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I’ve been working on the new Lenovo T400 for a little over a week now with some minor hickups and issues. The laptop has a T9400 Core 2 Duo with 2GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive, the Mobile Intel 4 series video card, and the 2GB speedboost Intel memory component that’s supposed to act as the At this point I’m contributing many of these problems to Vista and not the laptop itself. When I first received the laptop, and opened up Vista, rundll32.dll decided to crash on me as well as some various other minor crashes in Vista.

With those glorious issues in mind, I figured I’d see how the hardware run under Ubuntu 8.04 before I got too comfortable with Vista. I had an 8.04 CD laying around and had no luck with the graphics drivers successfully loading so I did some digging and realized they had an 8.04.1 CD out which worked fine. I was able to proceed with the installation. Once Ubuntu had gotten itself off its feet I realized it hand’t found the wireless card. The wireless card in this T400 is the Intel Wifi link 5100 AGN and I assume that it’s too new for the driver sets in Ubuntu. I played around with recompiling the kernal following some directions posted here. Unfortunately Ubuntu was still pretty flaky. I don’t use the default wireless application, I use WICD.

Ultimately the combination of everything still wasn’t very solid and there was a lot of flakyness with Ubuntu environment. I reloaded Vista but went with Vista Ultimate to see how some of the additional features performed. The first install of Vista Ultimate failed miserably, from the start of the finished installation I was getting Rundll32.dll errors and on the second day the system crashed when I attempted to create a second tab. After bringing the system back up from a hard shut off I got the blue screen of death and a reboot. The second installation attempt has gone better so far. It seems that there’s some issues with the new hardware with Vista too.

The laptop performed well through both installations and held up well when I pushed it to the limits. Even with the Intel card World of Warcraft and a couple other games handled very well. I’m hoping that Ubuntu will hurry up with the driver updates though, Vista just doesn’t feel right.

Another beautiful thing about how bad Vista sucks is that they have an enterprise version that is completely non-enterprise friendly. Before service pack 1 if you wanted to browse the entire domain of your environment it found every single computer in the forest and threw it all at you like puke from a drunk. Now with service pack 1 it won’t let you browse your network unless you turn the feature on, oh and by the way, it still looks like a bag of vomit from a drunk on a Saturday night binge.

I reinstalled Windows Vista today in hopes that many of the problems it had were resolved by service pack 1. Apparently there were changes; how they’ve helped the operating system I don’t know. The system seemed faster initially except that there are pauses now when I use certain applications. I doubt Microsoft did this on purpose but this was probably cause by their lack of openness when it comes to Vista and software development. The mouse will work fine except for random pauses that last a mere second or two which happens only in Vista, not Windows XP. This also happens on the keyboard, especially when working in Firefox, I ?ve had to resort to writing this post in Microsoft Word because the pausing would be so bad that I would backspace to fix punctuation and it would think that I held backspace down and wipe out entire sentences. There ?s nothing worse than trying to bitch about how bad Vista is and having it screw with you the entire time.

I also deal with a lot of data recovery. I ?ll have students bring down their laptops to be worked on which will involve transferring data from their hard drivers using hard drive kits. In the past with XP I ?d plug the hard drive in and start the data transfer, usually no problems at all. Now with Vista it won ?t let me touch their ?My Docs ?, ?Favorites ?, and ?Desktop. ? I could see this as a good security precaution, except that all I need to do is to take ownership (multiple times since it can ?t get it right the first time) and then transfer their information before whipping the systems.

Maybe I ?m seeing it all wrong though, maybe since I ?ve seen so many operating systems across multiple platforms and have seen what can be done that I ?ve realized what Vista is. Maybe it ?s something similar to the movie ?The Matrix ? in that I want to go down the rabbit hole and get the hell out of Microsoft ?s world but I can ?t, there ?s too many things that are holding me back, too many people that don ?t understand that there is no real benefit to ?Windows. ? It ?s nothing but a standard that was created by Microsoft that they just won ?t leave alone; they keep creating new hoops (operating systems) that they want people to jump through. Each hoop is even fierier than the last, each one more deadly and dangerous.

I ?m just rambling (and bitching) ?.God I hate Microsoft Vista.