I am finally stable on Vista RTM on my desktop machine. It took a long time and a lot of effort. I like Vista, I really do. But getting to a stable (or semi-stable) point has been a real chore.

I run a small format machine with two hard drives, one a regular drive and one a SATA drive. I also run two monitors and a nice video card. When I went from RC2 to RTM, I started bluescreening.

The machine would randomly re-boot with a bluescreen. Never happened when I was doing anything, but I would step away or turn my back and down the thing would go. The error messages all said that there was a problem with the video. I bought a new (nice) video card. The problems got a little better, but they continued.

Finally, I happened to be hear at the machine when it went. A few minutes before the reboot, I heard a click. Come to find out, it was the SATA drive going to sleep. Once it went to sleep, it wouldn’t wake back up. Tried the obvious- Powered it down and unplugged that drive. Voila! No more re-boots. No access to the information on that drive either. I can live with that temporarily, but sometime I am going to have to figure out what to do about it.

Once I stopped the reboots, Vista RTM is running great. Office 2007 seems to like it, as does SnagIt. I love the new versions of the games - Spider Solitaire looks nicer. Messenger, IE7, and WIndows Mail do what I need them to do. I’ll post updates as I find them.

I would love to hear what roadblocks you have run into. Also, if you have any “can’t live without them” gadgets, let me know. I am always up to play with new toys.

[tags]Vista, Blue screen, video, SATA drive [/tags]