Vista: My Story

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So, my PC at work had finally crawled to a snail's pace with all the different bits and pieces I need to run on it. Moan, moan, moan. Okay, says the boss: there's a new Dell over there in that box - it's yours. Whheee-heee. Carry it across to my desk. Scowls from colleagues. Jealous, huh? Just 'cos I get to try out the new goodies before they do...

Plugged all the cables in, well, nearly all. No serial port.. hmmm. And no PS/2 port? What? Oh well..... Added the 256MB graphics card - nice.

Pressed 'On' and watched all the pretty lights and progress bars........ As it booted into Vista! (Eventually - and waited for it to download 20-odd updates and install them as well....) Ah, that is, I watched it on ONE screen - my other monitor stayed a rather disturbing shade of black. Oh dear. Nothing on the nVidia utility or Device Manager about the onboard graphics. Windows update for new graphics driver. No improvement.

Sh1t! Is the onboard graphics the problem?

Restarted and checked BIOS, nothing mentions the onboard graphics....(why is it OEM's like Dell insist on allowing virtually nothing to be altered in their BIOS?).

Turned off, pulled out the monitor cable to the card, and switched back on: started on the previously blank monitor, from onboard video chip - but stopped with a warning about the wrong graphics - fair enough, but at least I know the onboard graphics and the monitor are okay.

Shutdown and reattached other cable and rebooted. Still one monitor. Device manager lists only one adapter - the card, not the onboard graphics. Off to nVidia site for latest driver - installed it, but still no good.

Hmmm. Right, try fitting a second graphics card - have an ati one to spare. Start up -> BSOD. Oh feck!

Shutdown, remove ati card and start again. It won't. And the system repair won't work either. Oh feck oh feck oh triple sodding feck! Give machine a hard intimidating stare. Tell it I know people, bad people. People this machine really doesn't ever want to meet. Now behave!

Endless loop of nothingness. I shed invisible tears. Workmates are looking at me, laughing. This is not a good day.

Finally find Dell install disk and start again. Much, much slower install than off the hard drive. Back to Vista. Ah, only a sort of Vista, half of the drivers are missing. Find second Dell disk with drivers on. It is a complete junk program, asking me to press buttons to install drivers, but no buttons are there! Do it manually. Eventually have a network connection, and another 24 Vista upgrades to download and install.

Look at the clock: this has now taken 4 hours. Definitely not a good day. Back to one working monitor. So: Vista?! Pretty. Try a few things. They don't work. No TELNET???!!!!!!!! They've released an OS with no TELNET???!!!!!!!! Hmmm. And everything else is in a different place. Can't find anything. Simple things, like folder views, everything is somewhere else. This is like learning a brand new OS. Even linux conforms more to industry standards than this. Oh sh1t... my productivity slows to a pace slower than with the old PC as I have to learn everything all over again. More utilities refuse to work..... AWWWW FFFEEEEECCCCKKKKK!!!!!!

Boss walks over. 'Pretty!'
Me 'Yeah'
Boss 'Now try this,' handing me Office 2007 cd

Another hour passes........

Start up Excel. Oh. Errm.... What? Where's everything gone? It's all different. Oh no..... not again.

Productivity falls to near zero. Manage to get an hours work done. Oh well.

Pretty? Absolutely!
Useful? Biggest pile of junk I've ever had to deal with. Linux is easier. And how long did this take after XP? How long has it been out? Dear, oh dear, oh dear......

 

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I must be lucky then, my mum just got a dell laptop with vista preloaded, with all of the stories I was hearing, I thought I was going to have a rough time with, but so far touchwood no problems. I'm actually starting to quite like vista, even though I've only used it a couple of times on my mum's laptop. The UAC is a little bit of a pain when trying to do stuff, but it only adds one click to the installation of anything, which is a blessing because my mum and her fiance are not that hot with computers and ended up doing all sorts of stuff to the desktop which I'm going to liberate from them soon and rip it to bits to do my A+

 

For work I would never use vista, at least not now. However for home, I like it. I have no driver issues, all the programs that I use work well and are supported by vista.

The only thing that gives me issues is Transcode360. It's an app that basically transcodes any xvid file to wma on the fly while you are watching it on your xbox 360.

 

No, I mean no telnet (As in from run.. telnet x.x.x.x) - had to install puTTy. What? Do you mean no hyperterminal either? Oh feck it... The URL you posted is for private not business use so far as I could see, but thanks anyway. Guess what I'll be searching for on Monday

The major argument against moving from MS to linux all these years, has been the cost of user retraining. Given my experience so far, methinks that the move to vista and office 2007 is so huge that re-training costs won't be that different....

