Huh?

Did you help write the new Microsoft commercials? They too seem to be pointless.

vista's bad, but windows live mail is worse. it has the same bugs as windows mail and is slower. don't like the interface of wlm, either, with all of the accounts listed in the folder pane. in oe, i move the messages from the other accounts to a single folder, i don't need inbox, sent, deleted and whatever other folders are the default for every email account i have set up.

And to think I almost bought a notebook preloaded with Vista Ultimate! I figured by now most of the bugs and troubles would be fixed.

Thanks for saving my life Joe.

I'll stick with the quaint French villa.

Joe says;
"Deleting the messages was going to be 50 messages at a time at Gmail in a browser, so I went back to Apple Mail, purged the All Mail folder and then waited seemingly forever for the couple thousand messages to synchronize as deleted with the Gmail server."

So you going run back to Mac every time you can't figure out how to do something in Vista? Not that I blame you, actually.

Since you been using Mac mostly most of the time you have been writing all the nice things about how "Vista is really not that bad," one has to ask, just how bad is it? Obviously, its bad if even one of its biggest defender will not even use it. You will once again be running back to Mac in less than a month, pretending to still be using Vista. Tell me, does the Microsoft advertising have a big effect on the articles that are on this site?

Conway's Law: any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it.

So one part of Vista thinks you have a network connection, while another part doesn't? Those groups probably had trouble communicating while Vista was being developed, and this is the result. Can't figure out why things would fail so many times, and just magically start working after trying one last time? Again, that's the unstructured tangle of interdependencies in the Vista code, reflecting the convoluted interdepartmental rivalries that led to its creation in the first place.

Vista on my PCs (a Dell Inspiron, an assembled kick ass gaming machine and a MacBook) wakes up from sleep in a blink of an eye, so I guess that on your machine there's some problem with a driver, not with Vista itself.

Go to the Control Panel - > System and Maintenance -> Performance Information and Tools then select on the left panel Advanced tools and check if there is an entry under the Perfomance Issue about waking up from sleep.

In my personal experience drivers make a big difference when using Vista, for example I tried an Asus A8Js that has almost identical hardware compared to my Dell Inspiron (same CPU, same Ram, same HD, same video card) just to find that the Asus takes twice as much to boot (clean installation and same services activated on both machines).

BTW on the MacBook I never had problems with Vista running under BootCamp, on the other hand I had three kernel panic under Leopard, so not all French villas have the same solid walls ;-)

Enough already. If you don't like the stuff you use stop using it. All we need is more whiners. If you hate windows so much move on and let's get someone here that will actually report news and quit whining about how you don't like it.

Why dedicate the first paragraph of a rant against Vista to smashing Google? Perhaps because most people will not read past the first paragraph?

Not sure why you get so much spam and virus's with GMail. Personally my hotmail account is much worse at filtering and Postini is the defacto standard for protecting corporate email.

I'm certainly not in love with Vista, but it's more from an ROI over XP issue that get's me (aka very little reason to upgrade over what XP already offered for half the resources).

I would suspect that your wireless problem is related to your laptop drivers. Might want to verify that you are running the latest ones. This isn't hard, but it's not as elegant as Mac. Simply go to the manufacturer's site (aka Dell). Just type in the service code on the bootom of your computer and voila - install and download the latest drivers. Unfortunately, this is something that Windows users do have to get used to, but it's not really more complicated than that. I do agree that wireless in Vista is a bit aof a step-backwards. Good point.

Other than that issue, however, your post rambles on about Google, AIM, and other third-party software that I'm lost as to how they are relevant to Vista. I have had a GMAIL account for 2 years now and amazingly, I've not received a single virus. I'm even running IE8 - no viruses here.

In any case, at least half your post is complaining about things that aren't even Vista-related, so I think you really need to stop and think before you post in the future. What does Google e-mail viruses have to do with Vista? Talka about comparing apples and oranges.

In your rush to diss on Vista it appears you had to pull everything from your experiences and place them on Microsoft's back, which frankly isn't fair. If you can't realize the difference then I'm confused as to why you are even allowed to write blogs - you discredit yourself immensely and your point is lost and you come across as a whiner.

As for the Mac, I've had corrupted preferences and other issues as well, so it's certainly not a bed of roses in that camp either.

My Vista computer was working fine until Apple installed their latest iTunes fiasco on it. Might want to think about that before you start complaining about Microsoft and giving kudos to Apple.

TY,
- Cindy...

