Yesterday I decided to help a friend setup a secure wireless connection on her newish Compaq Presario F500 notebook. She only has it a few months, and it came with Windows Vista. I’m still running Windows XP myself (although the Mac conversion is looming, trust me), and I haven’t had much dealings with Vista. From what I had seen and heard of Microsoft’s latest OS, I wasn’t overly impressed.
Anyway, I setup the wireless connection using the WEP key I’d gotten from my friend’s Netgear router, going about it the same way I would on Windows XP. The process is almost automatic for me since I’d talked people through it literally hundreds of times as an AOL technical support agent a couple of years ago. Everything seemed to be in the same place and I did what I usually do, but the wireless just wouldn’t hook up. It was about then that my friend noted that the machine had been running a bit slower than usual lately. Fine, I’d just untick a few things that looked unnecessary in msconfig (start > run > msconfig > startup tab) and reboot. Maybe that would get the wireless working, too.
Big mistake.
Turns out you can’t just go disabling stuff willy-nilly in msconfig on Vista. With XP you can disable everything in that list and carry on with your wonderful life, but Vista sees fit to go apeshit when you try the same. So, upon reboot, I was greeted with a bunch of “application service” errors, none of Microsoft’s Apple-cloned Vista eye candy (just a bland, Windows ME looking interface), and a very worried friend who no longer seemed so confident in my computer literacy.
Oops.
Nothing would really work either. Nothing in device manager, nothing in network connections, USB ports were lifeless. What the hell had I done?
After a few searches on my own PC this morning, I found some answers. First, from BlackViper.com:
Do not use “msconfig” to disable services, type “services.msc” in the Run box instead!
Wish I knew that earlier.
Next, I used this list from TweakHound.com to reset all Vista’s services back to their default settings. (Took a while, too. It would have been nice if Microsoft had put a nice big “Reset all to default” button in there.) I did come across a few things that don’t appear in that TweakHound list, but I just left most of those disabled or set them to manual. Use your own judgement if you happen upon this same adventure.
A reboot later and everything was glossy and see-through again. Back to where I started. Now to figure out what’s up with that wireless connection.
I think you missed the moral of the exercise, Niall; Don’t use Vista.
It has good internals but it isn’t ready for anyone but total geeks and needs a complete UI redesign.
Thanks for the comment, Paul. I’ve been recommending friends and family to steer clear of Vista. Just more trouble than it’s worth.
yeah using vista myself iam sorry now i didnt stick with xp nothing seems to be compatible with vista. so when i ordered a new notebook for my daughter from dell for xmass i stuck with the old reliable xp..
Thanks for writing this.
I don’t know what all the fear of learning Vista is about. I’ve been using it for a year now as well as several of my friends. I find it more advanced than XP and frankly, when I go to my work place and ‘have’ to use XP it feels so 1990’s to me. All new OS’ have learning curves. Try Ubuntu or OSX. Jump in, seize the moment, experiment.
And thank you for this post. I had used services.msc before, but forgot the command. In my search, I found your blog and the answer.
~Wendy
I like the gui and feel of Vista, but that’s where the relationship ends. It came preinstalled on my current 1525 Dell Inspiron, and I have reinstalled 4 times already, had two complete BSOD meltdowns for no apparent reason and with little warning. I want to use the notebook as a DAW (so I have 4gigs ram – although I know it’s arguable that over 3 Gb makes no dif) I’ve had the machine for four months and never got it stable enough to use consistently. One of my forays into msconfig to turn off startups… ended up in an eventual BSOD.
One thing I can warn about – in Vista, if Internet Explorer suddenly crashes and won’t work, backup your data immediately before you shut down your machine again. I’m currently researching ‘upgrading to a former technology’, namely, XP – I have all the drivers and know about the bios switch. The only thing is, it voids the warantee and I still feel uncertain that it will work. There are so many possible hardware combinations in the Dell 1525… but one day soon I’ll forge ahead and just try with my fingers crossed. I don’t like using this word, but I ‘hate’ Vista.
it’s make me speechless! i told in mine too! why sometime it just happen in a specyf circumstance. but there’s alot myfriend tell me about vista and what technlgy bring back over! thansk anyway for wrote this! sory about my screwspeels!
Let me know if you need a few copies of Windows 7. Have a Few Copies of the release candidate lying about the office if you want .
My seven week old new compaq vista laptop was sent back to compaq yesterday blue screening non stop and unable to recover
Nothing speeds up that inevitable Mac conversion like wasting a few hours of your life trying to understand Microsoft’s bass-ackwards logic. Instead of “recommending friends and family to steer clear of Vista” you should just send them to http://store.apple.com instead.