Before Vista public beta testing started, I expressed my interest in becoming a beta tester. Being a Windows programmer, this sounded interesting; I also had what I thought was a decent PC at the time—Athlon XP 3200 2.2 GHz, 1.5 GB RAM, 300 GB SATA HDD, and nVidia 6600GT card I bought on eBay in anticipation of Aero.
So one day I get the invitation and there it is on my Microsoft Connect home page, a beta build of Vista. I went and installed it right away as a secondary system on my PC, leaving XP as the backup solution. The PC became dog slow, I had quite a few problems with drivers (never got my Realtek/nForce on-board audio working properly). Nevertheless, I kept using it and was mostly content with the slowdown, justifying it with all the graphic effects (that is, until I installed Ubuntu, but that’s another story).
Still, the part that gave me most problems was networking. Copying or decompressing files with Explorer across my home LAN was hopeless. Internet connection would randomly shut off until reboot.
One day I was trying to establish a VNC connection with my work PC, and as RealVNC connected to it, my PC rebooted without any prompts or error messages. No matter what I did, every time I connected with VNC client to the remote PC, my machine would immediately restart. This annoyed me so much that I fired up the Microsoft Beta bug reporting tool and entered the issue. I was determined to let Microsoft engineers know about it. As soon as I pressed the Send button, the bug reporter tool crashed.
After several attempts, which left me searching for words to describe developers who wrote the bug reporting tool, I managed to submit the issue.
Near the end of the beta testing period I was amused to receive an email from Microsoft which stated that every beta tester who submitted at least one bug was getting a free Vista Ultimate. That was a surprise! I downloaded the RTM build and upgraded my PC. The networking bug seemed to have been fixed. Still Vista was very slow.
After a while I received the RTM activation code and tried to activate my installation. It said that this number was already in use! I had to call an Indian call centre to manually activate my installation. The guy I spoke with spent quite a while trying to verify my claim to the serial number, then gave me the activation sequence. I asked him, “What about re-installation? Will I be able to activate it normally, or will I have to call you again?” His voice didn’t sound very confident when he told me that yes, I would have to activate it via the phone.
Then I installed Ubuntu and erased Vista. I never knew my PC could be so fast, despite all the 3D effects running at full speed. I never looked back. And now there are no Windows machines at my home—only Macs.
