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Troubleshooting Tips

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Vista Upgrade Fixes

Provided are some tips and advice about fixing certain Vista upgrade problems. Vista took longer to get up and running than expected, so I advice you plan to spare enough time for the task. Hope this saves you some time!

2008-10 Update: After using Vista for over 9 months as my primary working system, going back to Windows XP was the only reasonable way out, at this time. Your needs may allow you to still keep Vista, in which case the tips below may be helpful to you. Myself, I will wait for next edition of Vista, which ought to correct most of the problems. I still use Vista, just not on my primary computer.

2009-09 Update: In summary, the problems with Vista has been: very slow web folders performance, no click on right-corner of Explorer windows for folder options, driver problems, network drives coming up in "send-to" link in Explorer, many unusable default settings (many corrected with the fixes described below).

1. Problem: Vista Runs Slow (posted: 2008-02)

Solution: There are various tips to improve the performance of Vista. Here are some:

Speed up Start Menu Search
Start menu search box in Vista searches not only the start menu and control panel, but also your documents, and even emails. If the scope is too wide, or you have many documents in those locations, this can decrease your system performance. To reduce the scope and gain some performance benefits do the following:
Right click on the start button > select Properties > click on Customize > unckeck "Search Communications" > set "Search Files" to "Don't Search for Files" > click OK once, then again
Tweak Indexing Options
By default Vista will index all files in user profile folders, start menu, and any files you have setup for offline access. Depending your configuration, this may be many files. For maximum performance, you can disable all indexing locations other than the start menu. Searches to your files will be slower in this way, however. To implement this, do the following:
Start button > type in "Indexing Options" > click "Modify" button > click "Show all locations" > scroll and uncheck any folders you don't want to be indexed > when finished, click OK
You can also adjust the indexing settings, such as what file types are being indexed, by clicking on the "Advanced" button.
Disable AERO transparency
Although this is a nice looking feature, it will speed up your computer if you disable it. Do the following:
right click on the desktop > select Personalize > select "Windows Color and Appearance" > uncheck "Enable Transparency"
Disable certain un-needed services
Some services that could be disabled are:
- machine debug manager
- offline files
Network speed improvements
Run the following command at command level:
netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disable
requires restart
More details are explained at: Petri IT Knowledge improvement of website browsing & downloading files speed.
For more performance tweaks on Windows Vista see TweakVista.

2. Problem: Vista explorer randomly reverts to default view (posted: 2008-02)

Solution: As one blogger put it: "It seems that no matter how many times I explicitly define that I want the window to display information as a 'Details' view, Explorer will regularly and for no apparent reason, revert to the default, but far less useful,
'Tiles' view. "

The following may fix this behavior: Apply to All Folders

3. Problem: Vista and Sql Server/ Sql Server Express named instances (posted: 2008-02)

Solution: You may have to open port UDP 1434 for Sql Server named instance to work. TCP 135 may be needed also for connections and certain kind of querying.

4. Problem: Vista home to ultimate upgrade fails (posted: 2008-02)

Solution: The upgrade may go on and on, but it quits towards the end. To make it work, do the following:
Go to Control Panel > Programs and Features > click on left side on "Turn Windows Features On and Off" > turn off these 3 items:
1. XPS Viewer, under Microsoft.NET Framework 3.0
2. Remote Differential Compression
3. Windows DFS Replication Service
Apparently, Microsoft warns that to be on the safe side, we go to Start > System Configuration (or do Run and then "msconfig") > uncheck "load start up items". These items can be put back, after the upgrade.

For more information, you can read from VistaX64.

5. Problem: Outlook 2007 on Vista runs VERY slow (posted: 2008-02)

Solution: Many are aware of this issue. Here's what Microsoft's official answer is: You may experience performance problems when you are working with items in a large .pst file or in a large .ost file in Outlook 2007 (KB 932086). Important quote form this article:

"To accommodate new features, Outlook 2007 introduced a new data structure for .pst and .ost files. In this new data structure, the frequency of writing data to the hard disk increases as the number of items in the .pst or .ost files increases."

Another person comments on their blog site (Tim Anderson's ITWriting):

"Intriguing, especially as I had thought the .pst format was the same in Outlook 2003 and 2007. The big change was from Outlook 2000 to Outlook 2003, when Unicode was introduced and the maximum size increased to 20GB."

"I'd also like to know whether Microsoft is just stating the obvious here (bigger file, more disk access); or whether there is some exponential increase in disk writes, suggesting a design fault in the software. I have already noticed that if you show the I/O columns in Task Manager's performance tab, Outlook 2007 shows some extraordinarily large numbers.
Outlook 2003 worked fine with large mailboxes, Outlook 2007 does not. That's a blunder."

Outlook 2007 is not for me, performance way too slow by Petri IT Knowledgebase givens an interesting summary:

In summary: Outlook 2007 may appear nice and fancy on the UI part, but the functionality is greatly decreased in quality compared with earlier versions of this product, especially Outlook 2003 with the latest service packs. Having new and shiny functionality does not compensate for this.

The solution here is not an easy one. Outlook 2007 just does not work with large mailboxes. If you don't want to reduce your mailbox size, you are best advised to downgrade to Outlook 2003.

6. Problem: Want to use Telnet Client (posted: 2008-07)

Solution: Telnet is not installed on Vista by default. To install it, go to:
Start > Control Panel > Program and Features > Turn Windows features on or off > select Telnet client option > click OK

If all else fails, you may like to use these PC Magazine tips to make Vista look more like Windows XP.

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