The title really says it all, just a topic opener really, as I would like some debate on the subject. Now as we all know, Windows Vista came out on an unsuspecting world back in january of this year. The announcement came that XP would no longer be sold as of january next year, and OEMs began only selling Vista with new machines. Now people have found that Vista appears to not work with half their existing software which includes Microsoft’s own Windows Messenger by the way, Oh yes, you have to modify the TCP/IP properties to allow Messenger to connect to the Internet!! The performance is worse than XP, and although Vista looks nice, it offers no advantage over XP at present.

Now in recent months I have been having fun with my laptop becuase there have been errors croping up due to Windows Explorer erroring and producing a Runtime Error 217. Now I have rebuilt the laptop with fresh installs many a time, and then ran updates, and still the same issue. Now I have none of those problems under vista on the same hardware (just the other issues that Vista brings to the table) So on Monday I decieded to take the following steps.

1) Rebuild XP to base SP2.
2) Install base drivers for the Hardware from Dell.
3) Install the following KB Hotfixes only:

WindowsInstaller-KB893803-v2-x86
WindowsXP-KB915865-v11-x86-ENU
WindowsXP-KB918005-v4-x86-ENU
WindowsXP-KB927891-v3-x86-ENU
WindowsXP-KB920872-x86-ENU

4) Disable Windows Automatic Updates
5) Install Firefox for main web browser and leave IE6 installed without updates.
6) Proceed to install Office 2007 etc as normal

and so far the process has been a success. The only remaining issue is that WMP plays mp3s far too fast. At the moment I use Winamp instead, but this is a new issue so will require some thinking. Hardware has been checked out anyway, so god knows!! But the interesting thing is, I am not updating to the latest stuff from MS, and the laptop is working fine. Which makes me wonder, have the updates from MS been engineered to cause issues, with the answer being upgrade to Vista? I was not the only one with the problem of the Runtime Error 217 on the internet, it has been documented, but so far there are no fixes for it. It also seems to be random as to what configuration of machine it affects. I have been one of the unlucky ones but others have no issues.

Moral of the Story:
It’s not worth staying up to date using Windows Update. Use other methods of protection from Internet like a firewall and relevant software.