I have to admit that I love Microsoft Vista. I like the UI, I like the way that a lot more things are just so intuitive, I like the stability and I like the features such as Bitlocker, parental controls and so on.

Now at home this is sitting on my new desktop PC and when you look at the performance score of 5.9, you would expect it to perform well.

So I decided a few weeks ago that perhaps it was time to roll out Vista onto my work PC. Since making that choice I have wasted hours and hours fighting with my laptop.

So my work laptop is a Dell D630 with a dual core Intel CPU and 2GB of RAM. It is fully supported for Vista by dell and a full set of drivers are available.

So I first installed Vista Business 32bit and was shocked by the performance. Talk about slow. But when I ran the windows experience performance test it soon became clear that my machine had a very slow HDD so 48 hours later armed with a Seagate HDD running at 7200rpm and with 16MB cache, I tried again.

This time I decided to use Vista Enterprise 32bit SP1 and it loaded up really well. All the drivers went on without a hitch and after running windows update I was left with a machine that was as quick as it was with XP on it. Good news.

So then I came to install office. Every time I tried to install office it failed complaining about missing cab files. I got Microsoft to send me a new DVD but this failed, I tried a Technet download burnt to a CD but that failed, I tried copying the files to the HDD first and even that failed. The odd thing was that the same DVD had installed without a hitch onto my home Vista machine.

So after a lot of hunting the net only to find loads of people out there but with the same problem I tried something else. I loaded up elby Virtual Clone Drive and installed from an ISO file on the hard drive. PROBLEM SOLVED! Clearly Vista has a problem with the optical drives that Dell (and others from the web reports) ships.

So all was loaded up but upon checking the event log, there were tons of errors around MSI Installer, Search, WMI and more.

Again lots of searching told me how to fix some of these but not others. Indeed the MSI Installer problem seemed to get worse and worse until everything ground to a halt.

Convinced I had a corrupt installation after all the messing about with the office install I chose to wipe the HDD and start from scratch. Again everything installed fine but as soon as I started to use the machine, again errors everywhere. Again I worked on the various fixes which saw me working at the command prompt and in the registry but still I have errors. But as I had managed to get a day of work out of the machine, I chose to ignore them and see how we go on.

So there I am in a customer meeting (these are important as they pay the bills) and I fire up the laptop, fire up the 3G connection and try and start Outlook. Outlook refuses to start. Not in normal mode, not in safe mode not in any mode.

So I get home, and work into the night trying to fix it. Again I end up with a clean HDD and a new clean install. Come the morning and the event log is still looking very full. I call a colleague who I know has also installed Vista on an identical machine to compare notes. Sure enough has has some of the same errors in the event log but at least his machine is working. After a lot of digging however we identify  bad Outlook Add In so uninstall that. It does seem to fix some things but now Word refuses to start. So does Excel!

So one detect and repair later and we are up and running again. MSI Installer is still throwing 1001 and 1004 errors claiming an error with Visio that only seems to occur when Outlook is running and VIsio isn’t. But then the fun really begins with Windows Search now throwing errors about being unable to detect the crawler scope! It is throwing these errors at the rate of 200 per minute. More net searching and again this is a well documented problem with no fix.

And then it blue screens!

That’s it. For now, the laptop has XP back on it. The error log is clean, the machine is stable and quick and everything just works in the way that XP has always just worked for the last 5 years.

Now to be fair, I don’t need Vista. Nothing I run NEEDS Vista however I WANT it. Plus there is always the point that for now it has beaten me. For the first time ever I have had to admit defeat with a PC.

So I really can’t work out why this has gone so wrong. One thing that is clear is that all the issues seems to have been related to Office 2007. I know that all the install material is 100% as it is all via Technet so direct from Microsoft. But of all the programs I would expect not to play with Microsoft Vista, Microsoft Office is not one of them.

But for now, I am just not prepared to waste any more time on this. I have lost so much time over the last week or so on this that I have now got a pile of work to do before the weekend so tonight and tomorrow are both going to be late nights.

I still have a few ideas but they are long shots.

Compared to my colleague who is running Vista without problem, there were some slight differences.

• I was running Vista Enterprise, he was running Vista Business
• I was running a partitioned drive, he was not
• I was running Bitlocker, he wasn’t

So I could try a different version of Vista however if I want Bitlocker it would need to be Ultimate. But there should not be any difference! I have even wondered if I have a hardware problem but it should manifest itself elsewhere, not only with Office applications.

So for now, for work, I am sticking with rock solid Windows XP Pro SP3. It works, does everything that I want and is stable. Vista for work will just have to wait for another day but the challenge is still there to beat this thing but that will have to wait until I have more time on my hands.