Rampidbyter Rampid byter: A byte of my .Net developing life.

I upgraded Vista to service pack 1 just yesterday. Besides taking a while to load, which is ok, the service pack restarted my computer to a wonderful new experience. To say slow booting, well I could get a can of coke out of the fridge, and be about three quarters of the way through it before I’d call the system functionally responsive. First, it took forever to boot on the first restart, hell it took the side bar application a good two minutes to load up. I’m used to hitting the power, the machine shows my boot menu for a few seconds, hear the Vista startup noise, and I’m ready to login in at about twenty seconds. I have a quad core machine with plenty of Ram, and previous to the update I was almost content with the performance. Keep in mind I’ve already lost my ability to use my photo printer, no longer able to play my old PC games, and networking am not able to connect properly to my internal network thanks to McCafee.

Anyway, when the new service pack was installed I instantly lost my configured web server. Gone, had to reconfigure the settings in order to get the web server to run. All of the services required to run the web server were instantly stopped, and non responsive. From that point forward I had to reboot several times, and try to start the service manually. Frustration began at that very moment. From there my desktop takes a long time to load, hell navigating through my computer hard drive will leave my entire system non responsive with the loading bar being stuck at about 10% complete visible from the address bar on the window pane. There it sits with a disabled grayed out view of the folder contents, and it will take a good three minutes before it becomes responsive. IF it becomes responsive I should say. Not to mention that my graphics card seems to want to ‘recover’ itself from failure every ten minutes while trying to use Visual Studio 2008 on this machine. I can’t program on it, it’s become too frustrating to start work, only for Visual Studio to have to restart it politely, and then for some odd reason the graphics goes totally black with my graphics card being recovered. Fantastic. Just fantastic. I’m not even sure what the point of the upgrade was at this point because honestly my system seems far slower than it was before. If a quad core PC can’t boot to the desktop, with no user initiated applications running, then what can?  I’m starring at my XP CD, and honestly the only thing keeping me from down-grading is the fact I’m not sure what this new hardware is supported on. It’s one hassle after another. You would think Vista Ultimate would be the Ultimate experience. Besides being pretty it seems this is the Ultimate waste of my time, Ultimate pain the butt, and the Ultimate annoyance of the 21^st century.