Hasta la vista, Vista

Posted on Thursday, July 19, 2007 @ 17:25 CET

Seriously that's the best title I could come up with. Sorry.

At work I got a new Dell XPS system - a great machine but it sure ain't no Mac. And this puppy runs Vista Business to boot. Its the first time I've used Vista as a primary dev machine and although Aero is kinda cool, several apps I use daily have problems with it and have to revert to Vista Basic.

For example, Flash 8. Double clicking on the stage to navigate within a movieclip results in a slooow animation. Same when you double-click on an empty part of the stage to navigate back out. Painful. FlexBuilder also has issues from time to time and switches to Vista Basic by itself - unsure when and where this occurs but it does happen from time to time.

And the security prompts. After every other breath (it sure seems that way) you get prompted for this and that. No password mind you, just a dramatic, fade-out of everything and a popup box with OK/Cancel buttons. Luckily clicking through these without reading the message is a skill you pickup after about an hour - which totally defeats their purpose.

On a side note the XPS is a beast. 3GB of RAM, dual 2.4 GHz processor, 256MB ATI Radeon X1300. And it gets a 4.2 on the Windows Experience Index! Incredibly low, or so I thought. You see its not 4.2/10, no no. Its 4.2/5.9. Say whaaa?

Anyways, these are just annoyances and overall it works fine. Migrating from XP is no picnic though - finding where things are now is not always as easy as it could be. But today I swore it off.

I get to work, the PC is off and has been since Monday (its Friday). I turn it on and it tries to get into Windows but instead reboots. This happens three times and then I get the option to do a "startup repair." So I try it.

After a short time of checking this and that I get the following message:

Unspecified changes while the PC was off? Interesting. So I look through the System Recovery Options and select System Restore. Maybe an update (from Microsoft mind you) screwed things up.

And nothing happens.

So I click System Restore again and get the following message:

And nothing happens.

Well, maybe that's broken too. So I click on "Windows Complete PC Restore" for giggles.

Granted, I haven't backed up this three week old machine but all the code is in Subversion so it doesn't matter. Anyways, up pops System Restore (maybe it took a while to launch) and I try to restore to the closest restore point (before some Windows Updates on Monday). After a few minutes, the following pops up:

Try again with a different restore point and I get the same error. So lets try to read the FAQ. Click and:

So why not remove the link then?

Last option available: Dell Factory Image Restore. Since Dell was nice enough to partition the harddisk with one partition containing the factory state of the machine restoring this should be simple, and sure enough it worked.

So now the machine is back to its original state, without any of the apps I installed nor the configuration. While restoring Microsoft Marketing said: "Getting it done just got more fun."

Sure dying after three weeks for no apparent reason is fun.

So now its become a seat for the MacBook Pro to sit on. I'll get to installing XP or some Linux distro on that pig but I'm done with Vista. I'm more of a cat person anyways.

- paulo

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