10 Vista Problems You Didn't Know You Had

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The title of this article is "10 Vista problems you didn't know you had" and most of the sections are about great features of Vista rather than issues...

It did have some useful information in there though.
 
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Seriously, why take 11 pages of tweaking Vista and figuring out crashes and performance problems. Can we just move onto a WORKING O/S? Ubuntu? OS X for the needy, anyone?
 

Warsaw

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[citation][nom]Anon6465645[/nom][/citation]

....For those of you who have NOT tried Vista (Anon6464645) it IS a working O/S, probably one of the best I've used as well. Try something first before you complain about it. That's like a five year old boy complaining about kissing a girl thinking he will obtain "cooties" from them. Well guess what? When he tries the kissing out (eventually) he will probably like it.

So the question is Anon, are you just a little boy worried about cooties? BTW OSX is junk, used it many times on ex's computer and I can't stand how simplified it is. Might be good for inexperienced users, but is it really good to stay ignorant a long time?
 
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I'm sure that the Trinity Rescue Kit you mention in step 5 is a very good tool, but it should be noted that you don't *need* to use a commandline only linux distribution to clean up your windows filesystem, and doing so would probably seem somewhat masochistic to some who were used to using the point and click graphical file management interface available with vista. I'd suggest grabbing a ubuntu live CD or a knoppix CD instead and just point and clicking your way through these file management tasks the same way you would in windows if it allowed you to (and I have to admit I'm kind of amazed that vista can't tell the difference between currently a currently active \windows directory and a directory on another drive that just happens to share the same name - sound like another example of the 'good enough, it'll do' code coming out of redmond these days).
 

malveaux

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This is interesting.

11 pages of "vista woes" and in all reality, folks, zero information given. Talking about a problem and giving a solution are two different things. This article just lightly brushes across some issues with Vista, but doesn't give anyone anything actually useful.

The most useful thing in this entire article was a link to another website, to BlackViper's website, where you WILL find real actual information about servicing your Vista operating system, unlike this article, which doesn't do anything what so ever. "Did you know that Vista and Linux sometimes have network trouble talking? NO? Now you do! Oh, and we don't actually have information on that... lol, oh yea, check out BlackViper's site if you want to actually learn something! Ta! Thanks for visiting Tom's!" That's the article in a nut shell.

GET SOME REAL INFORMATION OR DON'T BOTHER `AUTHORING' EMPTY BLOAT.

Very best,
 

Qwakrz

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I WANT THE TIME BACK THAT I SPENT READING THIS. 11 Vista problems I never knew I had, well, I know vista pretty well and have only ever come across the 1 and only problem you listed which was an easy fix (which is not actually needed to be fixed as it is dynamic in size and frees up space when needed). The rest of your list are just tweaks that can be performed, with a few giving detrimental results to the stability and speed of Vista

This is just a moan on the perceived stability of Vista and how to break it in a very quick way by disabling services and unlocking protected areas of storage so they can be "fiddled" with. There are good reasons why some folders cannot be access by the end user as it stops viruses and other spyware from infecting the PC at the root level easily and disabling random services will make it less stable.

I have managed to use Vista for well over a year and have never had any need to go fiddling with it to the extent you listed here. I have only ever seen 1 BSOD caused by Vista, I have had a few from unstable drivers but I had about 10x as many BSOD under XP than I have under Vista 64bit.
 

Arbie

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I’m a member of the “it’s not as bad as you think” club when it comes to assessing my overall reactions and attitudes to this always fascinating and sometimes frustrating operating system - There’s just no getting away from elbow grease, regular Web searches and reading if you truly want to understand what Vista is doing, how it works, and how to deal with its occasional failures and foibles. For some of us, getting knee-deep in OS jargon makes us say “I don’t want to know.” - Vista happily creates one - The Case of the Mysterious - with ease and abandon - but it surely did this trick for me - usually, you’re too busy thinking “Rats! Have I lost everything?” Don’t fret: there is another way to grab this data besides frantically scribbling before Vista’s automatic reboot whisks all that data away - To save you the trouble of scrawling frantically - There is a catch: reading crash dumps - After it’s installed, short-circuit potential problems - fire up the debugger - presto! Problem gone - you can usually puzzle your way to a solution - that may come in handy should expert troubleshooting be invited in to help - point Windbg there instead as you go looking for clues - Few things can be as upsetting to a PC owner, especially anyone for whom computer access is a vital or central part of getting work done - why your panic factor should subside substantially if you’ve got a backup you can roll onto a new disk drive...


