A New Vista Dawning?

SecurityDude, CISSP-ISSAP is an IT consultant, Security & Privacy Advocate and blogger at large with over 20 years IT experience. SecurityDude shares tips, tricks, and info that the average networking professional will find interesting and indispensable.

I have been a pretty vocal critic of the poor stability of Windows Vista. My first experience with the product was running an “upgrade” from Windows XP to Vista Business on my Gateway Tablet PC. The Tablet PC has 2Gb RAM and an 80Gb hard drive. The Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor advised me that the CPU, RAM, Hard Drive speed and graphics card installed in the Gateway S7200C was enough to even run the Aero interface.

On this promise, I ran the Gateway Vista Upgrade CD.  Everything went pretty smooth.  Since the Gateway unit is my backup laptop, I didn’t use it a lot after the upgrade.  It wasn’t until I took it with me to Moscow in January that I got burnt.  During the three days of PowerPoint presentations I delivered, Vista blue-screened no less than twice a day.  When I returned home, I vowed, “never again”.

Well, after two years of installing and uninstalling all manners of software and drivers, my HP Pavillion DV9000 primary notebook was barely booting.  I made it through a four-week trip to Europe, the Middle East and Asia just barely. After backing up the system, I was about to reinstall XP.  That’s when I remembered the copy of Vista Ultimate and Office 2007 I had won at a Microsoft event here in town.  Instead of upgrading from my broken XP installation, I installed a new 250Gb hard drive and installed Vista from scratch.

All I can say is, “wow, what a difference”.  I have installed all of my previous software (including Network Instruments Observer 12.1) and the updated drivers for peripherals like printers, scanners and the like without a single issue.  I have been running Vista Ultimate SP1 for over a week and it has been the picture of stability.

I never thought I would utter these words but, “I like Vista”.

Tags: microsoft, vista, vista problem, vista ultimate, windows, windows vista, XP