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http://live.pirillo.com/ – Cameron Reilly joins me live to discuss his problems with Vista. Apparently, kangaroos do not play nicely with Vista.

Cameron Reilly of Gday World is an ex-Microsoft employee. He knows how Microsoft products work. He is obviously a geek of the highest caliber. Yet… he continually has Vista issues. Most recently, he lost an entire days’ work due to an odd BSOD. Windows had updated overnight. The next morning, Cam went to use his computer, and it blue screened on him. The only error message he received was something along the lines of “rundll32.exe has encountered an error…..”. Pretty obscure, eh?

Cam called his IBM tech support. They suggested using the recovery console to reformat his system. What’s that?? The recovery console crashed, as well? Holy mother of XBox… is that even possible?! They promised to ship him a disc within just a few days. He’s still waiting for those, btw.

After hours of fiddling, Googling, and trying everything he could think of (including BIOS upgrade and driver updates), Cam accidentally found the problem and solved it. Buried somewhere deep in a forum online, he found a post where a user had these same error messages, who ended up having USB problems. Cam unplugged every USB device from his computer, and began plugging them back in one by one. The last one… the USB sound card he is using to talk to me now… started throwing the errors and crashes again. Presto! Unplug it. Plug it back in. Grrrrrr! Unplug it again. Plug it back in. Ah-HAH! There’s the driver. Everything works well now. It’s 2am. Think Cam got any work done at that point?

I don’t care who is talking, or what they say. In my mind, Vista is still very much a beta program. There are known USB issues, Hub issues, driver issues… shall I stop there? Microsoft has issued a “performance pack” and a “reliability pack”. Why aren’t they addressing the actual issues users are facing? Why is it that this “wonderful, magical operating system” we waited for is still falling short of every single expectation?

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Vista Headaches with Cameron Reilly