Windows Vista

Windows Vista got a lot of bad press lately. Anyway, I installed it over the last few days. Here are my observations, and some solutions to my problems.

Why XP failed

I built myself a new computer so I had to reinstall my system. My preferred solution would have been to use my old drive and don’t change anything else. Linux (Ubuntu) worked great with the new hardware, but Windows XP didn’t do so well. Additionally I wanted to configure my system to use AHCI, and Windows XP always crashed during it’s installation (I had to install AHCI drivers via a Floppy! I haven’t seen a Floppy since 2003…).

Hours later I succeeded with XP but got other driver problems (I guess the problem was some Trusted Computing-thingy).

Windows Vista

My university offers Windows Vista Business for 10 Euro, so I went out and bought a copy.

The installation was pretty easy and fast, Vista recognized most of my hardware (altogether Vista-certified) and was ready to use. That’s where the trouble started.

Slow HDD access

The whole system was incredibly slow (it took minutes to access files on the old NTFS partition). I don’t know why Vista didn’t ask for some driver or anything if it wasn’t able to use my (Vista-certified) hardware properly. The installation of the chipset drivers from Intel fixed the issues and everything looked fine again (I usually install the drivers of the chipset makers – whether it’s Intel or nVidia because the drivers of the manufacturers like Asus or Gigabyte are usually out of date and don’t offer important features).

Blue Screen of Death because of network load?

The next weird behavior was that the computer crashed when I transferred larger files over my home-network. I didn’t matter whether I used a switch or directly connected my MacBook Pro to the port, it always crashed after a few hundred megabytes. It crashed really hard with a BSOD (which is shown for a few seconds followed by a reboot).

Hmmm – crash because of network load, that sounds like a driver issue (again on my Vista-certified hardware). I downloaded the driver from Realtek and tada no more BSODs!

Firefox

Something is still a bit fishy – Firefox is much slower than usual (not Firefox itself, but the rendering of the page). What’s going on here?

It seems that Vista uses a feature called “autotuning” of TCP packet size to improve the network performance. Unfortunately some Router have problems with this. The solution is easy, just disable autotuning using netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=disabled.

Unfortunately this didn’t help very much (I’ll leave it disabled anyway). I installed a Firefox Add-On called Fasterfox to improve the performance of the browser, but it seems that the plugin actually makes Firefox slower on Windows Vista. I tried it with Google Finance: using Fasterfox with the Optimized setting, FF took more than two minutes (until I cancelled it) and other Web sites took several seconds to load. Setting Fasterfox to the Standard setting caused Google Finance to load in a second and the other previous-10-second Web site less than half a second (I deleted the cache between all tests).

So, uninstalling Fasterfox Slowerfox was the solution and currently I’m experiencing no unwanted behavior anymore.

Conclusion

It took me two days to get Vista running on my Vista-certified hardware. Installing Ubuntu is merely a “few-click-experience” whereas Vista requires a lot of research and nitpicking of drivers.

For reference here my hardware-cornerstones with links to (at least for me) working Vista drivers:

• Intel 775 (Gigabyte P35-DQ6) board with P35 Chipset
• Realtek RTL8168/8111 Gigabit Ethernet
• nVidia 7600 GT

—
Vista
Etymology: Italian, sight, from visto, past participle of vedere to see, from Latin vidEre
1 : a distant view through or along an avenue or opening
2 : an extensive mental view (as over a stretch of time or a series of events)—Merriam-Webster

Hasta la vista, baby. —Terminator