A friend of mine got a laptop that came with Vista. He has had nothing but trouble with it. With very little extra installed on it but Office and Firefox, the whole PC will lockup from a script that Gmail uses for autosave. It constantly will drop its wireless connection and the only thing that will get it back is to reboot. Frequently, it will lockup when just trying to shut it down. Often, when I meet him a Paneras, I will be happily surfing along on my laptop with XP MCE, only to look up and see a face of pure frustration.

A friend of mine uninstalled Vista, replaced his hard drive with a bigger one, then re-installed Vista on his newer, bigger hard drive.

It was the point where Microsoft considered his copy of Vista "is no longer genuine." It was also the point where he needed to replace his mouse because he smashed the old one out of frustration.

If you hate Vista and MS so much why isn't your fileserver running a flavour of linux? Methinks the lady doth protest too much.

avatar_58 wrote:

If you hate Vista and MS so much why isn't your fileserver running a flavour of linux? Methinks the lady doth protest too much.

<agreement>
edit: oops, wasn't paying attention to all of the OS mentions

and didn't you see this?

but yeah, I'm not going to trash MS because I'm sure there are people there who worked very hard on Vista
HOWEVER, Vista does have a great deal of suck, I know without even thinking that there has to be a way to achieve that level of security without asking you-- yes you can turn it off, but-- no, here it is:
-you change a file
Vista: Are you sure?
"Yes, Vista."
-you delete a file
Vista: Are you sure about this?
"Yes, Vista."
Vista: Are you really sure?
"Yes, Vista..."
-you change a setting-- or try anyway
Vista: Do you really want to even look at the settings?
"Yes I'm sure, Vista."
-you open the window, change something, and click "OK" to save and exit
Vista: Are you really sure?
"I'm sure, Vista."
Vista: Are you really really sure?
"Yes, I'm sure, Vista!"
-you change the name of your hard drive
Vista: You're not serious, are you?
"Yes I'm f***ing sure and serious, Vista! Now quit it!"
Vista: Are you sure you want me to quit it?
-you get the nearest hammer
"I'm going to enjoy this..."
Vista: Are you sure about that?
-SMASH
Vista: You fool, you can't get rid of me that easily! Mwa ha ha ha ha! 😈
-you get the nearest rocket launcher and some silicon-eating bacteria 😏
Vista: Oh 5h17. 😵

avatar_58 wrote:

If you hate Vista and MS so much why isn't your fileserver running a flavour of linux? Methinks the lady doth protest too much.

He said his fileserver was running FreeBSD. His desktop is the one running Vista. Reading comprehension FTW 😀

I've installed Vista on my desktop PC just over a week ago and it seems to be much improved over Windows XP, quite the opposite of my experiences with the betas. The betas were quite possibly the worst pieces of crap software I've ever encountered (well, not exactly, that dubious distinction goes to FileMaker Pro and iTunes). Yes, the UAC is annoying, but that was quickly switched off and hasn't bothered me since. On the whole, the system even seems to be more responsive than XP. The only thing that really bothered me was not being able to use my MT-32 and SC88Pro with the MIDI port, as drivers for MPU401 and compatible devices were removed and are no longer supported. Fortunately, a few enterprising souls have figured out how to work around this (and posted it here on VOGONS too, which is where I found it). Pretty much everything that bothered me could be disabled through the (sometimes obscure) settings and the only annoyances I have are:

• the changed keyboard navigation in explorer (backspace [XP] to alt-up [Vista], having to do shift-tab twice in a common file dialog)
• the fact that there's no icon in the window caption that you can right-click in explorer windows
• the search feature really is crap. How hard is it to search 75 CPP files for "MakeTransparent"? Even though I've told it to search non-indexed content, Vista can't find any. I could find them myself just fine, but isn't that what computers are supposed to be able to do much faster?

On the whole, the benefits outweigh the niggles for me. And the wall papers are oooh sooo pretty 😁

Then again... I must've been the only person on the planet who had no problems with Windows ME. 😳

Reading comprehension

He rarely reads something, just get used to it 😉

Snover wrote:

He said his fileserver was running FreeBSD. His desktop is the one running Vista. Reading comprehension FTW 😀

Oh lah-dee-da mr fancy pants 😁 Either way he bitches nonstop about microsoft yet continues to use their products.

Kippesoep wrote:

the changed keyboard navigation in explorer (backspace [XP] to alt-up [Vista], having to do shift-tab twice in a common file dialog)

I have Vista (obviously from some other posts), and this isn't the case for me, IE is acting exactly like it did in XP (at least as far as I can tell, I don't use every feature)

the fact that there's no icon in the window caption that you can right-click in explorer windows

yeah, I don't like that, but it's not too bad

The search feature really is crap. How hard is it to search 75 CPP files for "MakeTransparent"? Even though I've told it to search non-indexed content, Vista can't find any. I could find them myself just fine, but isn't that what computers are supposed to be able to do much faster?

