Following on from my post about my horrible first experience with Windows Vista, I thought I would provide an update on how its going…

Well, the errors and Blue Screens continued despite me thinking things were looking better. I had three online chats with Dell support, who were polite, friendly and helpful, but were telling me to do some fairly obvious stuff that I has already done. But, they do have to ensure that all the most obvious potential solutions are tried first, so I gladly went along with updating the graphics card drive (again) and running memory and hard disk checks (again). None of these worked of course as I had already tried them. By this time I was religiously writing down the error details and times for every Blue Screen hoping to see some sort of pattern. Although there was no pattern in the error code (they were almost always different), the time at which the error occurred was consistent and I received the BSOD:

• Within about two minutes of first starting the PC
• Or, a few seconds after coming out of ‘sleep’ mode

This suggested to me that the error was either memory or motherboard – so I called Dell again armed with a bunch of new information. I was told that these error codes suggested that there was a hard disk problem – this sounded unlikely to me, but hey what do I know? So I went along with their advice to run the hard disk diagnostic tool. This is located in the Dell Diagnostic Tools stored on the recovery sector of the disk. To get there, hit F12 when booting, and select ‘Boot from Recovery Sector’ to see some more problem solving goodies. I did not even know this tool existed, so I followed the instructions, and left the tool running (it took about 6 hours to complete) and yep, you guessed it, no problems. So I ran the Dell memory diagnostic tool for a further 6 hours, and that’s right – no problems. So I though to hell with this, and every single check on the damn tool, and joy of joys I saw a ‘fail’!

Why I was happy to see something on my PC fail I don’t know, but at least it was a pointer to something that could be fixed. The failures occurred on the following checks:

• Level 1 Cache (Multiprocessor)
• Level 2 Cache (Multiprocessor)

I had to leave for work at this point so I shut the machine down and decided to try again later, and if they failed again I would call Dell and let then know. So I returned home, re-ran the tests and they all passed – WHAT?! How could it be so inconsistent? So I ran some other tests to see if they returned different results also (they didn’t), and then re-tried the processor tests which this time failed. Good.

Dell to their great credit, had telephoned me each day to ask how the tests were going, so I told them the results of the test, and they decided there was a problem with motherboard, processor and memory and would send an engineer out to replace.

And things have been perfect since – over a week and no BSOD in sight – and I love Vista! It really is an improvement over XP and frankly, a joy to use. I still have to go back to XP and Windows Server 2003 for my other work, but I don’t like to, I’m enjoying the Vista way too much.

And the moral of the story is:
Windows Vista has a bad reputation, so like many other people, I was quick to blame it. But a big, successful organisation like Microsoft doesn’t get things that badly wrong and it became obvious that the hardware was to blame. All hardware goes wrong from time to time, even the best quality, but it is how the vendor deals with the problem that makes the difference, and Dell came up trumps here.