Object Definitions Blog

Time to join the vista rant-wagon.

I have now had the joy of installing vista on two of my machines.

Actually the first install wasn’t all that bad. It was an in place upgrade from XP, which actually worked ok. However, under vista the machine now seems to be accessing the disk on a fairly permanent basis. I think it’s possibly trying to defragment over zealously. Sure I could probably sort it out if I spent time tweaking, but actually that’s not why I buy an expensive operating system – If I want to tweak I’ll go with fedora or ubuntu, stay richer, and enjoy it a lot more!

The second machine has been a nightmare. First I tried the upgrade from XP (it’s an XP media centre machine, nothing particularly out of the ordinary hardware-wise). At least a year and a half old, so should be no problems with hardware compatibility you would think. You would be wrong. Although everything runs fine under XP, even something as mainstream as the nvidia graphics card (a 7600 series) seems to suffer strange glitches under vista. Switch on visualization when playing music and it blue screens instantly.

But even getting far enough with the install to find the media center bugs proved difficult.

After the upgrade there was a problem installing a patch to upgrade the .net framework. It was a critical security update, but it simply would not install. I read the ms support forums (lots of similar reports there), ran the tools to manually uninstall the current version and clean out install shield info from the registry- but still no joy. There was seemingly no way to get it uninstalled, and the inability to install the patch left the whole system open to random attacks.

So then, a complete reinstall was on the cards. Everything seemed to install OK – well almost OK. After installation 48 updates came down.
So as expected, vista installed them on shutdown. So far so good. And then it went into ‘configuring updates’ screen on the restart and sat there for 3 hours. After which it went into ’shutting down’ and sat there for 9 hours.
Nine hours – seti@home has almost discovered aliens in less time than that… There was disc access taking place, so I was loathe to turn it off.

Eventually, the next day, I pulled the plug. After a power cycle the same pattern happened all over again. ‘Configuring updates’ for several hours, followed by the failed shutdown. Judging by the amount of moaning on the inet, I guess I am not the only one this happened to. All vista pcs seem to suffer from this annoying need to ‘configure updates’ on restart, having seemingly installed them on shutdown – and whenever it happens it now sends me into a cold sweat. Will it hang? Won’t it hang? If you are really lucky, when you turn the pc back on it configures the updates and then switches the machine off for you, automagically. But hang on – I thought I just turned the back on? Now I’m just confused.

Anyhow, that was the weekend over, and still no working media center for you, squire. This was rapidly getting boring. Finally a safe mode boot seemed to break the configuring patches cycle – but what a waste of time. And there are still critical update patches which failed to install. So what now? OS X? But I don’t want to have to beg Steve Jobs for my next JVM, either. And I’d like to choose my hardware.

Trying to install vista has taken me all the way back to those dark days I spent trying to get Sonic the Hedgehog to load from a second hand tape deck on my Amstrad cpc6128. Still, to balance this, I have a slight feeling that buried deep underneath the security popups there is an OS in there somewhere which is better than XP. Perhaps service pack 1 will make it all worthwhile. If anyone can ever get it to install.

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