Rated: 90% (4 votes)
Loading ...Another reason why I love Vista
garethogden
There’s a lot of rubbish talked about Windows Vista, and how it’s no better than XP, is noticeably slower, has poor driver support and so on ad infinitum. Sure, Vista has had its share of teething troubles, but I’ve been using it on my home PC since it was released and there’s simply no way I’d go back to XP.
I won’t go in to all the reasons why I love Vista, but I’ll mention one quickly because I had cause to call upon it recently (see here). That reason is Vista’s Repair function.
The reason I needed to repair my installation of Vista was because I’d managed to bork it good and proper while installing a water-cooling kit in my PC. I’d unfortunately managed to fit the water-block incorrectly, which meant that my CPU was overheating rapidly. Worse, the CPU’s thermal trip kicked in just as Windows was booting, instantly shutting the PC down and corrupting the C: drive’s boot sector as a result.
Attempting to repair a problem such as this in XP means using the Recovery Console – a nasty Command Prompt-based tool that harks back to the halcyon days of DOS (shudder).
Vista’s method, as you might expect, is much prettier, but it’s also much more useful and easier to use to boot. It’s called System Recovery and is accessed by booting from the Vista DVD and clicking on ‘Repair your computer’ immediately after selecting your language settings.
System Recovery lets you perform a number of tasks, from reverting back to a previous restore point, to testing your memory for errors, and there’s even a Command Prompt option for those whose l33tness will not allow them to be seen repairing their PC using a simple, automatic menu-driven system.
The option I needed, however, was Startup Repair, which is designed to repair or replace the system files that are necessary for Windows to boot properly. I selected the option from the System Recovery menu and Windows then checked my disk for problems, fixed them and reported back. Seconds later, my PC was working perfectly again – thanks Vista!
I’m sure the Vista-haters out there will pooh pooh this and point out a gazillion reasons why they think Vista is bad, but, for me, this is yet another reason why Vista is better than XP, and another reason why I’m glad I upgraded.
I still not totally convinced about leaving xp behind, so I dual-boot my machine, and hearing about this feature makes my day. The number of times I’ve had to fiddle around with various different methods just to write a small file to the hard drive to get my boot to work again has been too many and this feature makes it very easy to fix this and many other small but very annoying problems.
Also, it’s interesting that people are complaining a lot about vista, but are overlooking the new version of office which I think is highly overpriced. Some the new features are very good - context sensitive menus, hover menu, style sets, live preview,… But they seem to be marketing the new version of office using a lot of the features available in the current version. So far I havn’t seen anything worth calling it a new version rather than an update.
I agree with this blog, i stupidly formatted a drive the other day which contained the boot record for my PC. I did the same as you did and Vista (like magic) fixed it all and rebooted back into a working operating system.
Don’t be ashamed of loving Vista, you have another follower here!
pooh pooh! ha! kidding,
no i am not a vista hater.
i just hope that vista wouldn’t give me too much trouble when i want to do a simple think like connect to the Internet.
other than that everything work fine to me.