codyg1985’s Think Tank

Note: The following is an account of my experiences with Windows Vista, and may or may not reflect the general consensus of users’ experiences with Windows Vista. I will not deny that the cause of the following problems may not be Windows Vista at all, but my hardware setup. I hope to see solutions to these problems ASAP.

As I have been posting, I upgraded my primary computer’s operating system from Windows XP to Windows Vista Beta 2. I thought that my experience with the operating system would be a smooth one, but it is turning out that my experience has been anything but smooth.

Firstly, Vista would not run Daemon Tools, a CD/DVD emulator that mounts images onto a virtual CD/DVD device. Not only would Daemon Tools not install and work correctly, but it also unactivated Vista. Attempting to reactivate the operating system over the internet would result in an error.

Secondly, running Sim City 4: Rush Hour was a click-and-pray process. The game is extremely glitchy under Vista. I tried many remedies, including disabling Aero, but none of the fixes seemed to fix the problem.

I installed the latest drivers for my video card for Windows Vista, and that did not fix the problem either. As a matter of fact, it may have something to do with a problem below.

I found out why this was the case when doing what I usually was able to do on Windows XP without a problem; play Sim City, play music, and even browse the internet simultaneously. In Vista, doing just that froze my entire computer up. I have never had an NT-based operating system freeze up before on any of my computers. I reboot the computer to find out that my CPU was overheating. The CPU temperature was running at 145 degrees Fahrenheit, or 63 degrees Celsius.

Somehow a feature of my motherboard, ASUS Cool and Quiet, was disabled, so I reenabled it. The Cool and Quiet feature on Windows XP would normally cool the CPU by ten to twenty degrees. Not the case for Vista; the CPU temperature was at a minimum 120 degree Fahrenheit and 130 degrees F on average when I was doing nothing with the system.

But wait, there’s more! All of a sudden, my second monitor of my dual-monitor setup started to flicker. The screen would go black for a few seconds then regenerate, then go blank again, and so on. I disabled the second monitor, but did that stop the problems? Nope; my primary monitor began doing the same thing, making use of my computer impossible. This is why I am typing this post on my laptop with my crappy laptop keyboard (pardon all the typos).

Before you start yelling at me that Vista is still a beta OS, I understand that concept. Vista is not finished yet. However, my view of the operating system (and my computer) has not became clearer as the slogan suggests. My computing habits have been handicapped instead of enhanced. The only game I have been able to run is Solitare, and even that increases CPU usage to the brink of overheating. These issues are just some of the problems I have seen with Vista, and I am not convinced that anything short of a complete overhaul of the current beta will fix all of the problems.

I am hopeful that the problems that I am experiencing are an isolated occurance, and that CPU usage can be better maintained in future builds of Vista. Maybe I should look into alternative cooling options for my PC to continue to run Vista, but I would like to see CPU usage and CPU/Motherboard temperatures to be similar to what was experienced with Windows XP.