bobpeers -> blog

I installed Vista SP1 on my girlfriends computer yesterday (it’s in Danish which wasn’t one of the original release languages, hence the delay) and was disappointed to find that her computers network problem has not been fixed.

After writing about Microsofts problems with selling Vista to businesses it was funny to read this article where Steve Ballmer describes Vista as a ‘work in progress’.

As the article says, every piece of software is actually a work in progress, we all expect new verisons and enhansments to be released, but for such a figure to say this while at the same time trying to convince corporations to embrace Vista it sounds like for a moment he forgot his marketing spiel and the truth slipped out

After my recent problems with networking in Vista I’ve come across even more serious issues.

Last weekend we visited my girlfriends brothers who bought a new computer last year but have never been able to get it connected to the internet. It’s common in many flats in Denmark that the building has it’s own internet connection that is then shared amongst the flats; basically creating a LAN in the building. It’s fast, cheap and if it fails then it’s not your problem to fix.

I was trying to get a connection (they have Vista Home Premium) but all it kept saying was that the LAN connection could not be identified. I tried every possible fix but nothing would get me a valid IP address. Her brother told me that they had been warned that the buildings LAN didn’t work with Vista and they should get a router to connect through so they had bough one just in case.

Sure enough as soon as I connected the router everything worked without a hitch, they router was assigned an IP address and the router gave out an IP address to the computer.

The sheer fact they they were forced to spend money on a router that should be totally unnecessary amazes me. It basically means that everyone in their building buying a new computer will have to also buy a router, unbelievable!

This exercise in futility also made me think more about carrying around a bootable USB with some Linux distribution installed, or maybe a Linux Live CD to be used for testing and diagnostic tasks. One of the problems I had was that I couldn’t easily tell if the problem lay with Vista or maybe there was no internet connection at all. If I could have booted into Linux I could have easily diagnosed the problem and been sure it was with Vista from the start.

Type these words into Google and you quickly see there’s plenty of problems with networking and Vista. My own particular problem drives me crazy as it seems there’s no fix apart from manually resetting the network adapter every time it drops the connection.

It doesn’t happen straight away, but after some time (often after the computer has been woken from sleep) the network icon says I only have ‘Local connection’, not local and internet. Even this isn’t strictly true since I cannot connect to my router, I actually have no connection at all.

If I right click the icon and select ‘Diagnose and repair’ to open the fancy ‘Vista Network Diagnostics And Troubleshooting tool’ it suggests this.

After resetting the network adapter everything works fine again every time. This sort of bug is very irritating, even more so for my girlfriend who is not so technical ;-).

I can hardly believe Vista shipped with so many network issues that still haven’t been resolved. Hopefully the soon to be available Service Pack 1 will fix this but I’m not holding my breath.

It seems that the well known system requirements for Vista have caused some confusion, even amongst IT professionals.

The other day at work I was sending a couple of 2-3 year old HP desktop PCs in to IT support to have Windows XP Professional installed along with Office 2003. These are not cutting edge machines but they have 3GHz Pentium 4’s and 512MB of RAM, more than enough for a business PC running office applications.

Their response was that they didn’t think they would run Windows XP without 1GB of RAM. My 4 year old laptop with a 1.3GHz processor and 512MB of RAM runs XP and office just fine and the last time I checked the requirements for Windows XP it said 128MB of RAM was required.

I know that new computers all have at least 1GB of RAM but the idea that you need this to do anything is just not true (at least if not using Vista). It seems that people have heard so much about how you need X MB of RAM or a dual core processor that the average processing power of a PC is far greater than most people require.

I often see adverts from high street computer stores describing quite high-spec machines as ‘good for basic text editing, email and browsing the internet’ when that’s the sort of thing that can be done on a mobile phone these days.

It’s one of the (many) reasons I use Linux, it does all I require and much more without making me feel like I need to upgrade my laptop every 6 months.