Vista - Where Is My Stuff?

Today I get to say something good about Vista since the moons around Jupiter are aligned with Orion in the northern quadrant with the old planet, Pluto, that has been thrown out of outer space. Actually I don’t have a clue as to what I just said, but Vista deserves some explanation and hopefully some less aggravation for those trying to learn their way around the new operating system.

Having used Vista since it was in alpha and beta, the one thing that I still find annoying is why does everything that we have used for years have to be hidden behind layers of fluff? Oops, I promised to say only good things.

Where is the Run command? Well since no one used the Run command [except for me] Microsoft decided to hide it from view. So try this, yell at your computer, “Run, Baby, Run” OR you can Right click in the start menu and select Properties and than Customize. Check the Run box.

With the Run box now enabled I can do things like I did before in XP. Example. The Run command will remember previous commands used. So I can then use commands like - ‘perfmon.msc’

This brings up the Performance and Reliability diagnostic system for Windows Vista which provides a detailed analysis of what’s happening on the system. Performance includes cpu performance and utilization, hard disk, LAN and Memory. In the Reliability section you can view hardware that is misbehaving and also other problems your system may have experienced. Of note was that on March 4, 2007 the system experienced a unexpected shutdown. Sure did. The system froze like a block of ice. This was listed under misc. failures, but there was no explanation as to why. In fact I look all over the place, and still was unable to find out what had occurred. But viewing the pretty pictures and graphs was nice. Remember, say something good is the theme for today.

Oh, the Performance and Reliability feature also scores your system. I started with a score of 10 after a clean install of Vista Ultimate which was dated November 18, 2006. I followed the graph during the course of driver updates, uninstalls, and new hardware and the system is now at 8.64. Which is still good. Considering I still don’t have any sound nor are their drivers for the modem I installed last month just as a test. And I would guess if drivers do become available, my score would increase.

For a explanation of what Performance and Reliability does, Microsoft has a site here.

I would venture a guess that this is a tool intended to diagnosis a variety of problems that Vista may incur and to assist in troubleshooting the system. But in my case the information as to why my system crashed, froze, locked up, came to a standstill and died, was not explained.
So much for saying something good.

[tags]microsoft, vista, performance, reliability, [/tags]