The Rochester Guitar Club

DBall wrote:[What examples are problems that you have personally had with Vista (not second hand info)?

As you know, NONE. And I am hoping to find a replacement machine with XP so that I don't have to experience any of them. The Yahoo search result brings to mind a bumper sticker I once saw - "Eat S----, 20 million flies can't be wrong." So, maybe I should try it. Forgive my sarcasm, but considering the many years of my past life spent in quality assurance, it is hard for me to respect a company that released a product that illicits so many negative responses. I would say it is clear that they released a "Beta" product and let the customers do their software interface testing for them. They've done it before and will do it again (do the letters ME mean anything to you?) And, why not, they essentially have a monopoly. At least in Europe MS is getting beat up a bit because the EU is more sensitive to unfair market advantage and restraint of trade.
It's likely that if I do have to buy it I won't have trouble with it - because I'm not a power user or a gamer, or a video junky. I hate to support those corporate policies.
JC

OK Dan, now I have hands-on experience with Vista. So far 2 blue-screen bombouts from IE. At least it recovered properly. Windows messaging would not recognize my address books in either .WAB or .CDT forms so I spent an entire day creating membership and interested party distribution lists (~120 addresses) for the community group over which I preside (and edit newsletter) manually. I've had 2 programs I wanted to load blow up, one leaving a mess that had to be cleaned up to get rid of an error message every boot. If I let it sleep overnight it cannot find the web without power down reboot. User-Interface-wise I see a lot of cosmetic "change for the sake of change" that seems to offer no benefit - just a PITA to adapt to. I guess I stand by my pre-ownership assessment - "Not ready for prime time".

On the good side, I like the speed of the new machine and the fact that I now can interface pretty much any media card plus Firewire. Oh yeah - and it did recognize my HP printer/scanner OK. JC

JCarter wrote:OK Dan, now I have hands-on experience with Vista. So far 2 blue-screen bombouts from IE. At least it recovered properly. Windows messaging would not recognize my address books in either .WAB or .CDT forms so I spent an entire day creating membership and interested party distribution lists (~120 addresses) for the community group over which I preside (and edit newsletter) manually. I've had 2 programs I wanted to load blow up, one leaving a mess that had to be cleaned up to get rid of an error message every boot. If I let it sleep overnight it cannot find the web without power down reboot. User-Interface-wise I see a lot of cosmetic "change for the sake of change" that seems to offer no benefit - just a PITA to adapt to. I guess I stand by my pre-ownership assessment - "Not ready for prime time".

On the good side, I like the speed of the new machine and the fact that I now can interface pretty much any media card plus Firewire. Oh yeah - and it did recognize my HP printer/scanner OK. JC

Bring it with you the next time we get together... I'm guessing the conflicts/issues are easy to resolve and should only take a shirt period of time to figure out.

PS - why on earth would you use IE? www.mozilla.org

Dan - Can't bring it with - it's a desktop not very portable.

I'm using IE because that's Microsoft's browser of choice - supposedly written for, or adapted to the OS and you would think that it is the most stable since it would be the most tested (Ha, Ha - a bit of QA guy humor there). I've been using IE quite a while since I could never get Firefox to run on the old system. Since the system (Vista) is relatively unstable, I'm not loading anything I don't absolutely need in hopes that one of the frequent updates fixes some of the instability and compatibility issues. Maybe by SP-125 it'll be better.

So far I am happy it knew my printer (and I didn't have to load any of the HP crap that came with it to soak up system resources). I'm also happy that Office Home & Student loaded without a hitch over the trial version that was pre-installed. And again - the new hardware speed is nice.

There has been one more bluescreen and one more freeze. They don't appear to be tied to any specific event. I'm sort of dreading when the McAffee trial period is over. I'll bet it does not uninstall without leaving all kinds of junk. Then I'll put in RR free stuff which I had no problems with on the old system until they stopped supporting 98SE. That's what prompted the new machine purchase.