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My friend just purchased a new Dell Inspiron 1420 running on Windows Vista Home Premium, with a pink cover. Once we got the machine, we loaded it with some basic software and some photos. Thereafter, all she did was only normal surfing.

After a few hours, the machine began to slow down untill it hanged. After trying out every possible buttons and the system is still not responding, we have no choice but to press and hold the power button to shut it down.

The next time it started up, some of the Windows Vista system files got corrupted. So, the fastest recovery way would be to use Dell System Restore. I was surprised that the first few search results were not Dell Support pages (just like when we search for Windows problem, we normally don't get Microsoft support pages). Most of the pages asked me to press Ctrl + F11 when the system boots up to initiate Dell System Restore.

I failed to initiate the System Restore until I read it at yorkspace.com that I should press F8 if I'm using Windows Vista. The steps after that were very straight forward. A full guide taken from Dell Support page (which I found later) is as follows:

1. Restart the computer.
2. Tap <F8> during startup until the Windows Advanced Options menu appears. If the Windows Advanced Options menu does not appear, restart the computer, and try again.
3. Press the <Down Arrow> until Repair Your Computer is highlighted, and press <Enter>.
4. In the System Recovery Options window, log in as a user with administrative rights, and click OK.
5. In the Windows Vista Recovery Environment, click to select your language, and click Next.
6. Click System Restore.
7. In the System Restore window, click Next to display the most recent restore points in chronological order.
8. Click the Show restore points older than 5 days check box for a complete listing of restore points.
9. Click to select a restore point.
   A good starting point is to attempt to restore from the most recent restore point. If this fails to correct the problem, then try the next oldest restore point until the issue is resolved. Any software installed after the selected restore point needs to be reinstalled.
10. Click Next and then Finish.

Though I successfully recovered the system, it did not go well the second time. The machine lasted for a few hours for me to reinstall everything, it slowed down and not responding again. I'll get Dell engineers to check up the system.

I read from digg that says that Vista performs as good as XP on same hardware. How true is it? It was proved by a test run by Daniel A. Begun from CNET.

We expected to see "beta bloat" hamper the overall performance of the Vista beta, but that was not the case. Vista and XP both ran our iTunes encoding test in the same amount of time. Even more surprising, Vista was actually almost 6 percent faster than XP on our Adobe Photoshop CS2 image-processing test. The F.E.A.R. scores were close but not identical. The takeaway from the F.E.A.R. scores, however, is that at least for this one game, DirectX 10 is not only stable, but the current DX 10 beta version is showing comparable performance to DX 9.

After reading that article, I don't think the same way. Well, look at the hardware settings:

We loaded Windows Vista beta 2 (build 5384) and Windows XP Professional SP2 on a 3.2GHz Pentium 4, with 1GB of DDR2 memory running at 664MHz and an ATI Radeon X850 XT graphics card.

How about 800MHz Pentium III, with 512MB of SD-RAMs and Riva TNT2 AGP? I'm sure Windows XP can run very smoothly on such settings, but Windows Vista will not fit into such a machine.

Agree or not? Have your say (shoot me if I'm wrong).

Windows Vista Beta is available for download at Microsoft website, if you didn't hear about the big news lately. Alternatively, you may download it through BitTorrent (Good job, Chris and Jake). Then, you can dual-boot Windows Vista with your Windows XP with this Lifehacker tip.

I'm not ready for such huge installation for myself. I've too many thing in progress and can't afford to lose any data as the beta operating system might cause instability. Hope you can try it out! Have fun.

It seems like Microsoft is having fun delaying their upcoming Windows Vista. They first decided to release it end of this year. Then, they delayed it to beginning of 2007. Now, they are going to make us wait another 3 months to improve the product's quality.

In Reuters:

Gartner targets a Windows Vista release in the April-June quarter of 2007, nine to 12 months after Microsoft conducts a second major test, or "beta," release for Vista during the current quarter.

I've upgraded my RAMs for it, but the operating system still has a long way to be released.

Anything you want to say?

It has been rumoured that Windows Vista will be released end of this year, somewhere in the beginning of November. In news today, it is really disappointing to know that Microsoft has decided to delay the release of Windows Vista to next January.

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