Microsoft Vista team reads iTWire and responds to Vista problems

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 06 December 2006 22:43

Your IT - Entertainment

In my recent article ‘More problems with Vista final release?’ I detailed a couple of the problems I’ve been having with the final ‘RTM’ business version of Vista that was released on November 30. A “Software Design Engineer in Test” from the Windows Experience Team at Microsoft has been in touch to get more details!

It’s always nice to know that not only are –you– reading this article, but that the companies we write about are reading too. In my recent article on Vista problems I talked of intermittent crashes when hibernating or sleeping, and a problem where the colours in Vista look washed out when resuming from a successful hibernation.

While the crashing after hibernation or sleeping has not, as yet, returned, the dreaded colour scheme washout is still appearing, with my own quick fix of changing the colour scheme to 16-bit ‘Vista Basic’ and back to 32-bit ‘Vista Aero’ still working for me to get the colours back to normal, with the colours looking darker again.

I’ve just sent off an email to Microsoft’s Vista Software Design Engineer after he requested more information on the configuration of my computer. He asked for the info “so we can try to reproduce the problem in-house and root cause the issue”.

Getting this kind of direct request for info from what would appear to be exactly the right person (or one of the right people) at Microsoft is very cool, and is certainly much better and quicker than contacting Microsoft Australia people who would probably have had to refer me to their US Vista counterparts anyway.

I’ve only just sent the email before posting this article, so I’m not expecting an instant response. Indeed, they may ask me to provide even more information as they try to replicate the problem and work on a fix of some kind.

As soon as we get an update, we’ll let you know. Until then, thank goodness there’s a workaround! I’ll also be updating Microsoft if I experience any more hibernation/sleep ‘crash’ issues.

Update: I received another response back with instructions on how to save a file in Vista that will give Microsoft a more detailed look at what's happening in the system, and a request to please send the file over so they can continue their investigation.

Until then, I’m going to happily keep on using Vista. Yes, Mac fans have just told me to ‘Get a Mac’… but as a tablet PC fan that isn’t an option. Maybe if Apple release that rumoured Apple Tablet after all with a dual-core chip inside I could be tempted.

I did want to purchase a MacBook to run OS X and Vista at the same time, but for now I’ll wait – there’s still a lot of great work going on in the OS X and XP/Vista space with the Parallels software and more, and waiting a bit longer is actually a good thing as Parallels keep on improving, with the latest version allowing you to place Windows program icons on the OS X desktop and running Windows software in its own screen.

It’s the best implementation of Mac OS X running Windows software while still in OS X, but if the rumours of OS X 10.5 – Apple’s upcoming operating system – to be able to ‘natively’ run Windows alongside OS X are true, the Parallels people might be quaking at the thought. Unless Apple buys them up and uses their solution to offer the same capability from an OS level.

So it’s all a waiting game. Waiting for Jan 30 for the consumer Vista launch, waiting for an email response from Microsoft, waiting for the Zune to be sold down under and waiting for a better MacBook from Apple.

What I'd most like to see happen now, beyond getting every manufacturer in the world to get a move on with the latest Vista drivers for all of their hardware? Getting this colours issue fixed in Vista, the operating system I (mostly) happily use all day, every day. It's only a little thing, consdering there is a workaround. But it's always the little things that matter, isn't it?

After that, I'd simply like to see Microsoft work as hard as they can to get all of their partners focused on getting all software and hardware to work seamlessly and flawlessly with Vista. Now that Vista is out, there can be no more excuses!