Vista Laptop IssuesVista Laptop Issues

Posted June 11th, 2008 in Hardware & Gadgets

I bought a new laptop two months ago pre-loaded with Windows Vista. It was all working nicely until I started working for a new customer two days a week yesterday and we had to install some additional software etc on it. Then it all went badly and the laptop has become unusable...

When I first bought it, I installed Adobe Photoshop, VMWare Player, Microsoft Office, Zend Studio and a few other applications. I also had to install the Cisco VPN client and a Juniper Networks VPN client to get into a couple of my customers' networks. This was all working nicely and despite being a resoure hog (I have 2GB of RAM on this laptop and Vista uses about half of it after booting up) it was reasonably quick and responsive.

As part of this new work I'm doing, the laptop configuration needed to be modified to log me into their domain server etc and we installed Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server etc. After everything was installed the laptop was running considerably slower and the Cisco VPN software didn't appear to let me log into the VPN anymore.

After some more messing around and uninstall/reinstall of the VPN client, I discovered it would work fine from home but not at their office. We messed around with it for about an hour this morning trying to get things working but the machine was griding to more and more of a standstill, running some sort of backup or restore in the background and somehow managed to automatically delete all the VPN client's files. It required switching off and on a couple of times after it ground to a halt.

Needless to say I'm particularly unimpressed with Vista now and am currently using the product recovery discs from Toshiba to install Windows XP onto that laptop. I made it a point when buying this laptop to select one that had the option of reverting from XP to Vista and now am glad I made that choice. At least I know once it's reinstalled it's going to fly with 2GB of RAM for XP!

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