My first non positive Vista experience (not MS' fault though)

[NewsBot]

Hi all,

 

Let me preface this posting by saying so far I've had no major problems with Vista (run it on all my PC's and have since RTM hit MSDN) and much prefer Vista over XP.

 

However, I've just gone through my first non positive moment with Vista and it goes like this...

 

It was time for a reinstall of my main home PC. It's had release version of Vista on it for over a year now and you know what development machines get like - constant installation of reinstallation of programs and tools eventually make for a slower and messy experience.

 

So*- I do a base of Vista Ultimate x86 on my*machine. All is well until I notice that the wireless connection keeps getting dropped and then reconnected - every 30 seconds or so.

I saw this a lot in the early betas, but haven't experienced it with RTM before.

My wireless card is a D-link DWA-130 Wireless N USB device, so I go to the D-Link site for the latest driver and see to my horror that I'm using the latest version, which was released in FEB 2007 and is marked as BETA!! :|

 

A few reboots, uninstalling and reinstalling of the drivers don't help, but as luck would have it, the connection stays up just long enough so I can get to Windows update and I notice there's an update over there for my D-Link card (not written by D-link themselves of course).

But, the connection keeps getting dropped before Windows update finishes, so by this stage it's starting to get annoying. Of course, I can't just download this update on my laptop and stick it on a USB drive and then onto the desktop, because Windows Update only works on the PC you're updating itself.

 

So in the end I had to find an older Wireless G card, place it (along with the D-Link still connected) into the desktop, use that older card for the connection and get to Windows update to pull down the updated D-link driver. GAAAHH! :s

 

It's stuff like this that is leading to a lot of the (in my opinion) ridiculus press for Vista. Now, this isn't actually Microsoft's fault, but they're the ones in the firing line.

For D-Link to not update beta drivers in over a year for a product that is still shipping and available in stores is beyond idiotic. It's also the last time I'm buying anything from them (I've also had a bad router from them that reboot itself constantly).

 

Sorry for venting, but my simple reinstall turned into a multi hour event that shouldn't have been so hard! All is well now though...! :D

 

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