Joe, I saw the same, or else a very similar, issue with Gmail. From Thunderbird via IMAP4, I deleted all of my spam and then selected "Compress folders" which invokes the IMAP command to synch (according to the docs, anyway).

All of a sudden, my Blackberry started getting all of that spam (that I thought was deleted) in its inbox. I had to go through and delete each one of those 90+ messages.

Since then, I let Gmail clean up its own spam and I don't bother doing it myself anymore.

We have 4 computers at home, 3 with XP and a brand new laptop with Vista. On our wireless network the 3 XP computers never have any problems. But the Vista laptop loses the network every few days and needs to be rebooted. Problem is, once it loses the network, holding down the power button won't shut it off. The only way is to unplug it and remove the battery. Not very friendly. This is a good Toshiba laptop with all the SPs and Windows Updates installed. The XP computers are only re-booted on patch Tuesdays and would probably go much longer if it wasn't for Windows Update needing a re-boot.

Did you let your teenage daughter write the column for you? The same opinions we've grown to love/hate/ignore are still present, but the presentation was quite immature.

The Hand wrote: "So you going run back to Mac every time you can't figure out how to do something in Vista? Not that I blame you, actually."

You made me laugh. Seriously. I've been a Vista defender. Repeatedly. You shouldn't take my writing about slow adoption as being negative. That's market reality. Vista's bad buzz was deserved early on, but not now.

Joe

I think a lot of your problems have to do with Vista 64 bit. I have Ultimate 64 bit on my laptop (an HP as well) and it takes forever to come back up after sleep. All the other laptops in my office are 32 bit and they come up right away after sleep. I have also seen Dells that come back up with no delay at all. They are also a lot more responsive in general. I wonder if it is an Nvidia driver problem.

My 32-bit Vista machine wakes up from sleep near instantly as well. Sounds like you have something odd going on. Spell check for IE8 would be nice and is overdue. IE7 Pro was my solution previously, but the spell checker wasn't working when I initially installed IE8b2. Not sure if others have it working?

There are some things you really shouldn't go back to. Microsoft's flawed, rotten products and vendor lock-in are some of them.

Hi,

We used to have a NetGear Router with a cable modem from our ISP provider here in New York.

Everything worked great and I can fine tune the router with no problems even though most of our pc's are from dell.
We have different versions of Windows, One XP PRO, one XP HOME, one VISTA ULTIMATE, one VISTA PREMIUM.
I have all the pc's internet connection handle by Windows through DHCP.
However, I had made the address static with no problem.

All the Dell laptops come with a configuration utility for the Ethernet/Wireless card, but non was causing a router to completely dropped internet connection since they were loading at startup, but not managing the connection.

The network center on both Vista's Machine was always showing a green light all the way to the internet.

A month ago we switched to Verizon Fios.
This service comes with a router/modem combination.

I wanted to set the router to assigned the same IP to the pc's so I click on Lease Type = Static.

And for sometime the router kept the address.

As soon as we started using this router I noticed that Vista network center would display a green light to the router but no connection to the internet (showing a red X), even though we have internet connection.

Suddenly the router began dropping complete connections to the pc and internet.
When using the Verizon diagnostic utility, it will indicate that a Dell, Linksys or other application managing the broadband connection was interfering with the connection, to turn it off, re-start the router.

I knew all the pc's internet connections were being handle by windows, however the fact that I left the utility from Dell load was actually trying to communicate with the router and in the process creating a conflict.
I disable them from start up, and now I don't get that message anymore.

As the lease between the router and ISP server was renew, all the IP addresses were set to what ever the router wanted and instead of continuously assign addresses from 1 to 7 it started counting higher and now we were getting to 9, 10, 11 and so on when the first seven were available.

I called Verizon and they told me that they did not support Static IP addresses and that they had to be set on each computer.
They don't have an option like the NetGear Router did, but they do have a setting under the profile you are using on how long the least will last under that connection.
It was set to 1400 minutes which is 24 hours, I just increase this to about 580,000 which equals a year and now all my IP address remain the same.
Of course I had to reset the router to defaults and make the changes accordingly.

This router is not compatible with Vista in some way, which is causing the misleading information on the network center of vista.
Now that I reset everything and stop the Dell utility from loading, the network center shows green lines all the way to the internet.
There has been a couple of times since that the network center shows the red X on vista but not on a daily basis the way it use to.

My point on all of this is that maybe your wireless card utility is causing a problem with your network and since it can connect properly is providing incorrect information (Red X) even though you have connection.

Try making sure that the Ethernet/Wireless application that came with your pc/laptop is not loading and let Vista handle the connection.

Regards,
Geo