I've had this computer, and this crappy excuse for an operating system, for a year and a half now. And it still manages to surprise me with all the ways it can think of to go wrong on boot-up.
Usually it's something to do with the screen that gets screwed up. Recent irritations have included:
- showing a 1280 × 1024 background image on a 1920 × 1200 monitor.
Usually when this happens it will realise its error and correct it within, ooh, about five minutes. But last week it stuck with that setting for an entire session, lasting some hours. - images switching to and fro between left and right monitors
- refusing to show any desktop at all -- just a black screen with a cursor.
But it's really amazing how many variations on these themes it can come up with. Nothing if not inventive, Vista is.
Today it was a practical issue. I'm accustomed to the computer taking more than five minutes (timed) to restore from standby. That's fine, it fits my morning routine, I use the time to make coffee. But when it takes another four minutes, on top of that, to open Outlook...
The Microsoft VP who famously "got burnt" by Microsoft's "Vista-capable" scam -- for scam it was -- at least ended up with what he described as "an e-mail machine". He's still better off than me.
2 comments:
I recently got a new Dell laptop from my employer. It has Vista Business. My coworkers have identical computers. I have had no problems since I installed Ubuntu 8.04 on a separate partition. It works fine. One of my co-workers has had to re-install Vista so many times that he installed the Windows 7 Beta upgrade this past weekend and says so far it's a big improvement. For example, it's only using 600 MB of RAM instead of the 1200+ that Vista was consuming.
One of the Mac/PC ads I saw a few months ago had the PC guy making two piles of money. A little one for fixing Vista, a big one for advertising Vista. Maybe you've seen it.
Maybe M$ didn't realize that that was satire...
I'm not going to tell them.
I have, as the title suggests, blogged on Vista before.
It's not the big, obvious things that get to me. Geeks complain about the UAC and the DRM -- peh. Those don't bother me (well, the DRM does on a philosophical level, but not practically)...
No, it's the everyday annoyances. The little things. Like -- I open a folder with image files in it, and Vista has decided that it must be a photo collection -- so it displays them with information like "Date taken" and "Rating", when what I want to see is "Date modified", because this is actually an application folder. And it's such an effing performance to correct it when it does this kind of thing.
And don't get me started on the "Read only" attribute...
Sigh. Nice to see you, Eric.
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