Communication Breakdown
Communications from the world of, er, communications. And other stuff.
Thursday 29 March 2007, 9:22 AM
XP never forced me to do that
For some reason my laptop froze yesterday. I had been installing a new driver or some such thing (in retrospect I should have taken notes at the time) and something went wrong, and it seized up. OK, that's bad enough, but then I pressed the power button and the thing went into sleep mode. And wouldn't come out.
Dead. An expensive, new, dead laptop. Panicking, I did the only thing I could - something I've never had to do with XP, in no circumstances. I pulled the battery out, clipped it back in, turned the thing on and all was right again.
The first thing I did next, of course, was to change the settings so that "off" means "off" not "sleep", so hopefully I should never have to do that again. But I'm not thrilled. I can handle having to soft-reset my Vario II every now and again, because I'm used to the Windows Mobile experience, but I shouldn't have to wrench the battery out of a notebook to turn it off. Good job I didn't have any unsaved data.
Other than that, Vista's very shiny and nice. But... hmm.
PreviousComments on this post
don't get me started on vista, i have a fairly high spec acer laptop that ran xp fine, and according to microsoft was vista compatable, after installing vista i've been overwhelmed with various problems, one of them being the fact that if it go's to sleep; it won't wake up! i see more of the dreaded blue-screen than of my girl friend, last time i checked intel hadn't released a vista upate driver so i can't run aero, ironically my job is to tell potential customers how good it is, and from what i've been told; key buisness programs such as sage don't yet run on vista, which kind of defeats the point of using vista for buisness doesn't it?
Sorry David, I cannot share your experiences of XP. My Fujitsu Siemens laptop with XP Home has had its battery removed on several occasions to help it out of a software dead end that it has found itself in.
So I wouldn't dare upgrade to Vista.
My inital thoughts with Vista are that its fine with 'new' hardware, but anything more than a year old means you are going to have problems. I personally wouldn't 'upgrade' older XP machines unless you bring the spec up (or if you like pain!!); a 'safer' idea would be to buy your next PC/laptop with it pre-installed, then it is tested and guaranteed to work with all hardware/software it ships with.
Tony.
But my laptop is new! Core 2 Duo T7200 processor, gig of RAM (I know 2 would be better) etc etc. Bought it in December. I don't know if it's Vista's file system or what, but the OS just seems slow and buggy. Bring on SP1...
