My Corner of the Web
Updated: 17 May 2008
Original Post: 09 May 2008
I just purchased a brand-new, high-end Dell computer to go with my new home office. After the setup, I played around a bit with some of my pre-installed software and then put Vista to sleep when taking a break. Upon waking Vista back up I immediately receieved a blue screen of death! I stared at it for about a minute in shock - this can't be real. A brand new computer with only the pre-installed software on it does not do things like this. I literally felt betrayed. Of course, I jumped on the net to learn about the large number of problems Vista has upon waking up. Give me a break - what does a person have to do to get a reliable OS? Let's face it - all I really want now is an OS to get on the world wide web, every time, without fail... everything else is gravy. Ok, linux here I come. :)
Update 1: 18 May 2008
Diagnosed this with Dell. Appears that the virus software (PC-cillin) had a critical update that I needed. Why this is not automatically updated since the virus protection does do automatic updates - I don't know. Anyway, also updated a network driver. Again, same issue - why not automatically update that. Learned two new things about vista: there is a really nice Reliability and Performance monitor that has nice graphs. I will post one shortly. Also, learned about the microsoft debug tool to examine the crash dumps. These are the tools the Dell customer support rep used to diagnose the problem. So far, I think this may have fixed the problem as I have now hibernated and woke up the computer several times. Ok, one more thing - I also upgraded to Vista SP1 but that was not really the fix - the fix were the two items mentioned above! I am keeping my fingers crossed... still will be getting a Linux-based PC though. Still researching my options regarding cost/OS flavor/etc.