Should it stay or should it go? Vista Again

You may recall in my last post how I had had big problems with trying to get Vista onto my Dell D630 laptop. But over the 4 day bank holiday weekend I invested some serious one on one time to this with no distractions or real work to worry about.

In the end switching off Windows Search cleared up all the event log errors. As simple as that so I now have a laptop running Vista Enterprise at speed and with all the software I need.

So all is well.

Or is it?

Yes it runs.

Yes my error logs are pretty clear

But stability is a big problem and so I am still left wondering if I can live with this or if I should go back to XP.

Blue Screens

I cannot remember the last time I had a blue screen in XP. I really can’t but with Vista I get perhaps one every 48 hours or so. They seem to happen without warning and of course when they do happen, all is lost (I am getting back into the habit of saving work on a regular basis again).

At the moment I have not worked out what the root cause is but I am keeping a record of each one to try and form a pattern. Typically a bad driver or application is the cause but I need to locate it and then we can deal with it.

System Freezes

Most days, after I have started up the machine and it has been running for a few minutes, it freezes and more importantly stays frozen. In this situation the only thing to do is hard power cycle the laptop (again loosing any unsaved data) and carry on.

Again this sounds like a driver fault but where?

Security

Here is an odd one.

I run a VPN into the corporate network. It is set up to not allow any traffic outside of that encrypted tunnel. Now whilst this is a pain if you have a local network printer when working from home, it is there for a good reason. SECURITY!

But Vista does not care because by default, it also sets up an IPv6 network as well which means that at IPv4 level the traffic is contained to the VPN, at v6 level, traffic is free to flow anywhere it wants to. What this means is that even when I am connected via VPN into my corporate network, I can still connect to my other home Vista machine and my Windows 2008 file server that also sits on my home network.

I can actually work out why this is not as big a deal as it first sounds as my DSL connection from home cannot route v6 traffic so at least we can be safe in the knowledge that there is no backdoor into the corporate network created.

I must raise this finding to Nortel.

So I have been used to working on a Laptop that for the last 5 years does not crash, does not freeze, does not refuse to read optical disks and that I can depend on.

Right now, that same machine running Vista does not give me that confidence.

So I am holding on in there for now to see if things settle down and to see if I can figure out what the problems are BUT if this thing does let me down and stops me working in a big way one more time, Vista will be removed and XP SP3 will be back to stay.