Bugs, bugs, bugs

Today I decided to run the Windows Experience Index assessment again since it said it my score needed updating. However, peculiarly when I clicked "Refresh my score" there was no progress dialog shown. You could see the test was actually running, evident from Aero being temporarily disabled etc.

Luckily for me, I had an inkling as to where the progress dialog had gone. A few days earlier, I had decided to enable the option "Lauch folder windows in a separate process" in Folder Options and I suspected that was causing the problem. So I disabled that option, closed all windows then opened system properties to re-run the test. Bingo! Progress dialog was back. And just to check my findings, I enabled that option on a another computer - with the same lack of a progress dialog.

So, in summary, its probably best not to enable that option.

Minor Vista bug

As I like to note them, I just found another minor but annoying Vista bug.

Go to Control Panel / Power Options / Edit Plan Settings. Click on one of the drop downs, press down or up on the keyboard and click on the drop down (same button area) again. Lo and behold, the Save Changes button stays disabled - so you can't apply the changes.

Probably mixed mouse and keyboard navigation like this is not so common, but I use it pretty often on my laptop + touchpad. It's funny because VS2005 has same bug in some places (e.g. project properties) - which I reported before it was released but they refused to fix at the time because it was below their bar (next release was release candidate or something). They didn't fix it in SP1 of course.

Vista in nuts mode

The Vista on my laptop decided to go (literally) nuts a few days ago. Nuts, as in a few minutes after login it would half-freeze. Half freeze as in stop responding to keyboard and mouse, thrash the hard drive but still let some UI updates through (e.g. clock).

This would obviously make locating the cause a nightmare. I did manage to cause some funky BSODs in this mode trying to hibernate (something like INTERNAL_POWER_FAILURE ?)

Safe mode was working, but I couldn't see what I could to resolve this. Nothing interesting in the Event Log, and System Restore had no checkpoints (probably because I had it disabled when I was using XP and this install was an upgrade of that).

So I decided to format and reinstall Vista. Alls well that ends well because now Vista is far more responsive. It could be related to the recent performance/reliability updates (which caused problems on my old vista install). Or possibly the lack of junk installed that came with the laptop. What's great is that coming out of sleep mode actually happens in a reasonable time now!