I'm fixing up a 2nd hand Packard Bell to make it usable for the family who bought it. Took off Norton Suite and some other Packard rubbish but left a lot of stuff there that didn't seem to be doing any harm.
The idea of wiping it all and installing an "interesting" version of win7 crossed my mind, but since we had a valid Vista license I said "what the hell" and went with what we had already (Vista Home Basic). The previous owner had apparently done a factory restore, so it was as Packard Bell send them out.
After this I set up user accounts - one admin, one standard. Installed drivers; put MSE and Defender on; installed IE8. All seemed well, so I installed the games the kids wanted, since it's a PC for the littl'uns.
Two days later, I'm called back. Vista seems buggered completely. The kids didn't do anything, they swear, and couldn't have anyhow since I'd disabled control panel and most other stuff. I'm informed that the machine crashed once and had to be hard reset. Oh well.
Anyway, today there are severe problems. For one, the UAC prompts take 5 minutes - 5 minutes !!!! - to appear on the screen. That is beyond ridiculous, since explorer is literally locked for 5 minutes whilst I wait, preventing me from even restarting the machine.
Secondly the machine is now reporting ISATAP driver has stopped working, but that appears to be a simple fix, so I uninstall and reinstall network drivers and that seems to have gone away.
But still the machine is completely unusable, with this insane 5 minutes UAC lag. Also the hard disk seems to be accessing literally non-stop. MS anti-malware engine is taking 50% of all CPU cycles too :/ I'm a sad panda.
Is this normal? Is Vista really the most flaky OS since win ME? I skipped Vista personally, and crap like this is making me feel really glad I did.
Looks like a wipe and a clean install of Win7 tomorrow.
The idea of wiping it all and installing an "interesting" version of win7 crossed my mind, but since we had a valid Vista license I said "what the hell" and went with what we had already (Vista Home Basic). The previous owner had apparently done a factory restore, so it was as Packard Bell send them out.
After this I set up user accounts - one admin, one standard. Installed drivers; put MSE and Defender on; installed IE8. All seemed well, so I installed the games the kids wanted, since it's a PC for the littl'uns.
Two days later, I'm called back. Vista seems buggered completely. The kids didn't do anything, they swear, and couldn't have anyhow since I'd disabled control panel and most other stuff. I'm informed that the machine crashed once and had to be hard reset. Oh well.
Anyway, today there are severe problems. For one, the UAC prompts take 5 minutes - 5 minutes !!!! - to appear on the screen. That is beyond ridiculous, since explorer is literally locked for 5 minutes whilst I wait, preventing me from even restarting the machine.
Secondly the machine is now reporting ISATAP driver has stopped working, but that appears to be a simple fix, so I uninstall and reinstall network drivers and that seems to have gone away.
But still the machine is completely unusable, with this insane 5 minutes UAC lag. Also the hard disk seems to be accessing literally non-stop. MS anti-malware engine is taking 50% of all CPU cycles too :/ I'm a sad panda.
Is this normal? Is Vista really the most flaky OS since win ME? I skipped Vista personally, and crap like this is making me feel really glad I did.
Looks like a wipe and a clean install of Win7 tomorrow.
