After spending nearly 3 days setting up my new laptop, which came with Windows Vista Business (and wasn't available with XP) Vista did an automatic update which disabled my gigabit NIC card. Nothing I could do would get it back (I couldn't get a system restore point before the updates -- too many restores in between pushed it out the end).

So, now at 9:50 pm, I've finished pulling off my critical data and I'm doing the only thing I can do -- restore the laptop to the factory Vista configuration, losing everything I've installed, set up, tweaked, etc. I expect to be up until 2 or 3 am re-installing those necessary programs that I'll need at work tomorrow.

Microsoft, ES&D for bringing this piece of garbage to market when, clearly, it's not ready for prime time (or anything close).

. . . continue on until I get to go to bed.

You were warned. You were suppsed to wait for SP1.

Microsoft hates you. Buy a Mac.

I had no choice. I wanted a Sony SZ laptop and waited too long to buy it -- Sony doesn't sell them anymore with XP.

Hah! One of the things I don't like about Vista is just how Mac-like it is.

I just finished some litigation against Microsoft. I wonder if it's a setup?

I have no idea what happened that could disable a NIC beyond repair. Are you sure you tried everything before wiping it?

Absolutely. The latest update (oddly, for Office 2003) did something to internet access. I could ping everything on the network, including the DNS server on my ISP. However, no software that access the internet would work -- not Explorer, not Firefox, not Mail -- nothing. There's no way to remove updates once their installed (another "improvement" over XP), so I was left with no choice but to re-image the drive -- Sony and Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, won't sell you, much less give you, an actual Vista installation disk, so you can't repair and installation, only restore.

It's now 10:50 and I'm still waiting for the bloody re-image and first-time boot to finish. One of the things it does is install a whole bunch of trial garbage -- no way to stop it. A good part of the time spent bringing up the machine was decrappifying it.

Grrrrr!!!! 11:30 pm, and the #$%^&*() restore just finished. Now, I have to load in essential software and decrappify.

Ugh.

Sounds like Vista's stupid firewall and "security improvements." If there are drivers for the hardware on that model of Sony that work on XP, I would buy a copy of XP and forget about Vista for at least a year.

In any case... staying up all night restoring/reinstalling Windows with a deadline looming =

There aren't drivers available from Sony without reflashing the BIOS.

Yep. Right now, I'm uninstalling all the junk that I had to wait for an hour to install. I'll never buy a Norton or Symantec product because of this.

Sales people at BestBuy are talking people OUT of getting computers with Vista. Glad Mac OS X is stable and was copied by MS.

ALL of them? Or just the one or two you ran into? Cause every bestbuy i've been to is very actively promoting it, and their sales staff are doing everything they can to get people to purchase it.

Control panel > programs and features > installed updates > click the update and click uninstall.

I can uninstall every update it's ever installed.

Are you the person that waited and waited to buy a computer until Vista came out?

Vista does seem to suck. I've helped a few friends set up their Vista machines,and I hate it. I'm glad I've made the switch to Mac, at least for my personal PC's.