My Vista Experience

Written By: Bibby On: 22/07/2009Time(20:34:38)

It was October 2008 – I decided it was about time I stepped away from XP as it felt like the OS was slowing down to a crawl too often. “Format C” was becoming like a marriage. I had pretty decent hardware at the time (I love gaming) and a good amount of RAM and thought that this should not happen in any modern OS. Maybe Vista can change this? Divorce please!

On release Microsoft received a lot of criticism for Vista due to all the bugs that arose. Compatibility was a big problem for both everyday software and device drivers for well known hardware. Microsoft should have fixed stuff before releasing it… after all it is an OS – the software that makes the collection of tech gadgetry work together. It had been out for some time and Vista now came with Service Pack 1 so I thought “why the hell not?”

There was the Customer Experience programme though - Microsoft’s attempt at identifying issues that Vista detects automatically. Bug reports are sent to Microsoft which they then use to collate and produce fixes… or at least give pointers for a solution from a manufacturer’s website.

Soon enough I had the case in my hands with the shiny DVD hiding inside. I whacked it into the PC and sat all googly-eyed at the monitor. Mmmmm Vista… purrrty! What a change from the dross of XP!

Over time I realised that I did not actually need to withdraw to a reinstall of the OS… something that I felt too accustomed to with XP. There were all but a couple problems that always sat niggling at the back of my mind.

Microsoft’s “.NET framework” was the first to annoy me. .NET, of which Version 2 is built directly into Vista, is a programming platform that grants software written in a range of programming languages all the access they need to Vista. I don’t know how (maybe it was a power spike or something) but I received registry corruption in .Net.

Certain software like Norton Ghost 14 cannot update itself because of this .NET problem and some of Microsoft’s own snap-ins for MMC (Microsoft Management Console) fall over as they rely on those .NET registry entries. The .NET problem cannot be fixed as per one of the MSDN tech blogs; if the problem lies in the registry then there is no way to resolve this without repairing Vista itself.

Herein lies the second problem. Vista cannot repair itself as such… at least not in the same way that XP could. When a repair of Vista is performed using the installation DVD you pretty much lose all installed software and other settings. They are backed up in another folder but that’s about it… they’re unusable. The repair is simply just a reinstall feature usable on top of an existing Windows partition and nothing more. I feel cheated!

Apart from these two major gripes of mine Vista has fared really well. But now on the horizon is Windows 7 – the greatly anticipated sequel to Vista. And it is a sequel – it’s Vista but with Microsoft’s polish (TM) put to good use.