Frustrated w/ Vista thinking about going back to XP

Good morning,

I saw an earlier post about someone removing Vista nad going back to Vista and someone mentioned posting concrete problems w/ Vista instead of just trying to jump on the bandwagon of Vista Sucks.

So here is why on the main computer at home I'm thinking about going back to Vista, or at least sick of trying to troubleshoot....

My computer is a Dell, Pentium D w/ 2 Gigs of RAM.  Currently I don't have the Video Card to run full Aero, but that's fine w/ me....

Anyways here is the list of issues I'm sick of dealing w/

1.  IE7 crashing:  My wife uses the computer a lot and when she is on various sites, Facebook, some chatboards, Snapfish, Flickr IE7 will freeze and stop responding.  The troubleshooter doesn't list any specific problems or steps to resolve this problem.  My wife just wants to do her webmail, chat on her chat boards, and check pictures people post.

2.  USB drives stop responding:  I have my music collection on a 120 GIG usb drive and want to listen to music.  Media Player stops repsonding 9 times out 10, mostly between changing songs.  While the music keeps playing

3.  iTunes freezes:  I have the latest version of iTunes, downloaded it via the Apple Updater and every time I plug-in my iPod, my wife's iPod the application stops responding, probally linked to problem #2


None of these were problems before when I was on XP and starting to wonder if I shouldn't have upgraded.  I've downloaded drivers from Dell, made sure my system was completly up to date, ran anti-virus scans and anti-spyware scans and spent about a month and half trying to troubleshoot all the problems.

Anyone got any hints or suggestions for me or should I just format and start back w/ XP that was working?

what hardware configuration do you have (chipset, additional cards) and also which applications did you install?

also did you try disabling (and also removing) the AV to see if the problems stop?

Checking hardware configuration.  Yes I have disabled virus protection when troubleshooting the problems without changes

This could all be attributed to bad RAM, run some mem diags on it, Vista has some if you boot from the DVD and select repair my PC.

Also if you have 3rd party IE addons these can be causing issues,

As for iTunes, seriously

j0217995 wrote:



1.  IE7 crashing:  My wife uses the computer a lot and when she is on various sites, Facebook, some chatboards, Snapfish, Flickr IE7 will freeze and stop responding.  The troubleshooter doesn't list any specific problems or steps to resolve this problem.  My wife just wants to do her webmail, chat on her chat boards, and check pictures people post.

2.  USB drives stop responding:  I have my music collection on a 120 GIG usb drive and want to listen to music.  Media Player stops repsonding 9 times out 10, mostly between changing songs.  While the music keeps playing

Hmm...  item #1 sounds like a plugin issue, may not be IE at fault.
I have seen sites stall on loading pages but I have not seen IE7 just up and crash .... do the sites use flash ? what version of flash in on the pc?

#2 possibe bad hardware or cable?  or the drivers ?
depending on the pc (age,brand, mobo etc...) check for driver issues
and how did you load vista ? via upgrade or clean install?
are the USB ports on the mobo? what chipsets who made the mobo?

in general my plan is to not switch till I know I have all the drivers and have ran the OS "side by side" with a dual boot for at least 2-3 months just to help me work out stuff like that...
so I can test the web site, flash drive etc... with both OS's

j0217995 wrote:

Checking hardware configuration.  Yes I have disabled virus protection when troubleshooting the problems without changes

did you uninstall the AV software? there could be AV's kernel drivers that mess up with applications even when the AV is not running.

For hanging applications, you could try grabbing the dump and running it through !analyze in WinDbg.

However, for IE7, it's possible that you've run into my hanging problem which seems to be caused by uxtheme.dll. If you want to see the details, you can go to the newsgroup thread.

If IE7 is crashing take a look at the troubleshooting steps at http://www.enhanceie.com/ie/troubleshoot.asp
As has been mentioned before the most likely culprit of IE7 stability and performance issues are poorly behaved addons.

I use vista on my primary machine and wouldn't dream of going back to XP

Thanks
-Dave
www.dmassy.com

What I find annoying is that whenever I click a music file it automagically starts playing with no apparent way to stop it. I run Winamp all the time, but Winamp is still playing the song I selected. It's not even playing in the preview pane, and its totally confusing/annoying.

Lloyd_Humph wrote:

What I find annoying is that whenever I click a music file it automagically starts playing with no apparent way to stop it. I run Winamp all the time, but Winamp is still playing the song I selected. It's not even playing in the preview pane, and its totally confusing/annoying.

I just want to answer that with a resounding "huh!?"

I have a Dell Dimension E310

For those that asked, Yes I uninstalled my Anti-Virus and had problems with that as well

My USB Controllers are as listed

USB Controllers	Intel(R) 82801FB/FBM USB Universal Host Controller - 2658
	Intel(R) 82801FB/FBM USB Universal Host Controller - 2659
	Intel(R) 82801FB/FBM USB Universal Host Controller - 265A
	Intel(R) 82801FB/FBM USB Universal Host Controller - 265B
	Intel(R) 82801FB/FBM USB2 Enhanced Host Controller - 265C

It doesn't matter which controller I plug into the all freeze

My dispaly adapater:

Display Adapters

Intel(R) 82915G/GV/910GL Express Chipset Family (Microsoft Corporation - XDDM)

DMassy wrote:

If IE7 is crashing take a look at the troubleshooting steps at http://www.enhanceie.com/ie/troubleshoot.asp
As has been mentioned before the most likely culprit of IE7 stability and performance issues are poorly behaved addons.

I use vista on my primary machine and wouldn't dream of going back to XP

Thanks
-Dave
www.dmassy.com

Thansk Dave,

I have enjoyed Vista but when my wife is always complaining abotu it crashing or not working correctly its time to take a look at going back to what is was running and not crashing...

Skriker V1.0 wrote:



 

As for iTunes, seriously

So what would you use to manage yoru iPod instead of iTunes?

Sven Groot wrote:



Lloyd_Humph wrote: What I find annoying is that whenever I click a music file it automagically starts playing with no apparent way to stop it. I run Winamp all the time, but Winamp is still playing the song I selected. It's not even playing in the preview pane, and its totally confusing/annoying.

I just want to answer that with a resounding "huh!?"

I've had this happen a few times. After you close WMP the process is still running in the background, you have to actually kill the process to stop the audio

Cyonix wrote:



Sven Groot wrote:  Lloyd_Humph wrote: What I find annoying is that whenever I click a music file it automagically starts playing with no apparent way to stop it. I run Winamp all the time, but Winamp is still playing the song I selected. It's not even playing in the preview pane, and its totally confusing/annoying. I just want to answer that with a resounding "huh!?"

I've had this happen a few times. After you close WMP the process is still running in the background, you have to actually kill the process to stop the audio

I've had this too, but it's actually playing itself without any media player active.

j0217995 wrote:



Skriker V1.0 wrote:    As for iTunes, seriously

So what would you use to manage yoru iPod instead of iTunes?

The trashcan.

Sorry,

Not that it's of any help but wow you're having some bad luck
Vista works very well for me and even though I have a dual-boot system I never boot into XP anymore.

I strongly recommend you try to install the latest hardware drivers, especially RAID controller if you're using.  I/O intensive work by iTunes cause BSOD on Vista. I don't know exactly why.

After updating my hardware drivers to the latest versions, all problems disappeared.

heesub