Shifting to Vista: No driver dramas yet, but the networking is rubbish

Angus Kidman
Sunday, 29 April 2007 06:41

Opinion and Analysis

Waiting a couple of months for critical patches and purchasing Vista pre-installed on a new machine seemed like a foolproof way to avoid most of the woes new Vista users have experienced, but I hadn't counted on just how bad the networking stack in the latest version of Windows is.

Even before it became apparent that five years (the gap between Windows XP and Vista) wasn't quite enough time for some developers to get their act together and rewrite their software, Transit had always planned to stay away from Vista until it was time to purchase a new machine. Upgrading OSes is invariably painful, and doubly so if you're a notebook user, since manufacturers invariably make tweaks to the OS to reflect their hardware. Letting the manufacturer go through the install hassles makes life much simpler.

This month, it became clear that my not-particularly-ageing Toshiba Tecra was on its last legs, and it was time to acquire a new system before everything actually collapsed. Earlier this week, a new Lenovo ThinkPad T60 was delivered, complete with Vista Business, and I prepared for the prospect of a weekend spent reinstalling key applications and transferring files.

Initially, everything seemed to be going smoothly. The actual setup process with Vista is rather faster than with an XP machine, requiring fewer reboots before there was a working machine in place. Connecting to the wireless network also went ahead without any problems (though that might well be due to the built-in ThinkVantage software rather than Vista itself).

Vista's rather zealous approach to security quickly became apparent, when it repeatedly popped up warnings that there weren't sufficient security systems in place. This might be useful under some circumstances, but not when I was halfway through installing my anti-virus software. However, this still fell only into the nuisance category, rather than being a functional problem.

The first one of those came after I'd installed Outlook 2007. My imported Rules (used to automatically sort messages from mailing lists into folders) all managed to lose track of the folder locations, and I had to redefine every single one by hand. Now, it would be tempting to blame this on the fact that Vista uses a different directory structure to XP. However, since the whole folder structure for Outlook is internal to the PST file, that doesn't really make sense.

Anyway, recreating the rules was a pain, but at the end of the process I had a working email system. Unfortunately, the same couldn't be said for what I thought would be a simpler task: copying files from my old machine to my new one. Read on to discover where it all went wrong . . .