Vista Blues

AirCanuck

Everyone hates vista, it seems. Well, as someone who knows next to nothing about computers, I like it (haha). I do realize it's a RAM pig, and that while looking nice it's one of the worst pieces of software ever released (I think it won an award for this?)

ANYHOW

I don't want to switch back to XP, but I have 2 problems that keep reoccurring.
The first is that whenever I start it up, and periodically afterward, the message (I believe) 'windows explorer has stopped working' or 'is not responding' or something comes up, and I click ok, and then close as opposed to waiting for it to fix itself (as it never does) the start menu and icons disappear, then reappear as explorer reboots itself.
The second, is the wireless connection manager, if it has difficulty connecting to a wireless connection, it will just keep trying until I try to close it, at which point the manager will stop responding and I will have to end task.

Any suggestions (short of switching OS's) on how to fix these problems? Patches or something, perhaps?

Thanks in advance
AirCanuck

stoopid

Patches are always the first place to start. or buy a Mac.

Thrax

AirCanuck wrote:

Everyone hates vista, it seems. Well, as someone who knows next to nothing about computers, I like it (haha). I do realize it's a RAM pig, and that while looking nice it's one of the worst pieces of software ever released (I think it won an award for this?)

ANYHOW

I don't want to switch back to XP, but I have 2 problems that keep reoccurring.
The first is that whenever I start it up, and periodically afterward, the message (I believe) 'windows explorer has stopped working' or 'is not responding' or something comes up, and I click ok, and then close as opposed to waiting for it to fix itself (as it never does) the start menu and icons disappear, then reappear as explorer reboots itself.
The second, is the wireless connection manager, if it has difficulty connecting to a wireless connection, it will just keep trying until I try to close it, at which point the manager will stop responding and I will have to end task.

Any suggestions (short of switching OS's) on how to fix these problems? Patches or something, perhaps?

Thanks in advance
AirCanuck

These are just Vista bugs. They've not been fixed, and have no common cause. It's such a good little OS.

Jokke

I have Vista and I do get the Explorer problem, but not the wireless one. Update drivers?

Harudath

I've found this works with our PC downstairs (it has Vista). Open Task Manager, go to processes, find explorer.exe and end task- then click Run (New Task...) and type
explorer.exe

That'll restart it and it should stop crashing for that session, or at least a while

tmh88

I must be the only person in existance that doesn't get vista bugs like that. Every now and then(once a month or less), the buttons become all messed up, and the taskbar's buttons shift to the left and you can't click on anything. Other than that I have nothing bad to say about vista.

Harudath

I love the styles, themes, icons all of it but there's too many issues for me to even think about getting it

Jokke

As I said, I use Vista, and have no issues, except for the Explorer one.

Snarkasm

Wonder if Thrax even cares that the majority of users don't ever have these problems.

Harudath

Probaboy not But it's the massive variety of problems there are- If a user hasn't got one problem they've got another under totally different circumstances so it's hard to get a fix :S

Thrax

Snarkasm wrote:

Wonder if Thrax even cares that the majority of users don't ever have these problems.

You have to remember that I worked at the Geek Squad for more than 8 months' of Vista's life. I dealt with your "Majority of users" day in and day out in droves. I have seen the problem being referred to in the OP more times than I can possibly begin to count on computers that are fresh out of the box, newly post-upgrade, or even verifiably clean with certified Vista-ready drivers.

The crashing explorer.exe et. al. was irritatingly wide spread, and was amongst the top reasons why we returned as many computers as we did.

Snarkasm

Fair enough, but is it also fair enough to say that if the majority of people weren't having problems, they wouldn't be dropping by to say everything's just grand?

I dunno, it just puzzles me how most of the people I know that use it and I myself don't have these problems. I know it has its faults, and I won't use it on my laptop, but it just strikes me that for a long time, the "cool" thing to do was bash Vista, and it doesn't deserve half of what it gets today.

stoopid

Harudath wrote:

But it's the massive variety of problems there are- If a user hasn't got one problem they've got another under totally different circumstances so it's hard to get a fix :S

Been using Vi$ta for about a year now. This has been my personal experience - many little annoyances that just haven't added up to being one big annoyance (at least not enough to dump and format with XP). Latest issue - windows media player stopped working (tried a thousand fixes, none worked), then suddenly started working (after weeks of not using it), but in return my smartphone is no longer detected at all by Vi$ta. lol So my conclusion is that the smartphone was integrated into windows media player for songlist synchronizing, stopped working, causing my wmp issue, and when the phone finally caused anopugh issue that Vi$ta stopped using it/allowing it to run at all, I finally got wmp back. So now I have to fix the phone thing (first step was to uninstall and reinstall windows mobile device 6.1). When I get home and setup a new relationship with the PC I'll know just how bad the phone problem is. IF I can't get that working, I think I finally reached the point of no return (prodigal XP son).

I generally don't encourage people to go Vista unless it comes free with the PC (like it did with mine).