Vista and Vostro-the love-hate story...

I have been forced out of the blogosphere for quite a while due to some issues in my laptop that ate away a major portion of my spring break :(. I love my laptop-I really really do and Vista Ultimate has definitely been one of the reasons for that. But of-late I am tired of searching for solutions to all the problems that have been cropping up over and over. I am going to record the best and worst of this Vista-Vostro combination and if any of you have something to add (esp. some solutions) please do so in the comments.

Awesome:

• Windows Media Center-watching movies has become a great new experience with Media Center (there are a few bugs though, like every resizing of the window freezes the player and confuses the hell out of it-maybe it was not designed for laptops and fast application switching).
• Windows Dreamscene: One sure-shot way to grab attention to your laptop is to have one of these moving wallpapers on the desktop-its unbeleivably beautiful-some videos are really soothing. (again some issues with Dreamscene crashing and stopping+making the overall system slow-still worth it for the experience).
• Games: I love the Chess and Hold'em Poker games on the Ultimate.
• Aero: Doing a Windows+Tab to switch Windows is a new paradigm and am addicted to it now-its super cool to watch the windows in 3D and choose.
• Organized: Its hard to explain this one, but somehow all the pieces of the UI and the file system are a lot better organized on Vista than any other-very intuitive and simple.

Bummers:

• My advice to all new users would be-DON'T do a clean install of Vista Ultimate on your own. I did that and the first screen that greeted me after the install was a blue-screen (crash), and to top it all, the blue screen would vanish in a split second and the machine will reboot and the system will dutifully ask-"Looks like last time Windows did not boot successfully. Do you want safe mode?" (well there was no last time that Windows booted successfully in the first place!!). And the same blue screen appears in safe mode too.
• After a lot of debugging I narrowed it down to one driver that seems to screw it up for Vista-RICOH. And since you never get to login to the system, you cannot upgrade it either.
• So I tried the next best option-reisntall the OS, and I did this 4 times each time trying a different combination-nothing worked.
• The only “solution” was to install Vista home and upgrade to Ultimate. Now its “better”
• And why only “better”-well the first reason I reinstalled the system was because ever since I upgraded Vista Home to Ultimate, Sleep function is totally screwed up. If you put the machine to sleep and wake it up a balloon that says “One of your USB devices malfunctioned” greets you (I don’t have any USB devices connected) and from then on none of the USB ports work.
• Another problem when this happens is the system cannot be shut down after the USB problem; it stands in the “Shutting Down” screen for at least 30 minutes AFAIK.
• Finally, the problem that really drove me mad was this-every now and then when the system goes to sleep, it will never wake up. All the blue lights for the CPU/Bluetooth/WIFI will be glowing bright and fine, but the screen just stays blank-never comes up no matter what key/button you press.
• Then there are minor irritants like, once your hard disk capacity goes below a certain level, hibernate function vanishes and there is no way you can turn it back on even if you free up a lot of space.
• IE crashes every now and then. I started using Firefox and the world’s been brighter since then. If you are really adventurous, try Firefox 3 Beta 4-its lightning fast, does not eat memory and has some very helpful new features.
• And today I installed Vista SP1 and the microphone drivers seem to have disappeared from the system-need to debug this tomorrow-still not sure if it’s a Vista problem.