Vista Horror Stories

Story #1
Here's the story about the first computer. I had a machine with Vista Business on it and we needed to use the computer to image a drive with Windows XP. So I turned off the computer. The computer looks like it is off. The power lights are off, the fans aren't moving. Must be off you would think. I unplug the hard drive and hook another hard drive in there. I put in the boot key (so we can put XP on it when it boots) and press the power button. I am greeted with a Vista screen saying it is resuming from HIBERNATION! Then it has the audacity to give me an error that it can't resume properly... might have something to do with that blank hard drive in there huh? Now I know that if you click the red button on the start menu that it will hibernate, but that wasn't what we do. We click the arrow next to it and choose shut down. Every time we do this the computer actually goes into hibernation instead of turning off. How retarded is that?

Story #2
Alright this is a horrible thing I had to deal with today. First we get an order for a computer to get Vista Ultimate, but the problem is that it doesn't have a DVD drive in it, only a CD Drive. Plus its using one of those Intel JOE boards which doesn't have PS2 ports on it. OK I can handle that. I get Vista on there and boot it up and go to install the drivers for the board. Well it can't read the CD because its a DVD this time. So turn it off and hook up a DVD drive. OK now we can install the drivers! NO! The install fails twice for no apparent reason. On a restart it is supposed to resume the install but it doesn't. I finally get it to finish but then it says it couldn't install 2 things. So I go and manually install them. Now it says everything is installed... great.

Turn off the PC and take the drive out and hook the other one back up. Turn it back on and get all the other stuff installed. I figure I'm done and send it on to the next phase. Then the bad stuff happens. There's a flag in the Device Manager for a "Simple Communications Controller" which we know to be Intel's Serial Over LAN device. So put the driver CD back in but... whoops! no DVD drive anymore. <--- this is actually a fault of the numbnuts who ordered the computer but whatever.

OK so step2, let's go onto the file server to install it. A half hour later (for some reason Vista is insanely slow over the network) we get the install rolling and it completes like normal. But the flag is still there. OK I know what it is so I... uh... wrote a driver to make it go away....

>_>
<_<

Right well that's all fixed now ^_^ so to figure out why the sound doesn't work. Well Vista decided that the onboard sound was better and that the X-FI card wasn't cool and made sound only come out the onbaord sound. So let's reboot into the BIOS and disable the onboard sound! Great idea we had! Oh but as the computer was rebooting it decided to install some updates. I had since handed this project off to someone else at this point and he didn't want to wait for the updates. So he hit the reset button and yelled "I WIN!" and went into the BIOS and made the changes. Booting back up he was greeted by the infamous "Vista is broken" message. WTF! Then he passed this POS back to me (which is weird because we also make REAL POS machines but this wasn't one of them) and said to try out safe mode. He had enough of this nonsense and went to watch videos on break.com... Couldn't blame him really. So I try out safe mode.

You ever go into safe mode before? You know how it lists off all the stuff it loads on the screen before it gets there? Well it was doing this with such a huge delay you could see it putting in the lines character by character... So I guess the lesson here kids is to not turn off the computer when Windows is doing updates. Eight minutes later it was reimaged but I have to reinstall everything tomorrow.

Vista is such a pain in the Blot.

Oh in other cools news, I got my MCP on Friday!

Ex girly has Vists on her laptop. I told her not to get it..... headache, after headache......

Her:"OMG I hate this thing!"


Me: "I told you...."

My fiancee has had a machine with it since October....she hasn't had any problems at all.

You know Vista is great when there's an XP rollback feature in some of the later updates.

I won't touch Vista with a 50ft clownpole. Here's some of my dealings:

1) I was helping someone troubleshoot their printer. They had a Dell 945 All In One. For a Dell, it was a sweet looking setup. One problem: It was made before Vista was around and he 'upgraded' to a Vista Home Premium system. The Dell 945 wouldn't set up the drivers right. After doing some hunting and reading some tech blogs from Dell, I told him he was pretty much boned for about 4mos. He wasn't too happy that a $450 printer system was only good as a doorstop.

Early adopters always pay Hell!

2) Some of the system requirements blow me away. A 700MB memory commit charge? That's crazy. I have the workstations at my job fitted with PC4200 1GB memory cards on XP and they run like champs. However, anyone I've talked to that has 1GB of memory on a Vista system says it's pokey. Come to find out Vista doesn't run halfway decent unless you have 2GB minimum!

Memory hog!

Originally, I was gonna sit on the fence and wait for the inevitable SP1 for Vista. However, the more I hear about Vista... the more I'm gonna tenaciously hold on to my XP setup.

WAY TO BLOW, GATES!!

Just thought I'd mention this: Popular opinion was that XP sucked ass, then SP1 rolled around. That will be in a few months for Vista.

True, took me until SP1 to finally switch to XP. Well, that and the fact that W98SE was being a complete PITA. Had to split the HDD into 2 partition to get it to play decent

My experience with XP has been since SP1. I never used it without SP1 applied.

Myself, I have more experience with ME than 98SE. Hell, I'm running a PC with this POS on it right now, and a damaged HD.

The PC parts and stuff I ordered saturday cannot come sooner!

Everyone knows you have to avoid New operating systems like the plague for the first 3 years!


that gives them time to either fix the problems or pretend like it never happened

Nah, until the first service pack. I got my XP machine in early 2003.

That is in March for Vista.

I'm not looking to upgrade any time soon. It seems our digital rights erode a little more with each program update or OS version.


I think I'm good with XP at home till I die and stuff.


sure they will eventually make software I want to use that forces me to buy a new OS or the new hardware will be totally unstable without it but I like to pretend that I will never fall in line.