The "Windows Bible for Dummies Like the Rest of Us" useless happytalk jargon may fill out your article and make you feel like a real writer - but it's agonizing to read. Please redo and resubmit.

Also get rid of the "that said"s - terribly overused in tech journalism these days.
 
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I have Vista running 24 hours a day, use it as my media center, playing games, downloader, browser, and visualizations. I have 10 external WD My books through USB. Works fine. Vista is a good OS, people need to grow up and stop bashing it. Sure XP ran faster, but thats because the OS was less complicated. XP is like a security check at a train station and Vista is like a security check at an airport. You can get through the train station faster, but you accept that the airport will be slower because its more thorough and for your protection. The only reason why we need something like Vista is because sooooooooooooo many people are out there are writing exploits to make it look bad and to mess up peoples OS's. I don't get why people need to waste their time trying to make peoples life's miserable. At the end of the day, are they really proud of themselves to crash someones system or make 1000's of popups appear? I would like to interview a hacker and just hack their psyche. Hopefully make them realize they are better off dead; i mean its like someone who has AID's and wants to infect you just to see you die. They really have no morals and that scary, because the end of the world will be caused by someone with too much knowledge and no morals.
 

Tomsguiderachel

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I appreciate all of your comments. However, it seems like many of you are the type of people who are very knowledgeable about OSs and are very comfortable tweaking them on your own. It is only natural that experts of this sort would find this article to be basic. We created this feature for people aren't at all familiar with Vista's inner workings. It just wouldn't be right to create an article for OS experts on Tom's Guide.

Rachel Rosmarin, Editor of Tom's Guide
 

Tomsguiderachel

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[citation][nom]Arbie[/nom][/citation]
Arbie,

There's no accounting for taste. As an editor, I happen to thoughtfully disagree with your assessment, but again, I appreciate your comments.

Rachel Rosmarin, Editor of Tom's Guide
 

etittel

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FWIW, 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 "If this happens to you, try the following..." I do understand that the level of info provided here is not terribly deep, and I did try to point to other, more detailed sources when it seemed appropriate. The Black Viper site is one of my favorites, too, and definitely worth a bookmark and a visit. For me most of the really useful troubleshooting Vista information comes out of online forums (sometimes Microsoft's, most times third parties) and from Knowledge Base and TechNet stuff.

Thanks to whomever for catching my typo on the symbol lookup URL: I rekeyed instead of cut'n'pasting, and now I must pay. If I'd just opened the symbol path in WinDbug, I could have grabbed "SRV*c:\Windows\Symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols" My failing eyesight made the unwarranted character swap. My apologies.

--Ed--
 

etittel

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To Arbie:

Re: the useless happytalk remark.
1. Google me: I've contributed to over 100 books. How many have you written (over a dozen different ...For Dummies titles included)
2. The editor's assignment asked me to make this approachable for newbies. Maybe it was a waste of your time, but I wrote what I was asked to provide.
3. Why don't you submit an article to Tom's? We're always looking for smart, savvy contributors. Put your work where your mouth just was.

'Nuff said,
--Ed--
 

fuser

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Some of the criticism was unnecessarily harsh, while some was valid. I think the article just needs a different title. Those of us who believe Vista is (now, after a service pack) a decent OS, are constantly frustrated by articles that cast Vista in a bad light.

In this case, what does the title ("10 Vista Problems You Didn't Know You Had") suggest to someone who is browsing through the list of articles on this site? It tells us that Vista has 10 problems that need our attention.

The people who dig into the article will find that several of those 10 items are not Vista problems. For instance, the item discussing USB ports. The difference between USB 1.1 and 2.0 has absolutely nothing to do with Vista. Another item, "Vista drive images to the rescue", talks about a feature of Vista that can help you with backups. Is that a Vista problem?

This is an interesting article for new Vista users, but the title is misleading.
 

grifonik

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Kinda funny reading this... seems like 10 reasons to not use Vista!

As this article is targeted to some what newlings, I'd highly advise against disabling the UAC (briefly mentioned in BSOD section). Or, if you do, operate under a user account and reserve the admin account for software installations only. Without the UAC and operating as admin, you might as well name the machine "malware honeypot".

Been using Vista at home ever since it was released. I'm still looking for that "gotta have it!" feature that was worth leaving XP...
 

