That was the smell of the spacecraft, not the smell of space. It makes perfect sense since the spacecraft is made of metal welded together. This is a stupid article not worthly of Slashdot.
I have Vista running at home. As a whole, Vista seems significantly more stable that previous versions of Windows. I have had no blue screens. I have had the screen driver crash at one time and all that happened is that the driver restarted (again, no blue screens). However, I cannot recommend Vista to anyone because of the support Microsoft has been giving the product.
I started out with one major problem. I had Vista Premium. Unfortunately for me, I found that fax support has been removed from all Vista versions except Vista Ultimate. Score one for Microsoft marketing. I also started learning Russian and decided I could justify an upgrade to Vista Ultimate because of both the fax and language support.
I finally purchased the upgrade to Ultimate. There was some problems because I only had a single DVD in my disk set. You need a second upgrade DVD to to the upgrade and getting this ran into some minor issues which were resolved.
After successfully installing the Ultimate upgrade, I decided that since I paid for all the language packs, I should install all of them. Attempting to select all the language packs and install them doesn't work. Most fail. It took me over an hour to get two language packs installed at a time. I did this for several days and eventually had about 20 language packs installed. I then started getting an error code 2. I checked the Internet and found a hotfix that was supposed to deal with this. After installing the hotfix, my system became unbootable. After paying about $60 for a MS support phone call, the only solution they could come up with was for me to reformat my C drive and reinstall.
I was not very happy but since I needed my system, I complied. About two weeks later, I started getting threatining system messages saying that I had an invalid license key and my system was going to be deactivated. Again I called MS. I spent two hours on the phone talking with people that agreed I was entitled to a valid license key but had no idea as to how to obtain one. Eventually, there was apparently one woman at the company that was in charge of assigning license keys. I eventually got a new license key. The problem was caused by my doing the install from the upgrade disk. I guess I was supposed to know that I should have installed the original Vista Premium before I installed Vista Ultimate.
Sometime after the second install, I tried connecting a camera I have to my system. The use of this camera is very important on this system. Apparently, I connected the camera before I installed the camera driver and a MS default driver was installed. I then tried to install the correct driver written by Canon. The system refused to use the Canon driver. I contacted Canon. It turns out that I hade two registry entries under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\USB. The problem is that you could just delete these entries under previous versions of Windows but Canon knows of no way of deleting an entry under Windows. Canon suggested getting a flash card reader for my system to solve this. I purchased a flashcard reader but the reader hung when reading a card. I may be looking to try another reinstall.
The bottom line is that all new complex programs have bugs. MS is not addressing the fixing of their bugs. I paid to have the language pack problem looked at by MS. The impression I got is that the customer service techs had no access to the code and were not allowed to bother the programmers. The second registry problem under Vista is a fairly common. It is a major problem for things like cameras and no one at MS has made any hint of addressing it. So ever since Big Bill left, it looks as if MS is becoming business incompetent.
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That was the smell of the spacecraft, not the smell of space. It makes perfect sense since the spacecraft is made of metal welded together. This is a stupid article not worthly of Slashdot.
I have Vista running at home. As a whole, Vista seems significantly more stable that previous versions of Windows. I have had no blue screens. I have had the screen driver crash at one time and all that happened is that the driver restarted (again, no blue screens). However, I cannot recommend Vista to anyone because of the support Microsoft has been giving the product. I started out with one major problem. I had Vista Premium. Unfortunately for me, I found that fax support has been removed from all Vista versions except Vista Ultimate. Score one for Microsoft marketing. I also started learning Russian and decided I could justify an upgrade to Vista Ultimate because of both the fax and language support. I finally purchased the upgrade to Ultimate. There was some problems because I only had a single DVD in my disk set. You need a second upgrade DVD to to the upgrade and getting this ran into some minor issues which were resolved. After successfully installing the Ultimate upgrade, I decided that since I paid for all the language packs, I should install all of them. Attempting to select all the language packs and install them doesn't work. Most fail. It took me over an hour to get two language packs installed at a time. I did this for several days and eventually had about 20 language packs installed. I then started getting an error code 2. I checked the Internet and found a hotfix that was supposed to deal with this. After installing the hotfix, my system became unbootable. After paying about $60 for a MS support phone call, the only solution they could come up with was for me to reformat my C drive and reinstall. I was not very happy but since I needed my system, I complied. About two weeks later, I started getting threatining system messages saying that I had an invalid license key and my system was going to be deactivated. Again I called MS. I spent two hours on the phone talking with people that agreed I was entitled to a valid license key but had no idea as to how to obtain one. Eventually, there was apparently one woman at the company that was in charge of assigning license keys. I eventually got a new license key. The problem was caused by my doing the install from the upgrade disk. I guess I was supposed to know that I should have installed the original Vista Premium before I installed Vista Ultimate. Sometime after the second install, I tried connecting a camera I have to my system. The use of this camera is very important on this system. Apparently, I connected the camera before I installed the camera driver and a MS default driver was installed. I then tried to install the correct driver written by Canon. The system refused to use the Canon driver. I contacted Canon. It turns out that I hade two registry entries under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\USB. The problem is that you could just delete these entries under previous versions of Windows but Canon knows of no way of deleting an entry under Windows. Canon suggested getting a flash card reader for my system to solve this. I purchased a flashcard reader but the reader hung when reading a card. I may be looking to try another reinstall. The bottom line is that all new complex programs have bugs. MS is not addressing the fixing of their bugs. I paid to have the language pack problem looked at by MS. The impression I got is that the customer service techs had no access to the code and were not allowed to bother the programmers. The second registry problem under Vista is a fairly common. It is a major problem for things like cameras and no one at MS has made any hint of addressing it. So ever since Big Bill left, it looks as if MS is becoming business incompetent.