Saturday, December 16, 2006

Stay away from Vista RTM!

My computer is now completely screwed because of Vista RTM. After I upgraded from XP to Vista RTM, I encountered numerous problems:

(Note: Most of these problems were for my desktop. Strangely, my laptop has had no problems with Vista RTM.)
  1. RTM not ready for primetime. Many devices (printers, pocket pc, etc.) don't work. For example, Canon and HP aren't planning on providing Vista drivers until 2007. Dell won't support Vista until March 2007. If you have problems with your Dell system after installing Vista RTM, you're out of luck! Even several Microsoft products (SQL Server, VS 2005) don't support Vista yet.
  2. Diagnostics suck. Event Viewer is useless. Clicking on the "Get Help Online" link for an event shows a web page that says "yada yada, OS (Vista) not supported, yada yada". No Error Reporting or Dr. Watson. Programs die silently like they used to for Win 95.
  3. Outlook 2007 crashes. (This happens on my desktop not my laptop.) I eventually had to uninstall Office 2007, install Office XP, and upgrade to Office 2007.
  4. SLOW! My overall impression of Vista is that everything related to the shell is slower than with XP. Startup is very very slow (~10 mins). Event Viewer reports errors confirming the slowness. (This is only a problem for my desktop computer, my laptop has no problems.)
  5. Registry Editor no longer highlights the open key. So when you do a search, you have to track down the right key manually.
  6. Security is totally annoying! I seriously have to click on 5 different versions of "Allow" in order to install a piece of software. I have to click a nag box even for simple things. I'm close to turning off User Account Control and other security features just because it is so annoying.
  7. Overall flakiness. I suspect this is because of the new User Account Control feature. For example, clicking on "Update my score" in Performance Information and Tools eventually causes a message about a problem with WinSTA. Many installation programs (including Microsoft's) assume you are running as Administrator and will fail in mysterious ways.
  8. Hard to customize the Start Menu. It used to be as simple as dropping program icons into a new folder. For some reason (probably User Account Control) I'm not able to do this.

UPDATE: I finally gave up on Vista RTM after realizing that my printer, Pocket PC, Outlook, VPN connection to my office, and audio DO NOT WORK and most other things are SLOW or FLAKY. I decided to rollback to Windows XP. Curse you Vista RTM! You cost me 4 days! KAAAAAAAAAAAHNN!

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