Wednesday, May 09, 2007

The Hatred Continues!

If anyone is reading my blog, then they would know that my relationship with Vista is more of a hate thing than love. Yea, the Media Center feature are much nice than those in Windows XP. I have not had to hack Vista Home Premium to view HBO content which is a plus. But Vista is a pantload to deal with and once again it has proved to me that it is a bad OS.

The story begins with my installation of some updates on my computer as recommend by the Windows. I went ahead and had Vista download all the recommended updates and intstall them to the PC without me doing a lot of research. What a mistake! The next thing I know is that I no longer had any sound. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

So I looked at the updates installed and then tried to roll back the drivers related to my tv tuner. That did not work. So I tried rolling back all the other drivers that I could related to sound and nothing was working. I still had no sound.

Well... I grabbed the DVD filled with all the related driver software that I could find and tried reinstalling the sound drivers for my computer and that did not work either. I had not been fussing with this thing for an hour and their was no solution in sight.

Then I just gave it a few moments to percolate when I finally figured out that I could try to roll back to my last restore point and maybe things would work. It was not a guaranteed fix considereing that it did not work for Paul Thurrott when he tried to restore a system that had blue screened due to a bad driver as described in this past week's episode of Window's Weekly with Leo Leporte. But I gave it a shot and an hour and 15 minutes after making my computer a mute, it once again could make noise. What a relief. And yet another Vista lesson learned.

The sad part is that Vista just is not quite ready for prime time. If this was Windows 95, then I could expect this kind of silly issues. Windows NT had its fair share of quirks that led to issues with sound as well as graphics and even fatal blue screens. But I have not had this kind of issues since I moved my computers to Windows 2000 or Windows XP. Even Windows ME was much easier to deal with than this crappy program.

Life with Vista is a very trying experience and I do not feel that it this "pretty" windows is doing anything more for me other than create a hard time. This having a computer crash crap was cool when I was in college and did not have to be productive, but fast forward 15 years and it is the birds.

Thanks Microsoft for the crappy OS.

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