My Beef with Vista

Yes, yes…everyone hates Vista. Yes, yes – you have a horror story. I try to be positive, even in the face of overwhelming evidence and here even, I’m trying to light a candle instead of cursing the darkness. I think I’m too optimistic for my own good sometimes. Here follows a quick vignette and some thoughts about Microsoft Vista Enterprise. May you use it wisely to determine Vista’s appropriateness in your organization.

I’m working a laptop recovery for a Vista-loaded Lenovo T61 and have been recovering the user’s 177 Gb of data using that dandy USB-based laptop SATA tool that they sell down at Fry’s for $30. Had to find 180Gb of free data but that’s fine. I’m into the 3rd major attempt to back up this user’s data prior to reimage using Windows Deployment Services and it’s still not a foregone conclusion that this process will be successful. Here’s what I’ve experienced when backing up data on a Windows Vista laptop:

1. I’d love to do a byte-for-byte backup of this device, but A) Windows backup doesn’t work with this device; you can’t just backup a single folder or drive like you used to [correct me if I’m wrong] and B) Robocopy /MIR on this laptop seems to get wiggy and by wiggy I mean, ‘starts reporting that it’s copying things from the C: of my laptop’ who wants to put his personal MP3 collection on a users’ workstation?

2. A straight copy-and-paste of the files hung all weekend, I killed it and noted that it hung around 27 Gbs and never made any progress beyond that point.

3. Retrying the robocopy [hey, I might get lucky], I get the same personal file reporting problem. I got around that by moving all files to a single ‘new’ folder on the root of the source drive and re-firing the robocopy. It’s still going as we speak.

The beef comes in the fact that simple tasks like copying files don’t work easily. Lots of workarounds and alternatives must be explored before the process of migrating A LOT of data across USB 2.0 can commence. That sound like a fun way to spend Monday morning? I didn’t think so. Random hardwaer driver issues and functionality problems are still an issue; I’m still screaming about how my Broadcom wired-LAN driver randomly fails when you disconnect and reconnect a LAN cable. The user interface, wit the extra step of killing the User Acceptance pane every time you execute a system task – it ‘s just annoying. It’s like they put the training wheels back on the bike because some people still haven’t put the time in to learn how ride and we’re all paying the price. Hopefully, maybe three or service packs from now, Vista will work as seamlessly as XP. I don’t want to sound like an old curmudgeon here, boys, but stuff like this didn’t happen in Vista. A word to the wise…