boxes. The latter is what we’re doing, despite the huge increase in desk space required.

Even more seriously, none of our printers work with the new Windows either, and we can’t find updated drivers on the net. This means using the XP boxes for all paperwork — less now than it used to be, but still substantial.

Ultimately, we’re going to have to upgrade our printers too, but not yet. There’s no guarantee that machines currently in the stores will have Vista compatibility at present.

So we’re stuck here in a curious hybrid situation, with humming boxes and hundreds of cables perched and strewn everywhere. To combat “electronic smog” we’ve imported lots of spider plants (very good apparently), and are considering ionizing machines as well.

By the time we’ve finished, there may not be room for humans at all. Probably just as well.

Who says new technology gives “greater convenience”?

Mind how you go.

With news that Microsoft will no longer ship Windows XP by the end of the year, the pressure is on to get Windows Vista on an even keel.

Yesterday we replaced all our XP-based computers with brand new Vista ones. So, how’s the “experience” going?

Like all software projects it’s a bit of a curate’s egg. The good bits are very, very good, the bad bits, horrible.

First off, it’s over-engineered, as I knew it would be after writing about it for two years. I’ve long made my peace with XP, even its dodgy bits, like USB handling — there seem to be two conflicting systems at work as soon as you add new hardware through USB ports. On XP, I’ve arranged for all files and folders to be available from the desktop through shortcuts and know where to find anything I want.

In Vista they’ve tried to make it fashionably intuitive, so nothing can be found — unless, of course, you have an abundance of intuition (guesswork), and even then I doubt it’s that easy. Jim Allchin was dead right back in 2004 to scrap the Vista project as it stood, put aside the new file handling system, and rewrite the basic code around a kernel, a bit like Linux.

However, to my mind, it’s still too darned clever by half. It’s the product of geeks coding for geeks, but trying to make it easy for the hoi-polloi, like me.

I should point out that I’ve only been at it for around three hours, and we’re currently running the XP systems alongside the Vista boxes.

Worryingly, BT broadband has no new software discs for Vista, which is odd, especially as it took me six hours to get XP working on their new 8Mbs service. By the time I’d cleared off all the childish Yahoo material they showered onto our office computers — fuming with murderous intent — I’d damaged the registers and had to start again.

Unbelievably, I now have to do the same all over for Vista, even using the old disc. Why don’t these prize boobies realize that usability is more important than features?

I also had to turn off the main protection feature of Windows Vista, the User Account system, in order to get the broadband disc even to begin. The disc couldn’t see any admin powers with which to set the thing up. This, of course, is deliberately intended to stop enemy attacks — preventing intruders from scooping up admin powers. Trouble is, it also stops you doing the things that computers are meant to do, like making changes, improving settings etc. Each time I attempt to do anything beyond clicking on programs, the defence system asks me to override the defence. Crazy, or what? By turning off User Account protection, I can now do anything I want, but have dumped Vista’s main line of defence.

I expect I’ll turn it on again once I’ve wrestled the BT software into submission, opened up the computer to an avalanche of malicious grungeware, and become a nervous wreck. Come to think of it, I may have succeeded in that already.

Now some plus points : the computer manufacturer (MESH) has added some extra USB ports on the front of the box, and they work brilliantly. Both my flash memory pod and my digicam card reader worked so smoothly they might have been soaked in baby oil.

I might just get used to this — when I’ve gone through the learning curve, got online and remembered all my passwords for the Web-as-computer stuff.

Update : My query to British Telecom (BT) about the old broadband disc has resulted in a phone call informing me that there is no disc currently available for setting up their broadband service for Windows Vista computers. Inexplicable.

The call came from a foreign call centre and was delivered in an impenetrable accent so that the woman caller had to spell out each word out using a system of pronunciation completely unknown to me. By using a great deal of imagination I finally got the gist of my username and new password. I am soon to receive an email explaining how to get the software for Vista connection to BT’s broadband service — some sort of hasty workaround, I think. It just gets better and better.

Update : I take it all back. While I was waiting for the clunky BT software to take effect, Vista had done it all for me. I was online all the time without knowing it. Ah well, I was never cut out to be a geek.

I’m now enjoying the Vista experience enormously. OFFICIAL.