Vista SP1 - One Week Update
It has been a week since I installed Vista with Service Pack 1 (SP1) on this Fujitsu Lifebook S6510 laptop computer. I have said before that I like Vista, and I want it to be at least as good as XP on my laptop. I'm now pleased to say that I think it is so, and I am going to keep running it on my laptop. I think the fact that I have had Vista loaded twice before on this laptop, and both times decided that it wasn't stable enough or fast enough for me to use it rather than XP Professional, is evidence that I am not willing to just blindly accept Vista.
First, since installing Vista SP1 I have had no boot problems or failures, which I had at least twice with the original Vista installation. Not only that, but Vista seems to boot a bit faster than it did before SP1, and it certainly suspends and resumes faster than it did before.
Second, the general performance and "feel" of the laptop is quite a bit better than it was before SP1. There are no more of the long pauses that I saw previously, and I don't see the disk activity led on the laptop suddenly start flashing like crazy for no apparent reason.
Third, I haven't had any problems with applications or utilities, as I previously had. I haven't seen the dreaded "This program is not responding" window yet, which is very good news.
On the network side, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that Vista does not have the problem which I described recently with XP, where a static IP address on the wired ethernet interface interferes with routing on the wireless interface after a suspend/resume sequence. The bad news is that there is still some sort of intermittent problem with the wireless connection between the Lifebook and the Linksys WRT350N router. I wrote recently that I suspected this problem was caused by the Sierra Wireless AirCard, or the Swisscom software that came with it, but I have confirmed now that is not the case. The symptom is relatively simple; starting from a fresh boot of both the laptop and the router, the wirelss will always connect properly. If I then suspend/resume, reboot, or even just turn the laptop wireless off and back on, after some random number of disconnect/reconnect cycles, it will suddenly no longer be able to connect properly. The key word is "properly", Vista says that it has a "limited connection" to the network, but in fact nothing works. Once this happens, the only solution is to reboot the router - nothing I can do to the laptop or Vista will get a good connection again, but rebooting the router will always restore a good connection.
I contacted Linksys about this last Friday, and got a particularly unhelpful response of "sounds like a Vista problem to me". Sigh. So for the time being I am stuck with power-cycling the router from time to time. Ah well, where would we be if everything worked?
jw 31/3/2008