Vista after 2 months - Prognosis: poor

It's been two months since I got my new work laptop that came with Vista Ultimate pre-installed. During these past two months, I've endured a countless number of system hangs, windows crashes, program crashes, poor performance, and lots of headaches.

I thought it was nice, however, that Microsoft includes a tool with Vista to show you just how crappy of an experience it is. It's called the "Reliability Monitor" and it is a running graph that plots your system stability on a scale of 1-10. My system started off from the factory at an 8.92 (even Lenovo can't get this machine to a 10) and has tanked ever since.

As of yesterday, my system was rating itself as a 1.62 out of 10. It will probably be even worse tomorrow since I've already had Firefox crash on me about 6 times as well as Windows Explorer freeze and require a hard reset.



(note: you'll have to excuse the pasted-together image, but Windows only lets you see about 3 weeks at a time on the graph. I stitched the past two months together into one image)

Tiger Direct doesn't know Vista

I just got the following email advertisement from TigerDirect.com and wanted to extend a word of warning to anyone else who might have seen this...or similar offers.

This advertisement is for a "Vista Laptop" for $600. Sounds like a pretty good deal, huh?



From TigerDirect's description, it definately sounds like a good laptop. Who wouldn't want all of the new Vista features, right?

Notice that in the screenshot above, TigerDirect.com is advertising the "breathtaking Aero visual interface" as well as "Flip 3D".

However, if you read the details closely...or at least look at the top image, you'll see that this laptop only comes with Windows Vista Home Basic. The Home Basic version of the operating system DOES NOT include either the Aero visual interface OR the Flip 3D feature.

See the following from Microsoft's website:

You only get those advanced features if you get Home Premium or Ultimate. NOT the Basic version.

I can imagine that there will be quite a few disappointed shoppers who will order this budget laptop expecting all the new bells & whistles...only to find that they are running a stripped down version of the Vista operating system.