Is it me or does Vista SUCK?

Ok It looks really nice but after a couple of weeks now I find that it freezes up on me and the screen goes to a light almost grayscale color. The little pointer turns into a circle and stays like that. The clock on the right freezes and basically my only option is to turn the thing off by holding down the power button. I've had XP for years and maybe one time in 4 years on two machines have I had this happen.

All the technical blather provided by Dell is utterly useless. By the way sometimes it works for several hours without problems. I am getting concerned because next week I leave for China for a year and I am seriously thinking of returning the 1530 taking the refund and buying an Acer with a much better graphics card (non 8600GT) and pocketing $600.

Or sending the XP back and spending and extra grand and buying a Mackbook Pro.

Does Vista freeze 1-2 times an hour? No warning screens come up telling me what's wrong - just locks up. The hardware seems fine.

I don;t want to reinstall the discs because if you open the disc package Dell's fine print suggest I'd pay a restocking fee.

Pity because it seems like a nice computer being let down by horrid operating system - though my friend has it on a Compaq and she never has problems.

 

I love it, it has only froze once.

I do agree on the Gray scale thing...

 

It's just you... I have had 0 problems with Vista and I've had it for 13 months now.

 

i love vista with sp1, no issues here at all... cant you system restore?

 

Nope, just you.

 

I'd like to know what you are doing to cause it to freeze up constantly. I've had virtually no problems with Vista. My only gripe about it is the fact that it is an uber resource hog.

 

I have no problems with vista! I love it!

 

I'm sorry for your troubles with Vista...

For me, Vista has worked well...so I really can't complain.

Hoping it works out for you

Cin

 

Nope, it's you. I've been running Vista since the first public beta, and haven't had any problems.

64-bit is even more stable and smooth, too.

 

It's something with your system. Vista 64 is rock solid for me. In fact it's been 100 times better than XP was when I first started using it.

The issues with vista were blown completely out of proportion. My only gripe with it is the added DRM layer, but OSX also suffers from added DRM as well. I really hate the MPAA and RIAA.

 

It's a shame that so many people choose to fly off the handle and blame the OS after "putting up" with frustrating behavior over a long period of time. Certainly, the computer shouldn't be acting like that, but it sounds like you're working under the assumption that the operating system has somehow been designed to annoy you (and from the looks of this thread, specifically you).

If you're willing to lift yourself out of the cesspool of online Vista bashers, then by all means, get your head together and post additional information to help us help you figure out exactly what is going wrong with your computer.

What software do you have running, and specifically what non-factory installed software have you added? What about autorun entries?

Do you see anything in your system error logs?

What software is crashing - you mention the graying out of frozen windows, so which ones belonging to which programs?

Seriously, it's completely absurd for the end customer to actually be afraid of using something they bought, i.e. you're afraid to use your OS installation disks. Why don't you call up Dell and get the straight answer from them about the restocking fee instead of questioning yourself over legal small print? I wouldn't hesitate to break the seals on that software after handing over 1000+$ to Dell for a computer that I intend to use.

 

just another vista basher...
Vista is the best OS i have ever used IMHO!

 

Its just you.

Vista64 has been solid for me, i have little minor complaints like how the system goes sluggish if you keep it on for a whole week straight.

 

I would put it slightly more politely: your Vista experience does not parallel with mine. Vista has been solid, reliable and smooth (although I did do a clean install as soon as I received my M1330).

The only bugbear for me is its inability to play nicely with the wireless at my workplace - in XP it's a doddle, but Vista just constantly asks for the username and password.

 

its you...

 

I think its something with you / your system.. I have Vista Ult. with SP1, and have had no problems at all.

You can try an in-place upgrade / repair using the Vista Disc. I know it works and it just repairs your system. You don't lose anything, but still better to make a backup of the system (either a complete PC backup or at least your data n important files).

And btw, yeah, I find Vista IS a LOT better than XP

 

The same thing happened to my wife with Vista actually. For that matter, the same thing happened to my wife with XP. If I would have known her back then, i would say the same thing probably happened to her for 95/98 and Me. She is the type of person who loads a bunch of junk on her machine and doesn't keep her sypware and adware turned on. So the things she loads come along with other programs and they clog up the machine and kill the performance. Thats the only bad experience I have had with vista and I cannot blame MS for that one

 

It's just you. Vista has been rock-solid for me from the beginning.

Maybe you can be recruited into one of those 'cool' Apple Mac commercials

 

As most everyone as said, it's not the OS that's causing your problem. Vista has not crashed on me once since I received my M1530 in January. You may have a memory problem, a driver conflict, etc., none of which are Vista's fault. This can happen with any OS. Before entertaining the thought of buying a Macbook Pro, spend some time on those forums. You'll see a fair number of complaints about hardware issues and even Mac OS X issues, notwithstanding Apple's excellent advertising.

 

Ok then it appears Vista is not the problem - great something else is causing the problem. I downloaded a google pack that included skype, wefi, real player, google earth but none of these programs should cause any problems. I deleted Wefi because I thought it was kinda of doing the job a second time and may have been interfering with things.

