May 28th, 2008
Do you know how I define a person's character? It's not about the mistakes he makes, and not about the deeds he does—at least not initially.
But, a person faced with his mistakes or being shown the error of his ways (not just accused of it, but actually made to see his culpability) shows character by stopping and ignoring the panic and psychic disconnect he feels, and instead examines—and admits, if need be—his failings. Basically, it's like this:
| Good Character | Bad Character |
| "I'm wrong? Oh, so I am! My bad." | "Nope, I'm not wrong. You're wrong." |
[Now for Part 2 wherein the author actually comes to his point]
Oh woe is me, that dreadful landmine-filled unreliable bug-laden piece of extruded grotch that is comically and ironically described as an operating system has done it again.
Yes, I talk once more about Microsoft Vista. This time it has started to behave strangely when surfacing to consciousness out of Sleep Mode. The screen resolution, which I like to keep at the laptop's native 1440 x 900 pixels, drops to a disproportionate view-widening 1024 x 768 as it wakes up. Apart from the irritation of having to reset it frequently, my icons get all squished into the upper left corner of the screen.
True, it takes me about 30 seconds to change the resolution back, and about that long or less to move all my icons back to where I like them, but that one minute I spend almost daily has really started to bruise my burrs.
As it turns out, it is because of the default Vista screen saver, which runs in the lower resolution. Vista lowers the resolution to play the screen saver, even though the computer is busy going off to sleep, then forgets to set the resolution back, since it is waking up into the regular OS, and not running the regular screen saver exit event. I found a description and workaround (don't use that screen saver!) online pretty quickly—here is a link to a good description of it.
But the key point in that solution is that Microsoft did not admit that this was a bug. Lots of forums have people (including MS Support people) quick to blame the hardware manufacturers or their video drivers ... but I was never fooled; Vista has been so buggy that my first assumption was that it was a Vista bug. And it was. Except Microsoft doesn't see it that way, despite the fact that it is their screen saver and their operating system's behaviour causing the problem. It's reproducible 100% now that I know how it is happening. It happens in all kinds of graphic cards running all resolutions on all kinds of systems. But still the denial.
This suggests to me that maybe the only time Microsoft Vista Tech Support would consider something to be a bug is if it directly and demonstrably resulted in death or dismemberment. Or maybe some kind of blight if it killed enough crops. But a changing screen resolution? Feh ... take a number.
So, back to my first statement about character: What kind of character is Microsoft showing its Vista customers by denying the existence of all these bugs, design issues, awkward workflows, and heavy reliance on up-to-the-instant hardware and drivers? Well, pretty much no character at all, actually.
* * *
You can stop reading here if you like, this next section is really just for me. Here is a quick list of problems I have encountered with the Vista Operating System in the 6 months since I've started using it:
| Problem (in the order encountered) |
| Solution |
|
| Elephantine slow networking |
| Bought new hardware, installed SP1 |
|
| Vista impaired (or prevented) networking for other computers on the network |
| Bought new hardware, installed SP1 |
|
| User Access Control has made workflows a nightmare |
| No solution, unless I want to hobble their security model by turning UAC completely off |
|
| User Access Control has made multiple application configurations a three-ring circus of batch files |
| No solution |
|
| Shortcuts on the desktop and Start Menu stopped working a few times |
| System Restore, then not installing some of the optional Windows Updates |
|
| Windows Installer became corrupted |
| System Restore (resulting in the need to reinstall several programs) |
|
| Service Pack 1 would not install (Windows logging service would not start because the registry entry for it was corrupted) |
| I tracked down the Windows Event Log service not starting: SP1 could not log its installation, so had to roll back each time. I further tracked that problem to a corrupted registry entry, which I manually fixed so that the Event Service would start, and SP1 would subsequently install. I told a support person at MS (in China) about this solution and a few days later she mass emailed my solution word-for-word to me and some other undisclosed recipients. (Maybe I should hit them up for a job? Naw, forget it: I don't need the headaches.) |
|
| DRM impairs network performance a small but noticeable amount |
| Nothing I can do about this; I have tried other media players, but still use WMP from time to time. |
|
| Files would not copy over the network |
| Bought new hardware |
|
| Files copied inside the same hard drive heart-achingly slow |
| Installed SP1 |
|
| Compressed files take an order of magnitude longer to decompress than in XP |
| At first I used an open-source freeware decompression utility. I didn't need it after I installed SP1 |
|
| Keyboard and mouse stopped working! |
| This was the worst mess so far with Vista! I keep regular backups, so I lost no data, but I had to completely dump and reload Vista from scratch. If I could have, I would have installed XP instead, but some of my hardware doesn't have XP drivers. After dumping and reloading the OS, I had to reinstall all my applications, all my games, an endless stream of updates (including SP1 again), then restore my user files and documents from backup. |
|
| Screen resolution changing after sleep mode |
| Stop using Vista's own screen saver: just use a blank screen |
|
Actually, there were other little problems here and there that don't merit mention, but this list is impressive enough to show just the kind of misery this OS is putting me through. Thank God my old XP laptop still works like a charm; it has carried me through those Vista-induced rough times.
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