Escape from Vista Hell

My attempt to migrate 8 Windows 2000 workstations to new Dell Vista PC's was harrowing. I spent 4 days almost around the clock doing something that should have taken about 8 hours. If you are interested, this is my story: http://darkbrownhole.blogspot.com/2007/02/42-hours-of-vista.html

I upgraded both my desktop to vista within 2 hours back in Feb. Setup, Config, settings, everything. I had zero problem with vista. Even the nvidia drivers worked. The only hiccup was with dell who took their time in sending the express upgrade.

I was recently on a cruise in the eastern Med on Princess Cruise lines, and during on of the evening production shows, the dancers were all dancing and singing with a video playing against the back of the stage (really big), then all of a sudden every one in the audiance got to watch Vista spontaneously reboot. Seems rather unreliable that it can't play videos without rebooting. Seems like the world is a much more unreliable place with Vista, I don't remember seeing this sort of thing in years. Hopefully they haven't upgraded the navigation computers to Vista.

I am currently experiencing a similar problem with a Dell GX280 business class desktop. The system has SCSI hard drives running off of an Adaptec 39160 controller. Sometimes when I am working in Photoshop and heavy disk IO is being performed, the entire system will slow to a crawl and eventually become unresponsive. After about 30 seconds it will just reboot and pretend nothing ever happened. I have tried updating drivers with no luck. Prior to my fresh install of Visa Business I ran XP with no problems for three years. I am an IT Director of a 2500 user company and I am not going to let my department waste time even considering Vista until SP1 is available for it.

I installed Vista in my HP nc6400 notebook and it's working without issues. The drivers I downloaded are very stable. At least, in my experience and many of my customers, Vista has been better than XP. BTW, all were clean installations.

Jeez, not thst the problems with Vista are not valid, but what new MS OS has NOT had similar challenges? 3, 3.1, Windows, Windows 98, ME (gag!), 2000, etc. Valid complaints, are, umm, valid, but keep it in perspective guys. MS is MS and the success of their business model gives them no reason to change.

Good point from Ron.
Of course, we're all free to change anytime.

As an IT Director myself, I have to say the business value is not there. Windows and Active Directory is like a bucket of bolts. Really not much better than Windows NT from a management perspective. This fabulous directory product -- that doesn't do very much out of the box. Example: The "computer management" plugin - does it have anywhere the ability to tell you who is logged in to the PC? No. The most basic stuff about managing a network is completely missing.

Well I never had problems with my upgrades to Win95,98,98SE,2000 & XP. But my upgrade to Vista is like running a marathon in hell. Lots of sweat, some tears and a very sore head from banging it on the wall. Once running (slowly) (system Quad 6800, 4 GB, 750 SATA 3G, Asus 8800 GTX video, ASus Striker Extreme MB) so it is all top notch hardware. The system runs good until I need to get in Windows Explorer, then there is a 20-30 delay then it comes up. Click on a folder and the delay again. Turned off Raid, no change. Had a dual boot with on a second 750 GB drive. Using XP at the moment while waiting for MS to get their act together. By the way it was Vista Ultimate I installed.

well MS Windows Vista is headed the same direction Windows ME went / straight to the Garbage can and Microsoft knows it is a Crap~Tastic OS they just wont publicly admit it yet

JayR Cela

Gates gets away with this kind of crap because he doesn't care about the end user, only their money.

Let me get this straight. The guy is having a problem with iTunes on his PC and he and you automatically assume the problem is with Vista?

Listen carefully:

GET THAT APPLE CRAP OFF YOUR PC.

Get rid of Quick Time, get rid of iTunes, get rid of ANYTHING that came from Apple. They are ALL trouble on a PC.

I am speaking from personal experience, which has been a BAD experience with Apple crap on my PC.

Dave H.

Vista == DOS 4 reloaded.

My Vista Ultimate installation keeps crashing out and its problem solver says it's my RAM. I've run 3 different memory checkers for over 8 hours each writing to the memory and doing every check on the planet and they all come back with zero errors. It seems like running any video applications or graphics applications too much will cause it to BSOD, lockup or re-boot on it's own. It also crashes if you let it go into screen saver with IE open or any graphics program still on screen, if you minimize everything and click on the blank background it usually won't crash. Now, how do you explain that to your employees if we were to downgrade to Vista??

After my first installation of Ultimate Vista, any sound would make the PC crash. Then I had hardware failure issue and reinstalled Vista. For the most part the second installation was somewhat better, except that playing videos crashed the OS. Then it lost my user profile, so another reinstallation, this time with on-board sound. My Pinnacle HD USB TV tuner plays in low-rez mode, MPEG1 videos won't play at all. Some things are better but overall not much difference. Using EVGA Nvidia motherboard and 8600 GTS video, 2GB ram

Sigh...

I've had this tussle with Cringe before, and as usual, his mind is like a steel trap - nothing gets in...

Lemme get this straight. After a Dell DRIVER UPGRADE, the RAID ran properly...?

One more time: Microsoft doesn't write drivers - that's for the hardware manufacturers to do. Microsoft writes (primarily, oh anal ones) OPERATING SYSTEMS with a published set of specs on HOW to write drivers for it. If DELL took their sweet time in providing a solution, then perhaps we need to lay the blame where it belongs...?

"I'm just tired of the iPhone fanboys shooting huge sticky wads and high-fiving each other (literally) over their stupid cellphones."

"GET THAT APPLE CRAP OFF YOUR PC."

Oh, please. Even diehard PC magazine editors are admitting finally that Apple computers are now far superior to anything the Windoz world has to offer. The price points are coming down and Apple's share of market is increasing.

I've seen this "crap's" stock rise from $13.40 a share when I bought it to $120 a share today.

Jimmer - would you like Cringley to listen to you?

Dell doesn't write drivers; Dell builds PCs (decent machines in my experience). Intel is the other 800 pound gorilla, and Intel does write drivers, including these. As a near duopoly, MS and Intel have responsibility to make their products work together. We can blame anyone else (including Apple or Dell) but only Wintel can do anything about it. In this case, since the existing Intel drivers were industry standard and on the MS HCL, I have to agree with Cringley.