Vista, the Corvair of Operating Systems
A few posts ago I compared Vista to the Edsel, Ford’s disastrous auto introduction in the 50’s. After working on yet another Vista PC with the infamous KSOD (blacK Screen Of Death), I think that comparison may have been too generous.
I admit to not having a balanced view of the market, people who come to me have problems and they are often pissed off at their computer, operating system, Bill Gates or anyone else they can think of to aim their frustrations at (I recently referred to a customers dead computer as being useful only as a “boat anchor” to which he replied that he was thinking of using it more as a clay pigeon, such is the level of frustration one builds up). But what I do notice is that the Vista problems that come to me are more arbitrary, more severe and the fixes either arcane or impossible. I hardly ever have to re-install Windows XP, but there are some problems with Vista that just have no cure.
As I mentioned previously, here in Chaos Central we run a network with XP Home, XP Professional and Windows 7, jumping over Vista. Generally, I’ve been willing to give Vista the benefit of the doubt though, it must work for some people right? But try Googling sometime for “Vista black screen with arrow” or “Vista black screen with cursor”. It’s not just the number of results you get there, it’s the number of people commenting on the blogs and forums that cover technology saying “I’ve got the same problem, is there no solution”. Well, no, there really isn’t a solution in many cases. The only good news is that in most cases, we’re able to save personal files like documents and photos but still, Vista just seems to fragile for production use.