When i run the machine in Safe mode with networking on the thing works perfectly. I ran symantec's virus scan and no virus detected.

I also downloaded the current itunes to sync with my ipod. That caused a freeze up as well but oddly after it moved all the files to the ipod. I restored to a point prior to putting that program on and it still causes problems so I doubt it is itunes. I also downloaded bittorent but I never had problems with this on my other laptop. I also downloaded Firefox

Yesterday I was on the ferry with no internet access and I was able to watch a movie for the duration and no problems. It's weird because it goes just fine - it runs cool, the screen is amazing the drives work, but all of a sudden it just freezes.

I am trying to get a handle of when it does freeze up. Seems to do it when I try to run the mcaffe stuff so in safe mode I uninstalled the program.

Someone mentioned restoring it how do I do that?

Thanks, at least I now know it's not Vista and it's hard to believe it's the computer itself

 

Vista used to be bad because of all the hardware that really wasn't up to par with what Vista needed. We are now in the point where 2GB ram is the minimum and the gpu's are DX10 supported. Its not a bad OS at all.

Its just like XP. In the beginning people said XP stunk and Windows 98, NT, and 2000 were so much better, etc. Now if you look at it, over time with SP1, Sp2, and now SP3, everyone likes XP. Vista is just getting the same kind of thing, except it takes longer for Vista to get to the "acceptance" stage because unlike XP which was pretty good on the hardware that was available, Vista was ahead of its hardware at launch.

Of course there are always things that can be improved regardless of OS.

 

Well I was replying on my laptop and it froze again.

I do now think I know the problem but not how to fix it. It froze up and after 30 seconds I just shut it off - had I waited it probably would be doing the same thing.

A big blue screen comes up saying it has to shut off to protect something blah blah blah and then restarts but it ends up doing it again and again.

Anyone get this blue screen problem. The laptop is fine because if I just avoid the internet it seems to work fine.

 

are you checking the temperatures??

 

blue screen can be due to many things.. and what did it say anyways, 'shut off to protect..................'??? any other messages?

 

Yeah, its a PAGE_FILE BSOD. Not sure what it does, but certain actions seem to trigger it. It seems to be related to the hard drive by the looks of the error, though I'm not sure. I have a feeling its a hardware problem, though I haven't looked into it much.

 

I found this on the internet http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1647

The blue screen they show int he link is the one that I get.

 

You sure it says DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL?

Mine is different, mine has "page_file fault in non_paged area" I think or something. I think it has to do with the CPU.

 

The screen comes up to fast - this time it checked the hard drive and said it was ok, symantec says no viruses - and I was replying to you and it froze yet again.

ARGGHHH. The laptop is not hot at all - I uses the current A9 bios and a laptop cooler.

 

great now it deleted all the icons I had on the left side of my screen and the top bar - but the clock on the right is still there. It's rather comical actually.

 

Now it's logging off all buy itself - the screen just says "logging off' with that annoying little circle presumably telling me it is working. And **** it's slow.

 

BSODs usually have nothing to do with heat problems since if there is a heat problem, everything would have shut off rather than BSOD. It really depends on the error.

Try restarting and see if they come back.

 

Ok I did a system restore but back before I downloaded iTunes and bittorrent and now the machine is snappy and back to normal.

Basically I restored back to 3 days ago when I had no problems. So far so good.

Could iTunes be the problem or Bittorrent? I am going to assume the latter because it's a rather "naughty" program but it worked fine on my HP XP notebook. I may just leave the bittorent duties to that machine.

Of course my conspiracy theory mind believes maybe Apple is imbedding a virus to screw up Vista machines to say "see Vista sucks you should buy an apple" but they would not do that wahahahahah. LOL (I would if I was trying to get more market share.)

I have an apple Ipod I just bought a few days ago - I am perfectly happy to avoid iTunes as well. Not sure I can still sync but I can live without that.

It's kind of sad though because I was just getting used to itunes.

 

What program do you use to copy music onto it?

 

vista rocks man,
sorry for your problems...

 

Now it's just fine.

I downloaded Itunes and was using apple lossless. I put about 8 of my cd's onto the Dell and itunes and then connected the iPod and pushed the sync button - that seemed to be when my first problems began because it had not locked up until that program. But I ran a virus scan and it came up fine.

Now everything works - I'm typing this on the XPS so it seems fine now. Really odd. I can't imagine it being iTunes because I assume some of you are using itunes with no trouble.

I can't see it being bittorrent either because that is an incredibly good program - I have downloaded an incredible amount of stuff - I was in Korea and I wanted to watch the tv shows I missed never had a single problem with it. I might try it again one by one to determine which of those two programs was the problem knowing I can do the restore back to fix it.

 

Well it's not bittorrent - it's fine. I started with this because I figured it would be the culprit.

So now I'll retry iTunes - the Windows version does not seem to give me a lossless option only up to 192kbs. And it seems awkward compared to the apple. So I'll try it again.