Windows Vista and My Early Annoyances

Well, after a long absence, it is time to let you in on what I've been working with. My home-built PC's motherboard died in February 2007, so I decided to just purchase a complete new system. I bought an HP m7750n desktop system with the 19" widescreen display. So far, I have been pleased with the system. It came with Windows Vista Home Premium and I will have to admit, I really wanted to post a blog and rant against Vista. I've since cooled down and the OS updates have solved the annoying problems I first had.

In defense of Microsoft, not all the problems were Microsoft's. Many of the vendors of the older equipment I tried to use with Vista were doing a "wait and see" when it came to providing drivers and console applications for their products. This caused Microsoft to be blasted for being incompatible with most existing equipment.

One example for me is my HP PSC1315 All-in-One printer. It had this neat little console application that allowed me to scan, print, and other things. There was no console program for Vista because HP had not developed one. One did not show up until late Fall 2007. So I could still use the printer to print, but could not scan. The HP support site recommended using the scan feature of Windows Vista, but that feature is only available in the Vista Business and Vista Ultimate versions. My system came with Vista Home Premium. Now that I have the new console program from HP, everything works fine.

Another annoying problem that Vista had was the extremely slow decompress time for unzipping zip files. When I would try to unzip a file with the built-in decompression software, the display would show a blazing 2 bytes per second decompression speed. Even relatively small zip files took days to decompress. I solved this by buying WinZip and associating it as my decompress software. I don't know if this has been fixed in any of the Vista updates.

And my last annoying problem was with a Simpleshare network storage drive. On Windows XP, I could connect to the drive using DNS naming which was neat because I did not have to enter the IP address for the drive to map it into Windows Explorer. Windows Vista did not allow DNS access to the drive at the time because the protocol that Vista used to connect to the drive contained a new layer of security. Sometime along the way with Vista updates, I did get an update that allows me to use the DNS method for connecting to the drive.

Overall though, I would say that my Windows Vista is running well now. It is different! The HP system I bought is not really a big honking processor with gigs of memory, but it still performs well with Vista.