Man Vs. Vista, or How XP Saved My Life

October 10, 2008 in Tech 3 Comments

After several years on the market, running Vista is still like navigating a WWII depth-charge field in the Mediterranean Sea with a nuclear sub. The OS’s faults were proven to me again this week when I booted Vista for the first time in three months, downloaded an update from Microsoft, and Vista immediately crashed and burned. Through no fault of my own, I suddenly found I could not reboot the system. My first instinct was to use XP to reformat Vista’s drive and never think of it again. But I bought the damn thing, I spent over a hundred bucks on it, and the manly man in me who just has to make mechanical things work was determined to salvage the situation.

Because of Vista’s many stability flaws, I must run a PC with two harddrives. Vista is installed on one drive, while XP is installed on the other. I change the boot order in my CMOS on startup to determine which OS is loaded. I use XP to capture HD footage of games so I can make screenshots for my books, and I use Vista for basically everything else. I don’t use Vista for HD capture because the result has frequently been a blue screen. The first time Vista gave me a blue screen, I was quite surprised. I haven’t seen a blue screen since I worked for IBM in the mid ’90s. My three month separation from Vista was due to my recent work on a strategy guide, set to hit shelves next week. When I need to spend every day playing and recording a game, booting to Vista makes no sense. I usually stay in XP through the duration, then return to Vista afterward.

This time my long absence from Vista was punished when I left it on for a couple of hours. While idle, its Windows Update program tried to automatically download and install fixes. I suppose the update bricked my PC, because I returned to find the drive inoperable and unusable. Luckily, I was able to boot XP on the other drive and backup files from my Vista drive (which is how XP saved my life).

I then inserted my Vista disk, wiped the previous installation, and reinstalled. I’m already aware of the fact that Vista cannot properly install with 4GB of RAM, so I removed one of my sticks through the entire process. Afterwards, I patiently downloaded and installed 64 updates. I checked for more updates, and was told there were none. So I then installed the display adapters for my Nvidia graphics card, reinserted the other 2GB RAM, and started to call it a day. How foolish of me, to just think I was done working on Vista and walk away. While I was gone, Windows Update tried to download Vista Service Pack 1. Remember, Vista told me there were no more updates. Vista lied to me. I returned to my computer to find it hard at work on this process, and canceled the download. I knew it couldn’t possibly install correctly with 4GB RAM, so I had to turn off the PC, remove a stick, reboot, and resume. But Windows Update would crash anyway, right in the middle of the download. So I figured the system needed a little more RAM in order to squeeze in all those megabytes. So I shut down, reinsterted the 2GB stick, and rebooted. This time Windows Update downloaded SP1 fine, and even started to install it. But then, it would crash during the install. So Vista seemed to find itself in a conundrum: it needed more than 2GB RAM to download SP1, but trying to install SP1 with 4GB RAM caused it to freak out. What was I to do, reach in and yank out a memory stick right before the install?

So I tried to handle installing SP1 the old fashioned way, by downloading the file from Microsoft.com. I took Windows Update out of the loop. Once I had the complete file, I did my little surgery operation on the RAM again. The patch began to install, and after about half and hour was almost done. The system just had to reboot a couple times to finish. But guess what? A problem occurred, and Vista determined that it couldn’t install SP1. So it rolled back the install, rebooted, and tried again. Failing again, the system rebooted and tried again. I soon found my PC in an infinite installation failure loop. Thanks for the memories, Vista.

What else was there to do? I had no choice, really. I booted faithful old XP, wiped the Vista harddrive, and reinstalled. Afterward, I determined that I wasn’t going to believe a word Vista told me until I had installed absolutely every update, plus Service Pack 1. So I started Vista, turned off those annoying bells and whistles like the sidebar and such, and ran Windows Update. This time, Windows Update reported that it needed an update in order to update. That was worth a laugh, but was also a bit confusing. Still, I made the mistake of trusting it, and clicked the Install Now button. Windows Update failed to install the update that it needed to update. And no matter how many times I tried, I couldn’t override the error.

So now what? I could spend hours searching the net for some half-assed fix posted in some half-assed tech forum. Or, I could just start over. So I rubbed down my well-worn install disk, wiped the Vista drive, and reinstalled. This time I managed to install all 64 updates, then Service Pack 1, then my display and sound drivers, all before I even considered reinserting the RAM. That was late last night. At this point in the day, I’ve managed to install and use most of my software and even the Mercenaries 2 Demo. The crashes are far less frequent, and I haven’t seen a blue screen of death yet.

Instead, I’ve seen the black screen.

Yes, it appears that the “greater stability” Vista Service Pack 1 offers is to replace blue screen appearances with a far more vague and useless black screen. Kudos Vista. You’ve made the last two days of working on you non-stop totally worthless.

So what’s the conclusion? I would probably be better off going back to XP permanently (like everyone tells me to). But I’m determined to make something work, even when it doesn’t want to, even when it appears to rail against working correctly, even when it sabotages itself, even when it tries to commit suicide. And as long as I have faithful old XP installed on my second drive–always ready and able to save my life–why not?

(Vista crashed only once while I was writing this blog post.)

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