Vista has been a bear for me. I dislike working every day because Vista makes
my day painful.
My latest problem with Vista concerns docking my laptop. I'm a very mobile
person, which requires me to dock and undock my laptop several times per day.
My setup is: a Dell Latitude D630 with a Dell docking station. While at
work, I have two monitors plugged into my dock - a 17" into the VGA port and
a 22" into the DVI port. My 17" is on my left and the 22" in front of me.
The problem is that Vista does not know what to do when I dock and undock my
laptop. As if there is a confusion with the laptop when it's in a dock
profile and in the undock profile.
When undocked, I open the laptop and the screen is black, only after using
my function-F8 key am i able to get my screen back on the laptop. Undocking
my laptop via the physical undock button and the windows "Undock" option
yields the same result.
Undocking isn't such a pain because I've figured out what I can do to get it
working again. Docking the laptop when I return from a meeting is a pain.
If I was using the laptop and shut the lid and re-dock it, Vista goes
foobar. Anything can happen with my display. Sometimes, it refuses to display
an image on the 17" or 22" monitor. Sometimes, I get an image on the 17",
others, just the 22". If I actually get an image on one of the monitors,
there's a whole process I have to go through where I need to re-enable the
second monitor, then specify the correct screen resolution of both monitors.
Typically, after doing this, Vista moves the monitors around so that my start
menu is on the wrong monitor, and I need to open the display properties again
and respecify everything a second time (yes, it forgets the screen
resolutions).
Most of the time, the display properties won't allow me to increase my
screen resolution past 640x480, so I have to reboot my laptop. An, keep in
mind this is when it actually thinks there are 2 monitors.
The rebooting gets into a whole different problem because it takes over 5
minutes to boot up Vista and login to my desktop. I have a domain login and
when I'm undocked and not on the domain, Vista sits at the login screen for 2
minutes, then sits at a black screen for another 2 minutes, then decides to
let me login.
I've heard that SP1 is supposed to fix the off-domain login issue; however,
I've installed the RC1 of SP1 and no beans. It actually takes longer no that
I've installed RC1 to boot up. Good job Vista.
One thing I have noticed is that file copying has greatly sped up in the RC1
of SP1. Finally. I've gone almost a year with a simple 100 MB copy from one
folder to the next taking hours.
Finally, let's hope that the Microsoft CD/DVD burning feature of Vista is
fixed sooner than later. I'm tired of waiting 50 minutes for Vista to burn a
regular CD. Ive wasted more time burning 30 MB to a CD.
Microsoft, fix these problems with your "next generation" operating system.