I thought maybe I was doing something wrong, but after long enough (and using enough options) I figured it was just written wrong, now I know for sure: this is a classic downgrade-in-an-upgrade

On the whole, the benefits outweigh the niggles for me. And the wallpapers are oooh sooo pretty 😁

Then again... I must've been the only person on the planet who had no problems with Windows ME. 😳

pretty enough
you didn't have problems with ME? 😮
actually, I didn't really have problems with ME either, but I didn't use it for all that long, and I caused some problems of my own, and I didn't try to play any games from 1986 on it

DosFreak wrote:

...and I hate dual-booting.

why? I hear as long as you have a good boot manager it's very painless. If it's the matter of choosing an OS each time you start it, you could set it to boot Linux (or Windows) after a certain time if you don't tell it otherwise, I'd personally go with 5 seconds.

General Vagueness grabs Vista and throws it into a fire

Nowadays I end up using my home desktop machine as a gaming machine, and my work laptops for work.

I have tons of laptops at work with Acronis images of various OS's so it's just a simple matter of restoring an image. Another nice thing about laptops is I can sit in my bed and watch movies on my desktop machine. 😀

Well, it looks like the NICS in my desktop are inoperable now. They were working fine for 3 days straight ut now I can't even pick up an IP address on them. I've tried everything and I've even tried booting from some LiveCD's. No luck.

So somehow the NICS were fried due to:

1. Huge 600+ GB file transfer over 2 days.
2. Trying different Network drivers.
3. Vista
4. Solar Flares

Since the NICS are fried I slapped a 1GB Intel NIC I bought back in 2003?, Vista found the driver, autodetected at 1GB and I'm back to synchronizing with my file server again. I guess I'll see how long this NIC lasts.

The NICS in my P5N32-E motherboard haven't been used since I bought it except for mabye 1 time last year....

You know, I was turned off to both Vista and Nvidia pretty quickly; the first thing I did on Vista was run the new solitaire game, and I wasn't able to finish a single game before the video driver crashed and was restarted. I played most of another game before the driver crashed again, but Vista couldn't resuscitate it that time; the thing just blue screened. I don't tend to think too highly of a system incapable of running a stable game of solitaire.

DosFreak wrote:

Well, it looks like the NICS in my desktop are inoperable now. They were working fine for 3 days straight ut now I can't even pick up an IP address on them. I've tried everything and I've even tried booting from some LiveCD's. No luck.

Did you try disconnecting power to the system until the capacitors discharged and then plug it in again? I've experienced in the past the Windows drivers for nVidia NICs leave the NIC hardware in a state that was inoperable by eg. forcedeth. (They eventually put a workaround into forcedeth, but annoying!) It could be something similar here.

general_vagueness wrote:

Kippesoep wrote:

the changed keyboard navigation in explorer (backspace [XP] to alt-up [Vista], having to do shift-tab twice in a common file dialog)

I have Vista (obviously from some other posts), and this isn't the case for me, IE is acting exactly like it did in XP (at least as far as I can tell, I don't use every feature)

Windows Explorer, not IE. I wouldn't touch IE with a barge pole 😁

I never got the whole backward/forward thing in a file manager anyway. Backspace used to be "navigate to the parent folder", but now it's "navigate to the previous folder", which is often different and rarely what I wanted.

In the common file dialogs, Shift-Tab goes from the filename field to the file list in XP. In Vista, it goes to the list header, which I find utterly incomprehensible.

right, sorry
I never touch file browsing via keyboard except for the Backspace key, and I haven't looked through files that much on this computer.
<uses the file exploring keyboard interface>
ah, yes, I see
I don't like it either, but I can't really say it was unexpected; it seems like every time MS makes a good interface scheme, they change it in the next version or the version after that.

Snover wrote:

Did you try disconnecting power to the system until the capacitors discharged and then plug it in again? I've experienced in the past the Windows drivers for nVidia NICs leave the NIC hardware in a state that was inoperable by eg. forcedeth. (They eventually put a workaround into forcedeth, but annoying!) It could be something similar here.

yeah, that seems likely, I've heard of drivers messing up the electronics before, and NICs would seem to be likely victims, given the power and complexity involved, and in particular I know from personal experience that capacitors can store a residual charge long after the power source has been removed, which is why it's so dangerous to take apart power supplies

Why not just use large USB hard drives for transfering data back and forth?

v0g0ns wrote:

Why not just use large USB hard drives for transfering data back and forth?

laziness
also, I may have figured out the Vista search problem

Something that consumes resources, breaks compatibility, and makes ridiculous demands on hardware manufacturers, just to control you and line the pockets of software and media giants? They shouldn't be allowed to call Vista an "operating" system...

Stay away from it, guys.

Hey, thats the american way. Dont mess with it!

Hey DosFreak, what do you think of XP compared to *pukes* Vista ? I have a legal version of XP Pro, and the only real thing I miss. is of course DOS. But other than that, then XP Pro is a fun fucker to mess with.