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  • Stateside and XPed again.

    The last few days of my Sydney trip were spent in relative internet silence. During my stay Windows Vista had incurred one of those OS crippling problems that it is so often known for. In this case, I was trying to watch a video of something that wouldn’t open in anything short of Windows Media Player. I had had the media player open to play some music at the time (Tool FTW!), and Vista couldn’t seem to decide which application had priority (*Hint* it would be the one that I am repeatedly trying to open).


    Vista

    Long story short, Windows Explorer crashed.

    Then it restarted.

    Then it crashed again.

    Lather, rinse, repeat.

    Somewhere along the lines a registry change occurred that didn’t get put back and so Explorer got stuck in an infinite loop. I had already dealt with this exact same problem when Explorer would keep crashing upon viewing the C drive. This time, though, it was on the desktop. This meant I couldn’t access most of the programs without doing long work arounds (e.g. opening programs in Firefox). It didn’t matter anyway. Even after a registry clean, or two, Explorer maintained its broken status. The only way to fix it would be to go into the registry, find the problem and manually change it. The only way to do that would have been to go through the command line interface (even Safe mode kept repeatedly crashing).

    Well anyone who has hacked around with Windows knows how awkward it is to deal with their token command lines. In the end I wound up reverting back to the factory conditions.

    Now I’m back in the states and my PC is Vista free. Like legions of other former Vista users, I “downgraded” to XP again. Now my PC runs faster, rarely crashes and has more free space.

    Note to Microsoft: You might want to up the development of Windows 7 a little. As it stands now, Vista is pushing to take the crown away from ME as the worst MS operating system in history.

    In other news Australia was a blast.