Slightly Remarkable

Last year, my younger brother Timothy received a very nice, brand-new laptop (purchased from Office Max) for his birthday. The laptop came with great specs like 3GB of RAM and 300GB hard drive space (something like that). The laptop also came with Windows Vista Home Premium (not such a great spec).

Of course, being the most technical guy in my family, I was unanimously elected Chairman of the Computer Problems and Malfunctions Committee and proceeded to begin the setup process for my brother to begin using his new laptop.

Although I am a Mac user (officially switched now), I still use Windows often since most computers still come with it. And because you can’t get a good Mac laptop for $500 just yet (but that’s buying cheap, the way I see it). I’m not unfamiliar with Windows XP or Vista, but every time I work with it, I am reminded (quickly) why I love the Mac: it just works.

But back to my story, the initial setup of a Windows Vista laptop is very smooth. You turn it on and begin using it. Of course, with a few problems, like UAC or “User Account Control,” which basically asks you to confirm a confirmation by indicating your level of certainty (often scaring users into declining and hence not achieving the functionality they sought because Windows scares them by convincing them that they do not want it). “Do you want to do this?” “Are you sure you want to do it?” “Do you realize that if you do it, the possibility exists that the sky could fall on you?” “Are you sure you would like the sky to fall on you?” I mean, pardon the hyperbole, but how many times do you have to confirm that you want to connect to your home network?

In any case, to compound the frustrations of clicking “OK” or “Yes” twenty times per action, Windows Vista doesn’t seem to connect to a wireless router unless, well, it wants to. The diagnosis of the router problem is incredibly idiotic. When it “diagnoses” the problem, it usually cannot find it; and when it does identify something it is always wrong. Not sometimes, always. After between 10 and 30 minutes of fiddling with network settings, rebooting the machine, and disabling layers and layers (and layers and layers and layers) of security settings, I concluded that Windows Vista simply would not allow a machine to connect to a network.

Several hours later, for whatever reason, I was playing with router settings for a virtual server I’d setup on my (Windows) laptop. In the process, I needed to reboot the router to update the settings. When I rebooted the router, Timothy noticed (and subsequently informed me) that his Windows Vista laptop connected to the Internet. So let’s recap.

Windows Vista

• would not connect to the wireless network
• said “no problems detected” when it diagnosed the connection
• required multiple layers of security to be disabled
• could not suggest rebooting the router
• randomly began working after the router was rebooted

Okay, excellent. Not to bash or anything, but in contrast, in December of 2008 when I bought my first MacBook Pro (which I am using to write this blog entry), here’s how simple the process to connect to the wireless network was:

• Turn it on.

And now you see why Mac wins over PC. It works. And it’s not just Vista. My previous Windows XP Professional laptop’s search function (you know, “search this computer”) was broken. I could search a folder for a file by name, which I knew was there, and not find it. Conversely, I can type anything in Spotlight and find it in a fraction of the time on my Mac. (Uses about 1GB of virtual memory to power it, but that’s a small sacrifice seeing as it doesn’t dramatically affect performance as far as I can tell.)

Let’s consider another situation in which Windows Vista decided to frustrate the family. Tonight, Timothy was installing some anti-virus software on his laptop (the same laptop he got for his birthday last year). Of course, why you would need anti-virus software is beyond my comprehension, considering that there seems to be so much security on Windows Vista that a virus wouldn’t be able to do anything — heck, the user can’t do anything half the time! Anyway, to make a long story short, after installing the anti-virus software (Trend Micro, if you’re curious, but I don’t think it matters as this was a Vista thing), the laptop no longer would connect to the Internet. Naturally, my first course of action was to again disable all security (Windows Defender, Windows Firewall, Internet Options security settings, the whole nine yards); next, I rebooted the laptop (after discovering that the “shut down” icon actually meant “log off” — a very serious user interface problem), which did not work, either. Then I tried rebooting the router, recalling my earlier issues with Vista. This also did not work. The solution eventually turned out to be that I had to disable and re-enable the wireless network adapter. Vista’s diagnosis of the problem? “Ensure that IPv4 and IPv6 settings are enabled.” Ridiculous!

So, ladies and gentlemen, when it comes to Windows Vista, don’t rely on whatever Vista tells you. If it tells you anything, it’s probably wrong. Instead, restart the machine, router, network adapter, and then try again. You’re better off just trying what you think will work than following Vista’s instructions.