Here's my little story about Vista:
My girlfriend bought a new Acer Aspire 5630 laptop with Vista Home Premium pre-installed. We take it home, boot it up, and start installing programs (Firefox, Thunderbird, Office) off a SanDisk Cruzer flash drive that works perfectly with XP. The programs install and run just fine. We go to shut it down, and it doesn't shut down. After a few minutes, we press the power key to shut it down. Shuts down. A week later, I get an instant message about how she was trying to get her paper off the laptop using the Cruzer, and it won't copy. She finally gets it off with an SD card. Later she had to pull the battery to get it to shut down.
Back to the store we go. We get it replaced, and test the Cruzer in the new laptop right there in the store to see if we can use it with the new machine. The same problems of not shutting down start occurring. The tech staff gets called over to trouble-shoot. He starts tinkering, tests the Cruzer in several of the store's XP machines where it works flawlessly. The now-dead laptop is put aside and a third machine brought out. Some other flash drives are tested, and work perfectly. The Cruzer is tested, and proceeds to crash the third machine. This machine, though, is still somewhat responsive unlike the first two, and the techie is able to track down the generic Windows USB driver that is crashing and responsible for the errors. My girlfriend is presented with a choice of getting a fourth laptop, or having this third one completely re-formatted. She chooses to have this one re-formatted. 4 hours later we get a call from the store saying the laptop is ready. It's sitting in my room right now, turned on to see if any other bugs pop up.
If there's a take-home message about this, it's check with the manufacturer about USB compatibility with Vista. @!#!@$!$ Microsoft!!!
My girlfriend bought a new Acer Aspire 5630 laptop with Vista Home Premium pre-installed. We take it home, boot it up, and start installing programs (Firefox, Thunderbird, Office) off a SanDisk Cruzer flash drive that works perfectly with XP. The programs install and run just fine. We go to shut it down, and it doesn't shut down. After a few minutes, we press the power key to shut it down. Shuts down. A week later, I get an instant message about how she was trying to get her paper off the laptop using the Cruzer, and it won't copy. She finally gets it off with an SD card. Later she had to pull the battery to get it to shut down.
Back to the store we go. We get it replaced, and test the Cruzer in the new laptop right there in the store to see if we can use it with the new machine. The same problems of not shutting down start occurring. The tech staff gets called over to trouble-shoot. He starts tinkering, tests the Cruzer in several of the store's XP machines where it works flawlessly. The now-dead laptop is put aside and a third machine brought out. Some other flash drives are tested, and work perfectly. The Cruzer is tested, and proceeds to crash the third machine. This machine, though, is still somewhat responsive unlike the first two, and the techie is able to track down the generic Windows USB driver that is crashing and responsible for the errors. My girlfriend is presented with a choice of getting a fourth laptop, or having this third one completely re-formatted. She chooses to have this one re-formatted. 4 hours later we get a call from the store saying the laptop is ready. It's sitting in my room right now, turned on to see if any other bugs pop up.
If there's a take-home message about this, it's check with the manufacturer about USB compatibility with Vista. @!#!@$!$ Microsoft!!!
