Vista is broken

Vista has not had good press since its release. And I can see why. Despite the eye candy Aero interface, it’s what’s under the bonnet that counts, and a lot of reviews certainly point to deficiencies in Vista when compared to its immediate predecessor, XP. I ran XP Professional from the start and at least from SP2, it was a really good, stable OS. Maybe it’s worth remembering that. XP had loads of blue screens of death before the first service pack, that’s for sure, and it wasn’t until SP2 that it became a really stable, first class OS.

Anyway, I think Vista has lots of improvements in lots of areas, but I also have my pet hates. The almost non stop UAC requests drive me crazy, and I was annoyed at first that some of my older programs wouldn’t run correctly on it. But worst of all was my experience with the Security Centre, and it’s really that I wanted to talk about.

My installation of Vista broke on the second day I had it after it froze up trying to install a monitor driver. After I rebooted, my Security Centre was broken. I couldn’t turn Defender on, Vista didn’t recognise my anti-virus program, and I couldn’t set restore points at all. Some of the Windows updates wouldn’t install, and it was, all in all, a right pain in the ass. My well thought out strategy (well, I thought it was well thought out) of having my OS disk in a Raid array failed miserably as I realised I now simply had a broken OS on two disks. Microsoft of course were no help at all. Their poorly trained support staff had no interest in getting their hands dirty meddling about in the guts of the OS, and would have me attempt an in place repair of the whole OS, an effort which took 2 hours and achieved absolutely nothing (except a whole lot of anxiety for me).

Then I read that SP1 was coming out, and I knew it wouldn’t work for me as long as the Security issues were as they were. I decided I had to either fix the issue or completely re-install the OS, and all my apps. (Groan…) So I decided to try and fix it. I searched and searched on the net and finally found a thread on a forum with the precise symptoms I had, and I thought I was home and hosed. Unfortunately the fix, repairing the repository, didn’t work for me as it had for all the lucky people in that thread. Why I could not fathom.

But if I have a quality with computers it is patience. I posted my issue on a couple of Windows Tech forums, but no one seemed willing or able to help me. Finally I found TechNet, Microsoft’s enormous technical forum, and eventually found a forum that dealt with Vista Security issues. I posted a description of my problems and waited.

It wasn’t a straight forward process. It took weeks of back and forth, trying different things and isolating problems. It didn’t look like it was going to work. But I persisted, and finally today, it all got sorted!!! For those that are interested, the WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) was well and truly stuffed along with the repository. I’m not techie enough to really understand all we did to repair it, but if you want to look at the thread it’s here.

All I know is now I face the prospect of installing SP1. Another chance for everything to go horribly wrong I suppose. Don’t you just love Windows!!!

Updated to say I’ve been looking at the 24″ iMac and it’s looking pretty damn sexy right now….