It’s no secret. Even Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer said that the latest Windows Vista is a “work in progress”. I was hoping that at least some of the problems, such as extremely slow file transfers & operations, network connection issues, and others, would be fixed in Service Pack 1.
Of course, SP1 release itself was plagued by issues, which caused Microsoft to pause automatic installs through Windows Update several times (it is for this reason I always turn off automatic updates). So finally, thinking they’ve resolved the issues, I got the balls to install SP1 on my Asus R1F laptop. The install took forever – I could have installed XP on another PC in the time it took to install SP1 – but was mostly automatic, so required no intervention. Imagine my surprise when I tried working with some files on my home network, to find the speed to be about the same as before the upgrade! VPN was still painfully slow, and it appeared no issues were addressed at all!
That’s not all. All of a sudden, the laptop started crashing every fifteen to twenty minutes, for no apparent reason. This only happened when it would be running on battery power, and often happened in the middle of work, making me lose all unsaved changes, and corrupting files processing at the time of freeze up. There was no blue screen message, no entry in the windows event log – nothing. After not receiving any help from Asus/AMD, I uninstalled SP1, using Microsoft’s helpful guide here. The problem went away.
So let me get this straight – the latest Vista is worse than unpatched Vista, which in turn is worse than Windows XP… Thank you Microsoft for redefining “progress.”