The Ow Starts Now

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The most bizarre by far though, was that despite finding a Vista driver for the office printer I could not get anything from Excel 2007 to print out in landscape mode. I was actually quite surprised to find that there was even a driver for the Samsung MFP considering the problems HP has at providing Vista support for its drivers. It was mad though, Word would print happily in portrait mode but Excel would not. I even uploaded the spreadsheet to Google docs, but Firefox wouldn’t print in landscape mode either. It seems it’s a driver issue though, as I don’t have the problem with the same file with my home machine.

Apart from the Creative issue and the printing quirk my work machine is acceptable, but my home machine degenerated until it was locking up all the time. It seems that I had some kind of malware that had got it, despite Windows Defender being fully patched. So another no good Vista feature.

The only solution was a complete reinstall, (with AVG Anti-Spyware) and amazingly Vista is now behaving itself. The RAID problems seem to have cleared up, and so have the user switching issues.

Now I’m past these things I can actually see that there is actually a half decent OS here. The Instant Search has to be the single biggest improvement over XP: you just start typing and the app or whatever you’re looking for pops up. And yes, MacOS X has had this feature since Tiger, released April 2005.

With all this hassle I’ve realised that it’s only because I have access to a lot of PC hardware and a desire to play PC games that keeps me attached to Windows, at least at home. If I had to buy my PCs I’d be sorely tempted to just run a Mac for work stuff. I can really see why some people do this, and just use consoles for gaming.

It’s all too easy to bash Microsoft for all these installation hassles compared to the Mac, but when you consider the myriad hardware combinations that are available on the PC, compared to the very small variations of Mac its actually quite impressive that Vista works at all.

That’s small consolation though if you’re one of the many suffering problems. The internet is awash with negative comments about problems getting Vista to work properly. In the office most people are sticking firmly with XP, until there’s a damn good reason to ‘upgrade’.

From my installation experience, I don’t blame them and if you’re thinking of taking the plunge I’d stay well away until Service Pack 1 arrives and is fully out and tested. It’s rumoured for an imminent beta release with a final version coming in November. That could mean waiting till next year, but if you can hang on that long (to play Crysis in DirectX 10, I expect) you could be saving yourself a lot of hassle. People are getting fed up - they just want their OS to work .

Message to Microsoft – don’t screw Service Pack 1 up – it could be your last chance.

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