The PDA Guerrilla: Vista after Service Pack 1

I really don't like beating a dead horse, but after reading that Microsoft is moving ahead with killing XP, I thought I should update my Vista user story.

For those who did not see or do not remember my earlier Vista blog, I acquired a Vaio UX ultraportable tablet running Vista second hand, in like new condition, from a friend who is a super gadget freak and can afford all the toys she wants. I use this as my production work and personal computer, so I use it heavily nearly every day. I really love the hardware, but Vista has been a problem from the start. I was hoping that Service Pack 1 would fix some of that.

So the service pack finally arrived on my electronic doorstep at the start of June. And so far the only difference I have seen is that it added about 3 GB more sludge to my computer, which was a problem in itself since the UX is an all solid-state system with only 23.6 GB of combined storage and memory total.

Here are some experiences from the last three weeks:

• The other day I booted my UX as usual in the morning. I never know what will happen when I do this. On this day, it “forgot” to turn on the Vaio's WiFi radio. Annoying but no real problem, I just rebooted. This time it came up with the error message “TosBtMng has stopped working”. I presume this is one of the Vista modules, although to be honest I have no idea what it is. I rebooted a second time. On the third boot, Vista started “normally” and ran the way it should.

• On that same day I tried to do a hot sync to backup my Palm PDA and feed data into several desktop applications that are linked to applications on the PDA. The hot sync crashed four times. I finally gave up.

• The next day I attempt another hot sync, This time the job completes, but it takes three hours! This is normally a 20 minute job. And that is not an exaggeration, I was working on the UX that entire time and watching the process.

This is just a sample. I have become used to various Vista modules such as the task manager and power manager crashing. Some days I just keep working and the crashed module doesn't seem to make a difference. Other days it does, and I reboot.

On some days also the UX becomes very slow in mid-afternoon. I usually only have two or three applications running on it – Mozilla Firefox, OpenOffice Writer, and perhaps Quicken or another normal application – so I am not putting a huge load on the processor. Rebooting usually fixes this.

None of this is a disaster, of course. But to me it speaks of an unstable system. Microsoft seems to have brought out its usual half-baked version. And given how overloaded Vista has become with “features” that get in each other's way, my favorite being the speech recognition system, I wonder if they are going to be able to fix it this time.

In any case, my advice as a user is stay away. I think Microsoft has shot itself in the foot big time, and I wonder if when it tries to force Vista on users, and particularly large enterprises, where it will generate huge numbers of help desk calls, it may just be pushing those users to Linux or Apple.