Day 4: Providing technical support for Vista.

A fragmentation grenade? Thats not dangerous, because there are nuclear bombs out there!

So I’ve been getting a little bit of hate mail from Microsoft fanboys and probably employees too:

So I decided to write day 4’s entry on day 3, and explain my interactions providing end user support for Windows XP and Vista as an assistant manager at a rental store for a couple of years.

In the rental business you get many different types of customers, and almost without exception, they all hated Vista.

Our store had Dell, HP, and Sony computers there when I started, it was just before Vista shipped, so they all had XP SP2 as their default setup, business customers had no complaints, home customers usually either paid off the full cost and owned the computer, or at least pretended not to be at home when I came calling for their 2-3 weeks of back rental payments.

Aside from having 60-80 computers on loan at any given time, and dealing with cleaning up the occasional virus problem that Windows is famous for, life was pretty good, as a note, when Windows gets one piece of malware, the next 50 pieces are not far behind, so cleaning up Windows is usually a format and reinstall.

Even when I didn’t have to do it, I usually convinced the customer I did because it would take an hour to recover it or an indefinite amount of time to root around in the registry, the several startup areas, the “backup” processes that malware typically spawns to guard it, and of course this all assumes that it’s not some kind of a rootkit.

There was one customer that had even gotten so tired of the mess that inevitably makes it’s way in with typical adware that the customer installs looking for some free porn or some ill gotten MP3’s, that he punched the side of an HP Pavilion and left a grapefruit size dent, telling me “Take your fucking shit back!”, we did, and we prosecuted. (OK, he was obviously stupid too, but oh well, it’s funny)

I have a few XP stories, but nothing had me prepared for Vista:

So, after taking calls asking when Vista would be in, and after having ordered new model PC’s or express upgrade discs, getting Vista on the systems one way or the other, as the customers were requesting, we started renting them out like this.

I figured Vista wouldn’t be worse than XP, and if anything, this new “security” model may make my job easier by blocking the more obvious spyware.

But no sooner than I started renting them out like that, my support calls went through the roof, sometimes quadrupling the daily average that I had under XP, if I had to put it from most calls to least, it would probably look like.

1. Viruses and spyware (about the same as XP)

2. Peripherals not working (Printers, webcams, gamepads, TV Tuners that I couldn’t have checked and had no Vista drivers, and more

3. Software not working (Biggest complaints were non-Microsoft office programs, video games, and iTunes, I even had complaints from several businesses that their company-specific software wouldn’t run)

Note: iTunes was fixed after about 6 months I think, it would tell you that none of your purchased music was “authorized”.

4. Bad performance (Most of which appears to have lived on past SP1)

So what did I end up doing?

I ended up giving them rental credits at the store’s expense, over bad things that Vista was doing, I ended up downgrading everything to XP, and putting Vista on “by request”.

This was per the store manager, now she knew very little about computers or operating systems, but even she recognized a lot of angry customers when she saw them, so she told me to “downgrade” it all back to XP, thankfully we already had recovery discs for some models from when she was angry about a few customers and a business formatting Windows off in favor of Linux (taking the recovery partition off in the process.)

The best thing Vista did for our business?

You remember those customers that pretended not to be home and made the repossession part of my job hell?

Well, I didn’t have many of those with Vista machines, because they were calling me to come take it.

Total estimate of lost profit due to Vista:

I can’t give specifics due to some NDA’s, but lost payroll, licensing fees to get the OEM upgrades and downgrades,  and the month long Vista disaster probably bled the store for a little over $12,000, and an immeasureable amount of damaged reputation with the customers we were dealing with, again without going into specifics that could identify that employer, if every store had similar Vista problems (and several I talked to had), Vista probably cost the company in the ballpark of $15-30 million dollars.

Two years later, pretty much everything in the store of course has Vista once again, I no longer have to deal with any of it thank god (I left the job a while back), the store manager doesn’t deal with businesses that put Linux on their laptops to replace Vista Business, so I know for a fact that most of them are getting Suse or Red Hat Desktop straight from companies like HP and Dell. (They don’t like having tons of their own laptops laying around, but they’ll deal with it in order to avoid Vista)

The funny thing was that all of our point of sale system was based on Linux and VXWorks.

The company tried to roll out Vista Business and Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PC’s, but it was a migraine, the entire point of sale system would just die (drop off the network) at random, and the test stores eventually went back to Linux and VXWorks.

Theres a good reason I like Red Hat’s Linux offerings so much, it is rock solid, and I’d rather be at the bar at 11 PM on Saturday night, than in the office, trying to figure out why our network isn’t working, on the phone with Microsoft in one ear, and the corporate office in the other ear.

Unrelated to that, the copy of Vista I have is botched by Microsoft on purpose:

32-bit Vista is limited to 2.8-3.2 GB of RAM, depending on factors such as how much your BIOS reserves and how much your sound card or video card have, now most processors since the original Pentium support 36-bit memory addressing, meaning they can address 64 GB of RAM, so long as the OS supports PAE (Physical Address Extension), Vista has it, but only to support DEP (NX-bit security feature), it is still hard coded to not accept more than 2.8-3.2 GB.

The 64-bit edition can do this, but you have to send off for the DVD, which costs like $10, which is nothing to throw a fit about, except that Microsoft doesn’t let OEM users do this, so you need to buy a full retail copy of Vista, THEN spend the $10, so since most customers have OEM Windows, this is essentiall a scam that Microsoft operates in order to sell users two copies of Vista (The OEM + The retail).

So when I have my desktop booted into Vista, it can only use 3.2 GB of RAM, when I have it in my 64-bit Linux, it uses all 8 GB. (Yay for not getting cheated!)

Moral of the story is, Vista is extremely risky business.