JoeAudette.com

I've just wasted most of my day fighting Windows Vista and I lost the fight. If you are a developer thinking about upgrading your main development machine to Vista, I recommend that you don't do it. I was tempted to do it about a month ago because of the new eye candy and all but right now I'd settle for an ugly screen and a computer that works as I expect. I wanted this to work but I am seriously considering re-paving and going back to XP, in fact I may be at a point where I have no choice as my main development machine is currently useless to me. For the moment I've shut it down in disgust.

I'm using a Dell Precision M70 laptop with 2GB of RAM, it scores 4 on the performance meter for Vista.

The problem I'm having is that the display keeps spontaneously changing the screen resolution and flashing to black as it transitions back and forth between 2 resolutions. I don't mean just when I'm launching a program that needs to run as administrator, I'm talking about randomly and repeatedly when its most inconvenient. I might get a few minutes of work done and then it starts again. I thought at first that it was because I'm using 2 monitors but I've wasted most of the day trying various configuration changes, I've installed newer drivers, for the NVIDIA Qudro FX 1400 Go card, I've tried just using the single monitor built into the laptop. A few times I thought it was going to be ok then the problem comes back.

I've had a mixed experience since I first upgraded in early February, things have basically worked with a few glitches here and there but in the last few days things have gone from bad to worse.  From the beginning I have had a problem where when it goes to screen saver then you move the mouse to bring back the screen it goes black several times so you had to wait for it to settle down before resuming work.

It seems like right about the time I upgraded to Vista my friend David blogged that he was going back to XP. I thought that was a discouraging sign because I know David is like me and likes to have the latest greatest tools but I figured I'd try to hang in there. Today its just become unworkable, Vista has just killed too much of my productivity to ignore it.

Now I've got to waste a whole bunch more time re-building my machine with XP and hoping that I can get additional activations for some of the tools I use like Codesmith.

I suppose its possible that the screen problems are being caused by hardware failure or some kind of problem with my display card. If I find that I still have problems after going back to XP I'll retract my criticism but somehow I think this is not what will happen.

I work very hard and nothing is more frustrating to me than having my time wasted for me. Vista has disappointed me by wasting a lot of it.

Update 3/16/2007

I still haven't re-paved to XP. The problem continues but I found a workaround that buys more time to come up with a solution to the problem. I bypass the screen issues by remoting into my Vista machine from my open suse 10.2 desktop. I still want to resolve the problem since my Vista laptop is not very usefull as a laptop if I have to remote into it, but its at least as usable as my other option which is running xp inside VMWare.


Update 3/31/2007 - Recovery! A few days ago I started using my Vista laptop normally again instead of through Remote Desktop and it seems to have healed itself, the previous symptom hasn't happened anymore. I'm not running at as high a screen resolution as I was before and I'm kind of afraid to change it lest it make the symptom return. I don't know if it was healed by Windows Update or McAfee update or whether its because Mercury is no longer in retrograde. I'm just glad to have it working reasonably well and stable again and I'm glad I didn't re-pave it at the peak of my frustration.