XP is the first OS I paid for since Dos 6 though

Leopard'D

I remember when people were Starscreaming about Windows XP and how it was a system hog and nothing ever worked. Well, here we are, several years later and many people are wishing they had XP instead of Vista. I have to admit that XP is a damn good OS and is very stable. I never had a hard crash with it but I did get the blue screen of death a few times but that was fixed with updates and patches. Vista is the new animal on the block and will be scrutinized for a while until it proves itself, which it may never since Microsoft is supposedly looking to release a new OS in 2009 I think. Vista is not much of an improvement over XP, there are more security enhancements, which are annoying, and a lot of things need to get fixed but in time it may end up being a good OS. Although I think XP will be on top of it for a while.

I just purchased my first laptop Vista Home Premium. My mom has Vista Business (they installed that instead of Home Premium for some reason) so I've had a little while to get familiar with Vista, which is very limited still. It's not bad, hopefully SP1 will make some improvements to it. I haven't stayed aware of what it will have so I don't know much about it.

I recommend that if you are going to get Vista, make sure you have/get 2GB of RAM.

I don't know what you are talking about. I'm running XP without any service packs...

And I've never gotten a BSOD either.

The first OS I paid for was IBM's OS/2 version 3.
The last OS I paid for was Windows NT 4 Workstation retail. ^_^

Go read internet forum posts from 2002. You will find much Starscreaming from people who claimed WINDOWS FUCKING 98 SE WAS BETTER.

I'm dead serious.

FWIW, i'd install at least SP1. It has some nice stupid XP behavior fixes and bug fixes in it, IIRC. There's also security fixes in it, but I know you're way more careful than most, so you don't need them.

SP2 has a different rep. A lot of people had XP doing weird Blot on them after installing it, and wound up being forced to revert. It worked well for me, but that doesn't mean it will for you.

BTW, I have that new PC built. I've not had much trouble with it other than UAC related Blot. Overall, it was/is a rather smooth transition, though not as smooth as the transition from ME to XP.

I haven't even started, other than losing at least 8 auctions for the keyboard I want on eBay. I am waiting for my tax return to get my motherboard and CPU since they are the most expensive things for me.

I turn it on. It breaks. Says somethings wrong in Vistas coding

With a huge scale app like Vista, no it doesn't. Linux has similar problems, as would just about any OS that's not 20 years old or older.

Driver compatibility/errors happening in the background during installation aren't the fault of the OS, no matter what OS it is.

Whatever. Vista sucks. Period

Bias and ignorance are fun!

Here's a fun nitpick! Is there some reason we needed the option to DELETE the Recyling Bin? I couldn't tell you how many times I've meant to empty it (okay, probably 3-4), but I clicked on "delete" instead. Then I'm off to the desktop properties to get it back! wtf.

I dunno.

It's not there in Vista, FYI.

Also, you can turn on the old 9x style start menu, making it work a whole lot better.

So yours mum [had to be said]

And it's not ignorance, I've used Vista, hated it, thought it sucked and went back to XP... so yeah,

I'll admit it has its' flaws. Once you turn off a lot of the vista exclusive crap(Something I do in XP as well. Running it right now via dual boot due to GameTap not working properly with a 64 bit version of either XP or Vista), it works like a charm.

As for what I said... It sounded like you were saying my comments about, well, any OS bigger than 100 megabytes that is not exclusive to one system(for example, a game console) were bullBlot.

Which is kinda pointless really - I mean you've bought something new and canceled all the new stuff (pretty much). Is pointless and silly to me.

Well, TBH, most of the stuff people would 'optionally' buy Vista is to place high spec PC games. Which I don't care about. All I play on my PC are RTS games, and even then it's offline. Well, maybe a couple of other things, but never online or high spec stuff, so that kind of thing never affected me...

Vista has a lot of low level improvements that aren't immediately obvious. Driver and app crashes are less likely to bring the whole system down, for example.

low level improvements are really the biggest part of any major OS revision(Provided it's not a massive transition ala ME to XP or Apple's OS9 to OSX), and generally take the longest amount of time, money, etc to do.

Have you played Supreme Commander? That one has been known to bring lesser CPUs down to their knees.

Nope - I only play AoE/AoM/DoW. That's it. Maybe sometimes a couple of other bits, but that's the majority of it... and my computer can't take much atm just because I need to do a massive revision of memory which I'm gonna do over Easter...

What's not there in Vista? If you were referring to the Recylcing problem I mentioned then, as far as I know, it's only present in Vista.

i have nothing to contribute to this thread except that xp sp3 will be released this summer

There's no delete button in vista, just an empty recycling bin button.

Argh. Not that it matters, but right click Recycle Bin -> Open, Explore, Empty, Shortcut, Delete

Well one things for sure, Microsoft sure made imaging Vista way easier than XP. I will get to start having fun soon with that.

So what is the Vista "experience" rating dependant on? My laptop's is a 3, and it's a little sluggish sometimes, especially at startup, but occasionally while performing mundane tasks like opening Word. I have 1 gig of ram, but am thinking of upgrading to 2 gigs. Would that actually benefit Vista's performance in any tangible way?

Yes.

Vista on anything less than 2 gigs is a Powerglide up. Think of how XP runs on 256 megs and you'll understand. Get a RAM upgrade ASAP.

The actual rating is dependent on the processor's speed, your RAM and how fast the video card/chip is. hard drive speed factors in as well, but it's not hugely dependent on HD speed.

Video card speed doesn't matter much if you shut off Aero, like I did. After doing so, CPU and RAM are the most important factors.

In the end, it's not that slow compared to an XP machine with the same specs, at least from my personal experience on my dual-boot system(XP 32 SP2 and Vista 64. Haven't put in the Vista SP1 yet. It came out a few days ago.).