Vista display problem returns

2/26/2008 9:25:35 AM #

I had this problem when I first installed Vista.

It went away with new Nvidia drivers. Then it came back with some new drivers, and disappeared again with new drivers. It was a PITA. In my case though, it was Nvidia's fault.

Maybe its related?

Lasse Hansen

2/26/2008 5:12:09 PM #

Steve, I'm sorry to hear that your problem is back. For my part, there is nothing that makes it imperative to run Vista, and there are many reasons not to, chief among them being that I do not have the time or the energy to suffer as you are doing.

Bill Meyer

2/26/2008 6:01:03 PM #

Lasse,
  I do believe the video driver is at least part of the issue and I'm not sure why it worked, at least momentarily, with a reinstall of SP1. It seems that the issue is perhaps controlled by some setting rather than it being a particular driver issue though it's hard to tell. Since the issue is mentioned in the release notes it seems pretty clear that Microsoft knew it was introducing this problem and that some portion of their customers would end up in my situation. What's really frustrating is you don't expect a service pack to make things significantly worse.

Bill,
  Thanks. Though my only real problems with Vista so far have been www.stevetrefethen.com/.../...iceWithDataLoss.aspx">hard resets, www.stevetrefethen.com/.../...atteryResources.aspx">huge memory consumption, www.stevetrefethen.com/.../...xSettingsWithIt.aspx">data loss, www.stevetrefethen.com/.../...hOnMyMacBookPro.aspx">the black screen of death and www.stevetrefethen.com/.../...sPerfectlyClear.aspx">usability issues. On the other hand, it's done wonders for my backup plans!

Perhaps you're right, maybe it's time to consider dotnet.org.za/.../review-windows-xp.aspx">upgrading to Windows XP.

Steve Trefethen

2/26/2008 8:58:19 PM #

Steve,

I was running Vista 64 on my Athlon, which was, at that time, a single core with 1GB of RAM. Back in August, I think, I said yes to an update, and the thing thrashed for over 3 hours. Seems the update consumed 1.5GB of RAM. Sounds to me like a design problem. Huge memory consumption seems to be a mere fact of life with Vista (Vasta?). I did not have reset problems, but did have a problem with black screen of death after the system put itself to sleep (only in the Gold release -- the pre-gold version worked very well!)

I don't normally bash MS. I consider the management of a project of the magnitude of Vista (or XP, 2K, or even NT) to be black magic. Reading Frederick Brooks cured me of wanting to see the unpleasant details of that management problem decades ago.

Having said that, however, any company determined to embark on so foolish a quest can't escape responsibility for the results it publishes, and MS seem to have put their foot in it this time. I hated the UAC (and finally disabled it), sort of liked Aero (but still object to the lion's share of the host CPU doing nothing more than painting the screen), and disliked mightily the migration of well-known and oft-needed tools to new and unexpected places.

In the end, as I said, there was no compelling reason to stay with it, so when, after my migration to dual-core, Vista failed to boot, I didn't rage, I didn't even shed a tear. I just rebooted to XP SP2, and moved on with life.

Bill Meyer