MrBradley

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I love this "Internet Tough Guys." that bash these articles that people take their own time to write freely for the public. Just to point out that these articles are in fact "free" so there should be no need to bash an open article to the public. Its not like a magazine that you paid a couple of dollars for. If you would like to make some suggestions, great! But look at the perspective of the writer as ettitel said how he was writing this article as if he was talking to newbies. Now being a Vista Ultimate user myself, I understand that there are problems with Vista and no OS is "Perfect" in any way. Im looking forward to Windows 7 and I hope Microsoft will not charge existing Vista users a high amount for licenses because considering how many people are frustrated with it, many people will abandon PC's for Macs. But even then, the user will not be completely satisfied with a mac. I've tried OS X and I find it to simplified as well and was not to my taste. I like the flexibility of Windows and I find its interface quite attractive. Theres nothing really wrong with it. What I dislike is Mac fanboys bashing microsoft yet they are using MS Word on their macs. Hmm....
 
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Throughout reading this up to step 5 I was thinking "WTH is this guy trying to accomplish here?". And then I got to Step 5 and went crazy enough to comment.

You don't need to use linux to delete something you for some reason can't access. Try taking ownership of the files first, give yourself access, or kill UAC if you must (though I don't suggest it, you should be able to access anything you need by taking ownership and giving your user group the rights).

Good lord...I don't even know why I read this things expecting to learn something I didn't know already. I was expecting tweaks, not basic OS information that is also relevant to many of MS's other OS's.

Time to resume reading this madness....6 looks equally stupid (sorry no other word for it....XP uses minidumps too).Throughout reading this up to step 5 I was thinking "WTH is this guy trying to accomplish here?". And then I got to Step 5 and went crazy enough to comment.

You don't need to use linux to delete something you for some reason can't access. Try taking ownership of the files first, give yourself access, or kill UAC if you must (though I don't suggest it, you should be able to access anything you need by taking ownership and giving your user group the rights).

Good lord...I don't even know why I read this things expecting to learn something I didn't know already. I was expecting tweaks, not basic OS information that is also relevant to many of MS's other OS's.

Time to resume reading this madness....6 looks equally stupid (sorry no other word for it....XP uses minidumps too).Throughout reading this up to step 5 I was thinking "WTH is this guy trying to accomplish here?". And then I got to Step 5 and went crazy enough to comment.

You don't need to use linux to delete something you for some reason can't access. Try taking ownership of the files first, give yourself access, or kill UAC if you must (though I don't suggest it, you should be able to access anything you need by taking ownership and giving your user group the rights).

Good lord...I don't even know why I read this things expecting to learn something I didn't know already. I was expecting tweaks, not basic OS information that is also relevant to many of MS's other OS's.

Time to resume reading this madness....6 looks equally stupid (sorry no other word for it....XP uses minidumps too).Throughout reading this up to step 5 I was thinking "WTH is this guy trying to accomplish here?". And then I got to Step 5 and went crazy enough to comment.

You don't need to use linux to delete something you for some reason can't access. Try taking ownership of the files first, give yourself access, or kill UAC if you must (though I don't suggest it, you should be able to access anything you need by taking ownership and giving your user group the rights).

Good lord...I don't even know why I read this things expecting to learn something I didn't know already. I was expecting tweaks, not basic OS information that is also relevant to many of MS's other OS's.

Time to resume reading this madness....6 looks equally stupid (sorry no other word for it....XP uses minidumps too).Throughout reading this up to step 5 I was thinking "WTH is this guy trying to accomplish here?". And then I got to Step 5 and went crazy enough to comment.

You don't need to use linux to delete something you for some reason can't access. Try taking ownership of the files first, give yourself access, or kill UAC if you must (though I don't suggest it, you should be able to access anything you need by taking ownership and giving your user group the rights).

Good lord...I don't even know why I read this things expecting to learn something I didn't know already. I was expecting tweaks, not basic OS information that is also relevant to many of MS's other OS's.

Time to resume reading this madness....6 looks equally stupid (sorry no other word for it....XP uses minidumps too).Throughout reading this up to step 5 I was thinking "WTH is this guy trying to accomplish here?". And then I got to Step 5 and went crazy enough to comment.

You don't need to use linux to delete something you for some reason can't access. Try taking ownership of the files first, give yourself access, or kill UAC if you must (though I don't suggest it, you should be able to access anything you need by taking ownership and giving your user group the rights).

Good lord...I don't even know why I read this things expecting to learn something I didn't know already. I was expecting tweaks, not basic OS information that is also relevant to many of MS's other OS's.

Time to resume reading this madness....6
 

Tomsguiderachel

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[citation][nom]Psy-Phi[/nom][/citation]

Hey Psy-Phi,

Is your CTRL-P macro stuck or something? Try not to waste so much space next time you make a comment, ok? It really undermines the point you are trying to make.

Thanks,
Rachel Rosmarin, Editor of Tom's Guide
 
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