Vista Oddities

Okay, so last year when vista came out my university offered the operating system for free as part of some sort of partnership with Microsoft. Against my better judgment I decided to install it on my relatively new (purchased august '06) laptop. The primitive portion of my brain decided that I was too lazy to reformat, so I just upgraded from XP. Needless to say, the system did not run amazingly and there were a lot of quirks.

Finally, after getting a new external hard drive and backing up all my files, I (stupidly) decided to reformat and fresh install vista again last night. I don't know why I chose vista over XP... I really don't have a good answer, other than the pretty interface and the spell check, which I think is really cool actually. Anyhow, I figured the fresh install would fix all my problems, but surprisingly enough, some things got worse!

So I'm kind of curious about some of the following issues:
1) Why doesn't the default windows picture viewer properly view .GIF formatted pictures? Whenever I open them, it just shows the first frame of the animation. It did this before, but I figured it was because I upgraded from XP. Even XP's default picture viewer could do this, so why not vistas?

2) Why is my Windows Media Player going EVEN SLOWER?! I know it's not the best program, but I've used it because it's easy, it's there, and I don't really need any other features. Before I reformatted, it worked pretty much just as I would expect it to work, but now that I've reformatted it takes AT LEAST 2 seconds from the time I open an mp3 to the time that it plays, regardless of whether or not it's already open.

There's a few more things that have been acting oddly as well, but these 2 are bugging me the most. Thanks for any help...

This is a surprise?

I think I already covered how much I despise Vista, so please, don't waste my time posting in this thread if you don't have anything helpful to add

You got enough RAM? 2 gigs is the recommended I think.

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Originally Posted by napalm

I think I already covered how much I despise Vista, so please, don't waste my time posting in this thread if you don't have anything helpful to add

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If you can, go back to XP until they manage to fix some of the crap that is still a problem. In my case, things would always start out great, but after a few months, problems would be all over the place. I'm hoping there are some pretty nice fixes in the SP1 update... whenever that rolls around.

1) The animation part of the GIF format isn't officially supported in the Vista Picture Viewer. It'll work in a web browser, though. No clue why it's not supported, but I speculate that since PNG was created to replace GIF, they dropped complete GIF support in favor of implementing PNG.

2) Not completely sure. That sounds very odd to me as well. Have you tried reinstalling WMP? I use foobar2000 as my music player. If reinstalling doesn't work, give it a shot. It's very plain and simple.

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Originally Posted by Rumpy

You got enough RAM? 2 gigs is the recommended I think.

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Oh... shoot. I only have 1 gig, but it has been enough in the past. I'm not really gaming on this computer so performance in that respect isnt a huge deal. I DO dabble in audio editing and recording and stuff in DAW's however.

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Originally Posted by ElCapitan

If you can, go back to XP until they manage to fix some of the crap that is still a problem. In my case, things would always start out great, but after a few months, problems would be all over the place. I'm hoping there are some pretty nice fixes in the SP1 update... whenever that rolls around.

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I've heard its supposed to be out any time now (Second half of 2007). I looked at what it's supposed to fix and it doesn't look all that great, but I guess we'll have to see to tell for sure.

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Originally Posted by [+Duracell-]

1) The animation part of the GIF format isn't officially supported in the Vista Picture Viewer. It'll work in a web browser, though. No clue why it's not supported, but I speculate that since PNG was created to replace GIF, they dropped complete GIF support in favor of implementing PNG.

2) Not completely sure. That sounds very odd to me as well. Have you tried reinstalling WMP? I use foobar2000 as my music player. If reinstalling doesn't work, give it a shot. It's very plain and simple.

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Yea I have been using IE for it, but it's just... *dumb* that I can't see animated .gifs when I'm browsing through my pictures. I've heard about pushing new trends, but come on, you can't include animation for one of the most commonly used picture formats? That's absurd, and totally undermines the backward-compatible nature of computers.

As for reinstalling windows media player, that's a great idea, I don't know why I didn't think of that... maybe because it's sort of a "key" windows componant, or so i'm lead to believe. I'll give it a try!



I know working on Vista is a stupid idea, but like I said before, it's hard to go from pretty back to ugly. And honestly, the spell check is somewhat of a big deal for me, because 75% of my computer use these days is just surfing the web and writing emails.

Vista > XP for everything except wireless networking. That's all I have to contribute.

Update: I found some random vista help website and discovered that this is a problem related to my soundcard and the vista version of windows media player. My guess is that it was fine last time because I upgraded and it may have kept my older version of media player? Its hard to say.

Anyhow, I found out that anybody with Sigma Tel audio adapters has to go in and disable some dumb setting and blah blah blah... anyhow, problem solved, you can all sleep peacefully now :)

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Originally Posted by Schlep

Vista > XP for everything except wireless networking. That's all I have to contribute.

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Hmm? I have no problems with wireless networks...might be just your driver?

napalm, glad to hear you found out what it was :) I like Vista. I haven't experienced any problems after upgrading to it, so I guess maybe I'm one of the lucky ones.