Windows is Trying Hard to Push Me Over To a Mac...

[J-Mac]

Frustration level is about at the boiling point all the time now with Windows.  If not one version, then another.

My desktop PC has been the absolute buggiest piece of expensive junk I have ever owned - and I've had some real junker cars in my time.  Lots of Windows issues along the way using XP Pro -- but then again this machine seems to have a myriad of hardware gremlins also.

Now it's my new Dell XPS M-1330 notebook.  Pretty high-end computer, and also not cheap. Decent dual-core Intel processor, 4 GB RAM, lots of other fancy crap on it. And Vista Ultimate along with Office 2007.

First, the fingerprint login disappeared.  Stayed away for three or four startups.  Then returned as if nothing had happened.  Also, a handful of icons on the desktop went away - gone from the computer altogether!  Fixed that manually - the hard way.  I also noticed that a number of shortcuts in the Start>All Programs menu are bad.  All those had to replaced manually.  Some fun on a new machine.

Next, Microsoft Updates.  What else.  It has had 2 critical Office 2007 updates for me for two weeks now, but installation fails every time I install them.  One is Office 2007 SP1.  No good reason noted anywhere for failing.  Just tells me the the installation failed.  Actually it tells me this every time I turn it on.  Of course it always checks my patches, sees that those two are missing, and tries to install them again.  But they have failed 16 times now, so I ignore the update notification.  Pretty persistent, though.  I have searched the MS site, the MSDN site, and everywhere else, but though it seems a lot of users are getting this, there are no good fixes for it.  Reinstall Office, Windows, sacrifice a live chicken and dance around swinging it over my head - no deal.

Next, my brand new, very light Firefox 2.0.0.12 installation crashes often all of a sudden.  If I am on this PC for an hour Firefox will crash 6 or 8 times.  After plenty of troubleshooting, I am using Opera on the notebook.  Can't use RoboForm or other extensions, but at least it isn't crashing.

Then yesterday shortly after starting the notebook I got a good, old-fashioned BSOD!  Damn!  Couldn't see what it said because it restarted too quickly.  So I figured I would look at the Event Viewer to see what happened.  Nope.  Event Viewer cannot start.  Service has not started.  Try to start that manually - won't do it.  Again, I searched high and low, and though a lot of users are seeing this, there are no official solutions from MS. Event Viewer WAS working just fine before.  Now it appears to be gone.

I did read, from a poster on a forum somewhere, that NOD32 was causing similar issues with the latter Vista betas.  So I figured I would shut it down for a while and see if things worked any better.  Guess what?!?!  Can't shut down NOD32!!!  I can on my XP Pro machine.  But not on Vista.  Searched for a workaround for that.  Only solution is to remove it from the startup folder!!

Man, this machine is only a month and a half old!!

When I think back to all the trials and tribulations of Windows 95, 98, and Me, I fully realize that....  it is not rose-colored glasses that are blinding me;  none of those were actually as buggy - at least for me -- as these two computers!!

Sorry - Just needed a good whine.

Jim

[mouser]

maybe back up your hd and downgrade to XP Pro.

[lanux128]

if you had these problems right from the beginning then it is time to bring Dell into the matter.

[J-Mac]

if you had these problems right from the beginning then it is time to bring Dell into the matter.

-lanux128 (April 22, 2008, 12:59 AM)

I will.  But Dell and I have a history, so I was hoping to avoid it.  Having a long purchase history there over the years and seeing their product quality and support go downhill, I was not looking forward to this.

Jim

[lanux128]

then i assume that you had bought your desktop & notebook at the same time and both came up pretty badly. and as mouser suggested, try to get a downgrade to WinXP since XP has more stable drivers.

[J-Mac]

Nope - desktop is a Falcon Northwest Mach V purchased in June 2006; that one has had some time to really drive me crazy.  Already replaced two Seagate SATA internal 500 GB drives, the multimedia cardreader three times, the graphics card - an nVidia Geforce 7900 GTX was just replaced last month with a GeForce 8800 GT, and the Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi Extreme Music was replaced six months ago.  Never saw so many damn parts fail.

Dell notebook is less than two months old.

Jim

[J-Mac]

BTW, I was so sick of Dell that I shopped for a nice custom-built PC. That's how I decided on Falcon Northwest.  Reviews of their machines are always perfect.  Leave it to me to get a lemon.

And I wasn't about to get another from them when I was shopping for a notebook.  Dell has upgraded their notebooks quite a bit since  I jhad last purchased, and this XPS was on sale.  Ha!

Jim

[mediaguycouk]

I like whining so I'll jump in.

I spent Christmas with a work macbook to try and learn it (my job is in IT support). I spent my time making a flash media server security module and a flash video player to communicate with it. After Christmas I just love my windows pc more.

