10 Vista Problems You Didn't Know You Had

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bull999999

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It makes no difference if its Tom's Guide, or Tom's Hardware, they are both related to each other and are derived from same person. "Tom". One Men, who started this site when you were still wearing dippers and eating apple sauce.

Actually, it does, since those two sites are targeting different audience. If you read the comments, there are people who actually learned from this article and each other. Malveaux is more like a guy who goes into a first grade classroom to complain that the class isn't challenging enough enough though it's geared toward first graders.
 

Denisimo

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[citation][nom]etittel[/nom][/citation]
[citation][nom]bgd73[/nom][/citation]

Every today's PC has 2.0 USB that works with USB 1.1 devices. Thus you dont have USB 2.0 and 1.1. The program is misleading.


[citation][nom]zak_mckraken[/nom][/citation]

Its not just about the title, its the whole article, plus the writer trying to defend himself like some great writing guru just because he wrote 100 books.
He even stated that he spent 6 months looking for solutions to those problems stated in his article.
And I quote;
[citation][nom]etittel[/nom] my goal in writing this story was to document actual issues that I've had to research and solve on my system in the past 6 months or so. It was written from the perspective of [/citation]

Once again! What problems have been researched for the last 6 months??
 

bull999999

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Wow, haven't seen backlash like this since they announced the new Star Trek movie takes place in an alternate timeline.

It's not the first time that I've seen a backlash like this. Whenever there's a newbie article that gets published on the Tom's Guide, all these "experts" come out of the woodwork to yap about how they wasted their time reading such an article beneath their level.

There's a list of question for you "experts"

1. First page or two should've alerted you to the fact that this article wasn't for experts. So why do you read through it and complain about it?

2. Tom's Guide has different articles, look and feel, and even different URL than Tom's Hardware. What more do you need to understand that they are different sites? Do you fall for phishing scams as well?

3.
"Fluff articles like this that appeal to the soccer moms and Math teachers of the world are popular and generate hits."

Maybe they are the target group for Tom's Guide???
 
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To be honest, the comments from the Tom's staff just fuel more hate post. best to just ignore it.
And for the article, it has some good information, not enough depth, but good enough. it's for sure not for newbies, when you start running all kind of thrid party software to change stuff, delete stuff...modifying services etc...any one that know linux won't even touch vista, so a boot from linux to vista is just useless for most people...if you know enought linux...you probably geeky enought to know how to find a solution to fix your vista problem.
As for the title, it's really misleading for sure. Almost like newspaper title to mislead so that you will read the article.
this is a article to tune vista, not 10 problem vista has.
USB 1.0 , 2.0? you know it when your transfer is like 50x slower...even retard will know. turning off services or boot program is a task for experience people.... you always has to google each
program to find out what it is and you make your decision if you want it off....there is no one site or template that works for everyone since no one has the same configuration exactly.
Most common problem are not mentioned here, like vista
security warnings, turn off indexing, problem with searches or slow file copy etc... which sp1 fix most already.
I have been using vista since day 1 on 6 matchines at home and 1 was a server that run 24/7 ...so far there is nothing major happens and it's a much more stable and secure than xp. might not be fastest, but that's the price you get for security. (like airport security check...the more the slower) As for driver, never install from CD and always download latest version and make sure it works for vista.
I have install all kind of hardware and most time the driver for vista won't be that bad...the only time I had trouble was bad apple
itune that give blue screen with hp driver ...I can tell you most crashes are due to bad 3rd party softwares...which is out of control of MS. You got your choice of many hardware so you suffer the result of sub-standard sofware. How much do you think the company paid for software programmer when they charge you 15$ for a memory stick or a mouse...you get what you paid for when you buy from non-major brands.
 

Denisimo

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WoooHoo, my last post got edited. Looks like some once ego got crushed when i mentioned contacting the bill payers and sponsors of this website.

Good job!
 

VTOLfreak

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[citation][nom]royalcrown[/nom]No, a lot of older boards soket 462 (xp), 754 and 939 systems and some p4 boards used add on chips to add extra usb ports that werent built into the south bridge. Sometimes these were older 1.1 ports and the new chipset had usb 2 ports (ie. my Chaintech skt600). Fyi, even that XP system could run vista and had drivers !
[/citation]
Ok didn't know there was a time when some AMD boards came with extra USB controllers bolted on. (I mostly work with Intel)

The other points are still valid though. I also noticed the superfetch effect. And I found it doesn't slow the machine down. Ofcourse I am also running a big raid array and it takes less than 10 seconds on my system for Vista to fill up my memory. If you are running a single disk config I can imagine it taking allot longer...
 
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An easier way to clean up old Restore pionts and shaddow copies is to go to a hard drives Properties, select Disk Cleanup, then click the More Options tabe, then select System Restore and Shadow Copies. I just freed up 20Gb that way.
 

royalcrown

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I have no prob with everybody saying the article sucks, but why not just say the article sucks and why instead of flaming the author. Ask him to write something more technical, or debate him, instead of flaming on a personal level. him. Tom's guide is chock full of fluff pieces and has been since day 1.
 

fulle

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The title of this article is misleading, and the information, while probably intended for the best, either calls for doing something unnecessary, or potentially damaging.

