Ranting and Raving

It has been approximately six months since I started the new job. In that time, my company has aggressively pushed an upgrade to Windows Vista. That in turn means that my exposure to Microsoft’s latest iteration of an operating system has been intense.

My only real experience with Vista before this job was my home laptop, which is more of a platform to play WoW on more then anything else. And the only issue I ever had was with the video driver. Turns out it was a ‘clerical’ error that marked the video driver as incompatible when that wasn’t the case at all.

That is not the case with work. I have run into several incompatibilities with software and hardware, and as with any aggressive business plans (well funded at least) money is thrown at the problem and it is steamrolled away. Thus all the glaring problems with the operating system (lack of backwards compatibility, stability, and an annoying attempt at ‘security’) are ignored.

So it is to my displeasure that I have begun to have issues with my own machine. Random crashes of programs (including Explorer.exe the damn shell itself), sluggishness, excessive load times, and file corruption (of the Outlook ost). A 2.0ghz chip with 4gb of RAM should not be acting this way. I recently went into the msconfig app and disabled a load of programs that did not need to run at startup and I also disabled the UAC. To my chagrin, after the required reboot, my profile was screwed. Another reboot seemed to fix the error, but I was then required to re-add all my MSN contacts in Trillian. That does not bode well, as it is indicative of other profile issues that will rear their ugly heads in the future.

I have contemplated the standard computer rebuild. Something that many Windows users have had to do since Windows 2000 Professional was out. For those that don’t know this, it basically boils down to re-installing Windows every six to nine months (sometimes twelve if you are a light user). After that period, so many updates have been installed, patched , removed, and re-installed that the OS becomes flaky. That doesn’t even take into account any programs the user might have installed, patched, uninstalled, re-installed, etc..

I dread this. Mostly because, as a system admin, I have a lot of small apps and tweaks that I need to do my day to day stuff. And also like a system admin, documentation is scarce. So for me to do a complete rebuild takes about a week, and I am not fully functional for almost a month as I go through my daily tasks and realize I missed a program.

Another thing is, that aggressive Vista upgrade by my company also includes the setup of Bitlocker. Part of that security feature ties into the Computer Name in Active Directory. My rights in AD are limited, so I may not be able to delete my old computer account. Thus I would have to rename my laptop something new and create a new key. It’s just one more thing to heap upon the hassle.

It is not so much that I want to avoid having to do the rebuild as do I have the time and energy to do it now. I know that the longer I wait, the more issue are going to crop up. I just need to bite the bullet and re-install.

Too bad I cannot install XP. Although, even if I could get an exemption, I’d still be up the creek as apparently Intel doesn’t have the correct SATA drivers for XP for the chip in machine. Either that or they didn’t even bother making a XP compatible version.