 

And I still have only one monitor working!

 

Dunno either then: didn't work for me. Someone at work with a laptop (vista preinstalled) has same experience with telnet as me though. Odd. Oh well..

Found out about the dual-monitor thing though: it will never work unless the two chipsets use the identical graphics driver (link from MS). Now that really fecks me up. And I thought the boss was doing me a favour letting me be the 'guinea pig'

 

Telnet is there, it is simply not installed by default. You have to add it as an optional component.
It's in vista's equivallent of Add / Remove Windows Components.

 

Ahh. Thanks. Errm I guess that means I'll have to spend an hour or two finding out where that's hidden now (No, don't tell me, I like (some) surprises...)

(Lesson learned: beware of geeks bearing gifts)

 

everytime i see a dell base unit for me it's more like grumble...grumble...cheap piece of cr*p...grumble....grumble. they just continuously keep dying and more hassle than they're worth and one of the reasons why i'm changing jobs.

grim

 

One of the reasons why I'm liking thin client computing more and more, users can't break anything and nothing much can go wrong with thin clients

 

MacAllan,

One of the guys I work uses Vista daily because he has to make sure our desktop app that we sell in addition to our web services will run on it. He's always complaining about Vista. He absolutely hates it. He'd trash it if he didn't need it for testing, and he's been using it now for around 8 or 9 months. He will be logged in as one user, need to switch to another user, and the entire machine will lock up as soon as he logs in as the second user and tries to open an app. All he can do is hit the power switch and hold it until the machine powers off once it locks up. When that happens he's lost all the work he had open as the original user.

The machine has 2 gigs of ram and an Intel dual core cpu so it's not like it's starved for memory or horsepower either. I could see it if he was running less than a gig of memory and/or on old hardware, but he's not. From what I've seen of Vista from his struggles with it, it's junk.

 

I've been using Vista for a while now and I'm both impressed and annoyed with the product. Without a doubt Microsoft has compromised a lot with this OS and most of the ground breaking features they promised got kicked to the curb.

At first glance everything seems new but a closer look reveals very little which would tempt paying customers to upgrade from Windows XP. In my opinion it certainly doesn't deliver enough to be good value for money.

I have to say the full system backup and restore is a welcome introduction but not including it as a standard feature seems wrong. Essentially they want you to pay the upgrade fee for an OS almost identical to what you already owe. If you want most of the new features or improvements then prepare to folk out more on the more expensive Edition.

Performance wise you will notice a drop compared to Windows XP on the same system. However most of this can be clawed back by disabling the Aero interface features. I've had no driver issues, and I'm using a dual monitor setup without any problems. However stability is an issue especially when working with Internet Explorer or Media Player. Hopefully this will be fixed in SP1 but that's a poor excuse for those early adopters who coughed up the dough several months ago.

Ultimately I try not to think too much about the six years of research and development because if you compare the time it took to produce against the improvements and features you're left wondering what they hell they were doing all that time. Just to put this in perspective I have to mention something which I have a real love hate relationship with - Linux. Compare the last six years of development on Ubuntu or Suse and you'll see huge leaps forward in a whole range of areas which make the MS boys look like fools. Not such leaps coming from the Microsoft camp with this new release.

 

That's for sure. You can see more advancement in the entire Linux world in the last 2 years than you can see between XP and Vista. Ubuntu, and others, put out releases every 6 months that show at least as much advancement between releases, and with fewer bugs. MS's development pace is at a crawl.

 

I'd love to know how you set up dual monitors: even the MS website says it's not possible unless both graphics chips are using the same driver. With an intel onboard chip and an nVidia card, so far as I can see it isn't possible. Is there a way round this?

I think the thing that has surprised me the most, given the amount of R&D MS have thrown at it, is how unintuitive it is to use for users who are familiar with older versions of Windows. They try so hard to hand-hold all the time, they forget sometimes we just want to get on with it. It's the same psychology that brought us the god-awful office talking paperclip. They just can't leave alone sometimes....

 

I expected, after the wait, that Vista would be the linux-killer. I think the opposite is now the truth. Maybe it's different for home users who want all the Media stuff, but for business users, if they're going to have to spend so much time re-learning everything they knew, why do so with such a bloated monster? If I compare recent installs from scratch of vista vs debian etch, etch wins hands down.

 

I agree. Etch is a very good OS. What's coming down the pike from Debian is even better though. I run Sid on my desktop and even though it's only been a few months since Etch has been released Sid is quite an improvement on Etch. Lenny is going to be very nice indeed.

 

MacAllan my nvidia card has two DVI output ports so it is using the same driver. I haven't tried it with dual cards.