Bob On Development

It’s been a very discouraging day setting up a brand new computer with factory-installed Vista.

I posted earlier about this under the title “Vista: Resistance is Futile?“. The short version: I hosed a brand new system at a Vista RC2 Install Fair a few months ago but that was an XP-to-Vista upgrade. So when my wife ordered a new computer we decided to give Vista another chance and had the vendor install a fresh copy of Vista Ultimate. That way we “only” have to install her applications and data files. We expected some scattered hiccups but figured it couldn’t be that bad. Could it? Hm?

Well the new box arrived this past week from Falcon Northwest and we hooked everything up and ooh’d and aah’d over the sleek new UI. Although there are so many changes in the UI that an experienced Windows user encounters loads of cognitive dissonance, we forged ahead. Because we’re super busy right now, we planned to take a few weeks to work on this slowly and carefully and test everything thoroughly before shutting down my wife’s tired old Dell for good. Besides, I hoped to have a few useful posts about our experience along the way, even though hardware and operating systems are not the main thrust of this blog.

So today my wife (a systems analyst and experienced Windows user who was Not Born Yesterday) decided to use her new computer for the first time. Starting as-is, virtually out of the box other than configuring a working Internet connection, she simply wanted to make an online purchase. Just some easy gratification so she could feel warm and fuzzy about the new system.

We use a little app that resides in the System Tray called ShopSafe. It’s provided by our credit card company and allows us to make online purchases using virtual credit cards. It’s a two minute install from our bank’s web site. Or was.

The first problem she encountered was that IE7 refused to do the install. It couldn’t say why … it gave two possible reasons, and we had to figure out which one was the problem: either she did not have admin rights, or IE7 was configured to to prohibit installation of ActiveX controls. Now I ask you … how hard would it be for an OS to know whether the logged in user has admin rights? How hard would it be for IE7 to know if it’s configured a certain way and give you the opportunity to override or change that specific option? Oh well, best not get myself started down that road.

We then did what I suspect at least half the IE7 users out there would do if they only knew how: we went through the security options and requested prompting or outright enabled everything having to do with ActiveX controls, signed or not. We did not want to spend a half hour experimenting with the half-dozen options offered, and the complaint was way too non-specific to know which one was involved — although I suspect ShopSafe’s component, while very much trusted by us, isn’t digitally signed.

Once we did this, ShopSafe installed, and appeared to work correctly. The only problem is that IE7 would unceremoniously crash a few seconds after you would start it. We looked at the error log (which, while completely redesigned, wasn’t hard to figure out) and it said that IE7 had crashed. No kidding! I’d have never guessed! It said that additional info could be found in the Problem Reports and Solutions applet, but that had no relevant entries … in fact none from today at all.

So … we unintsalled ShopSafe and IE7 started working again. Probably ShopSafe installs some sort of plugin to manage its form auto-fill feature and that was not compatible with IE7. At this point to be on the safe side we rebooted, too. Now that shows confidence in the system, doesn’t it?

Okay, FINE. We just have to use the online version of ShopSafe. So my wife does that; enters her online order on a merchant web site, gives them the virtual credit card info. Just before she hits the submit button on their shopping cart, she opens GMail in another browser tab, and copies and pastes the order summary into an email, and IE7 locks up tight as a drum. Since she hadn’t actually submitted the order and it was in another tab, it was “bye-bye, order”.

The way in which this locked up was worrisome. According to the status bar, IE7 was trying to download a JPEG that was part of the pasted data; it had the CPU at 50 to 60% utlilization doing this task, apparently forever. Nothing in that IE7 window would respond. Another IE7 window was responsive, and could be closed. Everything else on the system was responsive. But there was nothing for it but to kill the hung instance of IE7, and my wife’s online order along with it.

I hasten to add the following for the sake of fairness: ShopSafe has nothing to say about Vista compatibility or otherwise, so we were taking a bit of a chance there. It’s not so much that it didn’t work, as how Vista handled this. Remember, this is the latest and greatest version of an OS that has been continuously refined for something like 17 years now. And this particular release is years late and much reduced from its original design goals. Shouldn’t we expect something more from it then?

And yes, pasting complex HTML into the Ajax HTML textbox in GMail may have simply caused the local JavaScript running on IE7 to go into an endless loop of some kind. It may have simply been a coincidence; I have no idea if it’s an IE7 bug as such. But … this is stuff we do in our sleep every day of our lives. Stuff we’ve set up on other XP-based computers without hardly thinking about it. And here we have an hour and a half destroyed on something that should have been a “cream puff” easy thing to throw at the system.

This is Not Looking Good.

Another thing to keep in mind: we are both very experienced users. How many people all over the world are pulling their hair out as I write this, who have no clue how to extricate themselves from the mess? How many users know how to check system logs? How many know how to kill a hung process? How many users will know more or less what happened so that they can glean clues and gradually figure it all out? How jammed is Microsoft’s tech support system this afternoon?

It is not a hopeful picture, especially compared to the user experience we had with XP. This sort of thing is buying Microsoft a jumbo dumpster full of customer ill-will. Maybe even enough to overcome the fear of Linux, at least for a significant number of people.

What do you think? What have your Vista experiences with typical consumer applications been so far?

Update: the next installment in our Vista setup saga is here.