Vista SP1 Problems

OK so here is a little rant for y'all. See my Texas accent? I have been a supporter of Vista and an early adopter. When people were complaining I just said this really isn't any different then what we have gone through with every major release of Windows. The real issue this time is other manufacturers have dropped the ball as far as supporting their old applications and hardware. In the old days you could go to the manufacturer's web site (or bulletin board for those of us who knew about computers before the web) and download updated drivers for your current hardware and fixes for your software. This time around a lot of companies, HP in particular have decided that it is time for you to purchase new hardware and/or software for the new OS and are not supplying drivers/updates for anything that is not currently in production. So in my opinion the big stink about in-compatibilities really isn't anything new. And yes every time we get a new release you have to spend some time figuring out how to get to all your old tools/utilities under the new interface.

So now to the rant part of this article. I recently installed SP1 which the world has been waiting for to fix all the Vista problems! Well guess what? It broke two Microsoft applications we run regularly on my laptop. The real issue is Microsoft has no fix at this point for the broken apps. The one I can almost understand, it's an older version of Encarta so I can't squawk too much about that but the other is Microsoft Streets and Trips version 2008! When I contacted Microsoft support their reply was yes that application is not compatible with SP1 and we suggest you uninstall SP1. Un-freeking believable! This is a company that has been getting all kinds of bad press about Vista, and they knowingly break their own applications without having a fix available.

I did some research on the net and was able to find a work around for the problem, you set the properties for the executable to run as administrator and Streets will run under SP1 but I was not able to get Encarta to run no matter what I tried.