

Man gets Windows Vista to work with printer - rams
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/141343.asp

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SwellJoe
I thought all the belly-aching about Vista was just people hating changes.
Until I actually had to deal with a Vista PC. When my girlfriend bought a new
HDTV, I built an HTPC to go with it, running Vista. Every driver just stops
working (in interesting and confusing ways) every now and then, and has to be
reinstalled. Yesterday I spent an hour poking at the network driver because it
wouldn't connect and I couldn't watch the latest episode of Battlestar
Galactica (and not being able to watch Battlestar Galactica makes me angry).
Every once in a while the HDMI audio driver just stops working and has to be
reinstalled. When switching between inputs on the TV, sometimes the video
signal goes black, and the machine has to be hard rebooted. I'm sure these are
all the fault of the hardware people writing crappy drivers, but it sure is a
pain in the ass.

Amazon's Unbox software does something even worse on Vista. For some reason I
can't figure out, it will only run once--on the next boot, it fails to start.
That would be fine, except it tries to start again, and Vista pops up one of
its "application has encountered an error and will be closed" or
whatever...and Unbox tries to start again. Infinite loop. Since the Vista
popup steals focus and cannot be ignored, the system has to be rebooted, and
the app has to be uninstalled before the infinite loop kicks in.

I'd been led to believe that constant rebooting was a thing of the past in
Vista...I think I reboot this box more than the XP install on my gaming
system.

Vista is the worst computing experience I believe I've ever had. (And I've
been using Linux as my primary OS since 96, when there were like five well-
supported pieces of hardware, and I've also used every Windows since 95 in my
life as an IT support contractor. I think many would say that Windows ME was
the worst, but now I'd have to disagree. At least all of the drivers from
95/98 worked on ME.)

~~~
PieSquared
Damn... and I thought all the belly aching about Vista came from the techie
people who liked *nix or Mac... but to hear a real live story about it being
that bad is almost, well, touching. Good luck setting it up to actually work!

------
apu
The title was so Onion-like that I seriously thought nwsource.com was going to
redirect to the Onion. Does Vista have any long-term chance for survival, with
stories like this?

~~~
jrockway
_Does Vista have any long-term chance for survival, with stories like this?_

Sure, as long as it's forced down people's throats. What else are they going
to use? "Windows" is synonymous with computing for most people. They don't
know they have other options, they don't want to learn something that looks or
feels different, and they are trained to think mistakes the computer makes are
their fault.

If Microsoft releases something else, Vista will go away. But it won't go away
because users rebel. They think Vista's bugs are _their fault_ , so they just
say "I'm dumb" and give up. It's sad.

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ComputerGuru
Vista required UAC to be enabled in order to install any network printer. And
with UAC enabled, the drivers won't install for non-made-for-Vista products...
it's a total Catch-22.

[http://neosmart.net/blog/2007/windows-forces-you-to-use-
uac-...](http://neosmart.net/blog/2007/windows-forces-you-to-use-uac-to-add-a-
printer/)

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jpeterson
Why don't we just cut all the pretenses and have news.ycombinator.com redirect
to reddit?

