Vista Nightmare

After running XP for quite some time, upgrading to Vista should have been a breath of fresh air. It turns out i had to roll back my OS to XP once again. This blog has been created to share my experience with those of you thinking about purchasing Vista.

Before i begin, here is the system used for testing:

Intel duo core at 1.8 ghz
4 Gigs of corsair ram at DDR2
ASUS P5K SE motherboard
Nvidia 8500 GT Video card
22" wide LG LCD
Razor Copperhead Laser mouse
Edifier 2.1 Speakers

Now I'm sure some of you are asking yourselves, "Why list your monitor, mouse and speakers?" That will be answered, so be patient.

When i purchased this computer it came with Vista home operating system. Everything extra like Nero 7 (cd/dvd burning program), Windows media player 11, AVG 7 Antivirus etc... were already installed. All i should have needed to do when i set it up was change my screen resolution to fit my 22" monitor. Yet, that wasn't the case. I received 2 errors saying that certain .exe files could not start and they had to shut down. I searched the files online to see what they were for ( because no extra info is ever given besides the exact file error) and they turned out to be utilities that were included with the video card. I continued to go online and add the programs i require in order to play games online such as communications utilities, friend finders and such. After installing these utilities i launched them in succession, as i do every time i game online. Before i could slide my headset on i received my first of many blue screens as my computer crashed. Memory dump, as i recall. Upon rebooting i received the message stating that there was a problem and it would be reported to Microsoft. I decided to bring up the task manager ( CTRL, ALT and DEL) You get a separate window asking what you would like to do. I just wanted the task manager. I let it go thinking the changes made to differ from XP were for the better, in some way. When i opened the task manager i was shocked to see that i was running 63 processes and most were necessary in order to run vista so they couldn't be shut down. Again, i let it go. I had a beast of a machine and it should be able to handle it. While i was in there, i tried to log my wife's side off, just to give my system a slight boost. Nope, you can't do that. You have to log into her side and log out. Not a problem, i guess. Vista is quick between windows, i have to give it that. A couple of processes dropped once i logged my wife's side out. Now it was time to install games. I started with Call of Duty 4. After i put the dvd copy of the game into the drive it spun for a moment then stopped. So i started it manually through the computer. It didn't take long to install. The file transfer was very quick. I was impressed. I restarted all my programs so i could begin gaming and i became really frustrated with the permission window. That had to go. So i went into the system and scouted around for a tab to remove the permission window and found that there wasn't one. I figured that if i was annoyed by it that someone had to be as well. I checked online and found several ways to remove it. The best was to modify the registry key that runs it.I did so and rebooted. Yet again, as i loaded my window after the reboot i received my second blue screen crash. I OWNED THE COMPUTER FOR LESS THAN AN HOUR. Again, frustration set in. Once i got back in, i restarted my communications utilities and started up Call of Duty 4. I was surprised to learn i had to run my settings for the game quite low. I was told that Vista would be an FPS(frames per second) killer but i had no idea it was that bad. All was well until i tried to load the same game the next day. A message popped up saying that the game did not close properly and it suggested that i run my game in safe mode. I later learned that the game had to be reinstalled so that Vista could recognize it.
As many others do, i leave my computer running 24/7. Every so often i noticed that the computer had to reboot from some error. I later learned that one of my programs, that Vista can't read, was causing crashes some time in the middle of the night. I later had to purchase a second motherboard because my first board got fried. I also boosted my system to 600 watts from the previous 400 watts. I then purchased the razor copperhead mouse to add some spice. The utilities would not work, so i had to change the settings on the mouse manually. After playing games i had to restore my resolution back to windows format.... manually. As well as change the sound from headset to 2.1 speakers ....MANUALLY! Vista with all its bells and whistles was becoming more work then it was worth. I also learned that i purchased a computer with 4 gigs of ram and my 32 bit Vista only can see 3 gigs(apparently this is the same for XP at 32 bit). So, with the talk of the first service pack coming out i decided to ask around and see if Microsoft would fix these errors. I learned that there was going to be a boost of about 2%. Yeah, 2%. Are you kidding me!!?? All those errors they receive from millions of people and the best they can do is 2%?
Luckily, i still had a copy of XP. I installed it on my new computer and i haven't had a problem since and so ended the Vista nightmare..........or did it. I just bought the ati 3870 video card and it runs fantastic but if i want to run the card on Directx 10 in the future........i have to have windows Vista :(