Over the past few days I’ve had the pleasure of having Vista Business Professional begin acting very strangely on my system.
This morning for example, it was incredibly slow. So slow that just bringing up a Save dialog box in Notepad took over 15 seconds. But when checking Task Manager, the system was pretty much idling. I couldn’t shut it down cleanly, so I had to force the system down. What then followed was a two hour marathon of rebooting in order to get Vista back to normal. It came up several times, but instead of the standard Aero interface, it was Windows Classic – which I could live with. At the same time though, most services didn’t come up, including networking, so my softphone was unable to work. Many reboots later (each one a 20 minute+ exercise) Vista came back fully, except that the desktop had switched itself to 640×480, from the usual 1920×1200 (easily fixed, but bizarre).
Yesterday morning it had similar problems.
The fact that I cannot reboot the system and expect it to come up properly makes working with Vista a very dicey proposition.
My Windows based phone no longer syncs without me explicitly opening the Windows Device Center. It used to work. What changed to make it quit? Who knows.
Additionally, several times now, in front of crowds or customers, I’ve had to reboot because Vista (or the Lenovo drivers) weren’t recognizing the projector properly. With the forthcoming Florida Tweener event, I cannot risk having system problems before or during one of my presentations (more to follow on those).
So, I’m kicking off a complete backup, and will be wiping the system and installing Windows XP with SP 3. Hopefully this will prove to be a more workable and stable system for me.
The shame is, when Vista works, it works very well! The sleep functionality is great the 9 out of 10 times that it works properly. The fact that it takes 20 minutes to have my system fully functioning on that 10th time, isn’t great.
Oh yeah, one more thing. At a new client’s office this morning we were discussing their system needs and the one thing she cared about was "I don’t want Vista". Microsoft has a real problem here.
I’m off to waste another 6-8 hours rebuilding!