OK, so the first couple of days were the generic 'how the hell does this work' stuff, but it mostly wasn't. OSX crashed every time you close the lid while connected to VPN. The speed of connecting to a share is at least 3 times slower than on XP and twice as slow as Vista. Also Flash would crash every 30 minutes or less. It was practicatlly a case of saving the file every time I clicked on a new frame or did a preview as I would expect it to fail.

My other half has just got a M1330 and it is lovely. Currently quick, she likes the fact that her old games are working on it despite being unsuitable for Vista and she has got the hang of vista quickly.

My recommendation for your laptop? Get your discs out and put Vista on it again, install your apps and get yourself a copy of Ghost / TrueImage / etc and make yourself a nice rescue disc. Partition your space to give you a applications and documents on different hard drives and then you can recover a new operating system any time it goes bad.

It probably won't, but it just gives you the oppotunity to thrash and trash the OS whenever you like.

[Fred Nerd]

Vista problems:
Was reading a bit about them on Ask Leo the other day. Try a reinstall of Vista. This isn't just the usual "try rebooting advice", retailers are finding that they have to reinstall Vista as a pre-delivery on all computers since otherwise they have way to many fail like you are describing.

The article is pretty recent on www.ask-leo.com, so it should be easy to find. Hope that helps.

[Carol Haynes]

You are not alone.

How about this article:

See: http://blogs.zdnet.c...=429&tag=nl.e539

for the full article.

[J-Mac]

I like whining so I'll jump in.

-mediaguycouk (April 22, 2008, 04:05 AM)

Oh, then you'll love me!

My other half has just got a M1330 and it is lovely. Currently quick, she likes the fact that her old games are working on it despite being unsuitable for Vista and she has got the hang of vista quickly.

My recommendation for your laptop? Get your discs out and put Vista on it again, install your apps and get yourself a copy of Ghost / TrueImage / etc and make yourself a nice rescue disc. Partition your space to give you a applications and documents on different hard drives and then you can recover a new operating system any time it goes bad.

It probably won't, but it just gives you the oppotunity to thrash and trash the OS whenever you like.

Reinstalling Vista is exactly what I am doing.  However I just wanted to vent a little!

Thanks!

Jim

[J-Mac]

Fred, Carol:

At least I'm not alone, then!

As for disk imaging software - I already do have it.  But as I think this OS was already crapped out when I got the machine, I can't see mounting an image that is most like bad itself.

Thanks!

Jim

[tomos]

As for disk imaging software - I already do have it.  But as I think this OS was already crapped out when I got the machine, I can't see mounting an image that is most like bad itself.

-J-Mac (April 22, 2008, 11:03 AM)

better luck with the new install hopefully

[J-Mac]

Thanks Tom!  If not, I'm going to find myself back using pen & paper again!

Jim

[J-Mac]

Vista problems:
Was reading a bit about them on Ask Leo the other day. Try a reinstall of Vista. This isn't just the usual "try rebooting advice", retailers are finding that they have to reinstall Vista as a pre-delivery on all computers since otherwise they have way to many fail like you are describing.

The article is pretty recent on www.ask-leo.com, so it should be easy to find. Hope that helps.

-Fred Nerd (April 22, 2008, 07:09 AM)

Sorry Fred:  I have searched high and low on the Ask Leo site and cannot find the article you mentioned.

BTW, navigation and search there is, well, kind of primitive. Not any fun looking for stuff there.  Pet peeve:  search results that are RSS feeds but not identified as such.  Grrrr.  Clicking on a result auto-opens FeedDemon and tries to subscribe to the feed.  Not that Leo's site is a bad addition to my feeds, but I generally don't like it when URL's aren't identified as RSS; my RSS reader can get way overfilled that way!

Thanks!

Jim

[Jimdoria]

This may be redundant, but have you ruled out hardware issues?

I had a lot of freezing/crashing issues with one of my XP machines until I ran MS's memory testing utility and found that one of my RAM chips was failing some of the tests. Replaced it and my system's been much better ever since.

Bad hard disk sectors could also cause issues like you describe.

[mediaguycouk]

Should be easy enough to tell. Turn on the laptop holding the Ctrl key (I'm fairly sure it's ctrl, if it isn't it is the Fn key) and then run the memory test.

[J-Mac]

This may be redundant, but have you ruled out hardware issues?

I had a lot of freezing/crashing issues with one of my XP machines until I ran MS's memory testing utility and found that one of my RAM chips was failing some of the tests. Replaced it and my system's been much better ever since.

Bad hard disk sectors could also cause issues like you describe.

-Jimdoria (April 23, 2008, 09:31 AM)

I haven't ruled anything out yet. Brand new, and just starting to give me trouble.

Oddly enough it sounds like you and I just went through very similar hardware issues - but on my desktop PC (the other one I whined about in the first post!)

However the blog post by Ed Bott that Carol posted a link to mentions that a lot of users are seeing very similar issues and only solve it by reinstalling the OS.  Also, I am finding a LOT of folks posting the exact same Event Viewer.MMC Snap-in problem as I am seeing.

Grrr...

Thanks!

Jim