I'm sorry, but I really can only pray that the "intended audience" never reads this. Advising to delete shadow copies, updating drivers that are functional, removing the swap file, turning off random services.... OMG! I REALLY REALLY hope a newbie doesn't stumble upon this article and follow any of this advise.

As far as the rest of us.... we would have benefited on an article written for a more tech savvy audience. This is mostly useless... as brought up by other posters, there is a better way for nearly every tip given.
 

myriad46

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Denisimo,

Before you suggest that someone go back to grade school to work on their reading skills, perhaps you should make sure your own grammer and spelling are above a 5th grade level.
 
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a tip: when checking your USB ports, be sure to check with a high-speed (USB 2.0) device
if i plug in for ex. a mouse, the port will show up as Low speed
 

bydesign

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The issue that I have is this article which the author targets noobs is that this is just bad advice. Vista works just fine out box with or without SP1. Not one thing in article is a legitimate problem. I’ll go one step further by adding that following your advice could very easily lead to problems.
You lack the knowledge to give advice on the topic and you apparently don’t know that. So you may be a great editor but based this article you no expert on Vista.
If someone is new to Vista do you honestly think that hacking their OS is a good idea?
 

Idks

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Point number 7;

Please include that one also needs to properly declare their symbol file path before debugging - also they need to download the proper symbol package and install before use. For 1st timers, that could create a headache.
 

engrpiman

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One quick point:

If this article is for the non-technical then why bring up the command prompt? you can easily delete restore points / shadow volumes by right clicking on a drive in my computer and choosing properties. Then choose disk cleanup and select the "more options" tab.

I am also not sure why you proclaim that you can't delete files in the windows directory and the program files directory. I have deleted many files in those directories. Are they by chance protected the the home versions of vista and unprotected in the Business versions, I use vista business?

Also Does UAC (User account control ) interfere with deleting system files? I Disabled UAC, Windows Firewall, and Windows Defender from day one.

Also if this article is for the non-technical then why talk about a command based Linux disk? If the person can't figure out vista then chances are they will struggle more with Linux. But hey I installed Ubuntu over Vista on my other computer just so I could have a useful command line.

All in all good article but weak on material.
 
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Can I make one comment for the editors/publishing staff: I typed 'tomshardware' into my address bar and hit Ctrl+Enter. Expected to be on a website catering for experts. Hit a link and ended up on a site apparently called 'tomsguide' which is apparently for less experienced users.

Make them two separate websites and drop the cross-sell. People want to know what they're getting and I agree with the tone of some of the posters above: Tomshardware has lost a bit of its hardcore slant and we're a little bit confused. I visit less and less because I used to get good, technical articles and now I get vague fuzzy stuff.
 

mitch074

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Let's say that this article is a bit unbalanced: there are good tricks in it, but it mentions a beginner's mistake (disabling UAC? Please!) and on another point goes straight to the sysadmin UNIX guru realm (command-line Linux? Please! Even Puppy Linux or Damn Small Linux have GUI tools, and they fit on 50 Mb of disk space!).

It's either too much (forget about a CLI-only Linux, use a LiveCD), or not enough (explain how to disable UAC once proper user accounts and data partitions are set up to reduce attack surface and fragmentation: use graphs, documented examples, what is file-level and system-level fragrmentation, etc.).

On the wesite where I publish articles, my editor would have binned the article for lacking coherence (he actually did once, I was good for a complete rewrite; I must recognize the new version was much, much better and complete).
 
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Yawn, deleting locked files is simple.
All you have to do is achieve ownership of the files in question.
Same "problem" as XP, it's part of the NTFS file system.

Booting a buggy linux ntfs-driver on Vista is a great way to damage your data however.
 

mitch074

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I personally resent the "buggy linux ntfs driver" in the post above: if it has demonstrated anything, it's that the current NTFS-3G driver release is actually LESS buggy than Microsoft's own: this one actually checks for file system's consistency before and after performing a write operation. ntfsfix actually saved my bacon and perfectly restored a partition Windows' own chkdsk had declared unbootable right after said partition was thrashed by a botched up Windows update; in fact, the NTFS-3G Linux driver beats Windows' as soon as it comes to data integrity. The Windows driver however, is still better performance-wise.
Moreover, achieving ownership of a file is impossible (or very close to being so) on Windows XP/Vista Home editions, as the tools required to change file ownership and authorizations are absent - in which case, a Linux boot CD is the fastest and easiest solution.

Please don't mention the DOS read-only NTFS driver.
 
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I'm less than 3 weeks away from owning a new iMac. Good riddance Vista. I got the Vista Ultimate for all the perks that never materialized. Oh yeah, there was the promise of a desktop wallpaper that actually moved--resource hog, lasted less than five minutes. I wonder if Microsoft will ever admit that it was Vista's UAC feature that doomed it? Did for me.
 
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