Arriving Somewhere

We are starting to get some questions at the Information Desk about troubleshooting Windows Vista on new laptops that students have purchased. Usually simple things like “how do I join the wireless network” or “how do I add network printers” and some not so simple like using Office 2007. So I asked for a copy of Vista to install on a laptop to give the myself and other reference staff the opportunity to get our hands dirty and try it out for ourselves.

Yesterday I sat down to install Windows Vista on a new Dell laptop. There really isn’t much to say because the installation went smoothly and simply, only asking for my input a few times. I was able to concentrate on other work only glancing at the laptop occasionally to see if it required my attention. Now, I must confess that I’ve been dragging my feet on Vista – I’m still on XP at home and lately I’ve been quite enamored with my Mac G5 at work (I’m rocking a dual screen setup now!) – so I had not been in any particular hurry to use Vista. However, being the tech geek that I am, any chance to try out some new and shiny toy is exciting.

With the install at an end and the anticipation building I set out to do my first task in Windows Vista. Run Windows Update. What do you think happened? I get an error message telling me that it can’t run update. I was connected to the internet, so that wasn’t the problem. The Help was no help at all (no suprise) so I Googled the error code and found that while my problem was quite common, everyone had a different solution. Of course there was no documentation on Microsoft’s website about the error and since I felt a headache coming on I decided to drop the problem and deal with it the next day.

How classic. The first thing I try to do in Vista results in utter failure. Before I shut down I decided to take care of one other problem. This particular Dell Latitude D830 has a widescreen resolution, and the display was stretched out to fit it. So I downloaded the NVIDIA graphics driver, installed it and restarted. Then it looked much better.

On a whim I decided to try running Windows Update one more time. Voila! It works! Why, after updating the graphics driver, Windows Update would suddenly work is beyond me. I certainly didn’t see any similar solutions in my Google search. Ah, well, at least it works now.

Another strike against Vista… after I log onto the computer I am always greeted by an “Open File – Security Warning” asking if I want to allow the Intel Graphics Accelerator to run. Three times. So I click Run (or cancel) three times, and always clear the check box for “Always ask before opening the file”. Argh.