My Asus N50-V notebook that I bought a few weeks ago came with Windows Vista on it. I knew that I’d dual boot Vista and Ubuntu, but I figured I would just wait the few days before the newest version of Ubuntu came out toward the end of April before installing it. That gave me a chance to explore Vista, since I had thus far managed to avoid it.
This was a dialog that came up fairly early on. It asks, “Do you want to join the Windows Customer Experience Improvement Program?” and, as shown in the screenshot, I selected the no option (more positively spun as “I don’t want to join the program at this time”). Selecting this option disables the OK button. I would think the expected flow would be to have a simple yes/no dialog come up. You pick your option and select okay. If you don’t want to pick an option, you select Cancel. It appears that you either select Yes and pick OK or select No and click Cancel. That doesn’t make sense to me because it’s requiring two clicks that say the same thing, but I guess that’s fairly standard Microsoft practice (e.g., the delete confirmation dialog that’s really just a confirmation of sending it to the recycle bin, which has its own confirmation).
I’ve also experienced regular “unknown” errors with the Windows Update feature.
The first few I encountered were solved by retrying, but now I seem to have attracted error diarrhea, and my logs are filling with errors.
Here’s what I think happened: I saw that there were 14 new updates to install. I picked to look at which ones they were and it looked like all MS Office stuff (I have Office 2003 on the notebook), so I clicked to start the update process. Little did I know, IE8 was snuck in there below the scroll point. After a few of the Office updates, a dialog box to install IE8 comes up. I pick to cancel, and now all 14 of the updates show as failed. Now any time I do updates, those same 14 updates are automatically selected, and I have to manually uncheck them one-by-one. That’s right, there’s no “Select None” option.
At least Vista leaves a bit more than two gigs of my four gigs of RAM unused at startup…. *sigh*
You should axe that Vista install and give the Windows 7 RC a try. I’ve been having great luck with the 64-bit version. If your Asus came with Power4Gear and Splendid though, do not install it. It doesn’t play nice with 64-bit Vista or 7. It will hose your sleep mode. I went from Vista Ultimate 64 eating up ~42% of my 4 GB at boot, to Win 7 64 using ~25%. It’s also felt quite a bit snappier. Then again, I also have less things loading at boot time (like Power4Gear and Splendid). I was amazed at the out-of-box driver support also; fingerprint reader, SD card reader, sound, wireless… all worked. Only things I haven’t got working are Intel Robson Turbo memory and Intel AMT (which I don’t use anyway). The best thing, the RC is stable and free to try until June 2010!
Fortunately I don’t need to use Windows much now that I do have the newest version of Ubuntu on here; plus the “Splashtop” feature is awesome. I do have Power4Gear and Splendid (along with all the other stuff that they shove onto notebooks), so that’s an excuse enough to not bother. It’s good to hear that the next version of Windows won’t be as bad as Vista though
I too have installed 7 RC 64 on my n50 but I can’t seem to get the volume/media and other touch buttons to work. Any ideas?
Dont hesitate to install 7 RC it is quite a bit “snappier” as previously described