Rick Rogers

Hi Michel,

To rollback to XP you need a copy of it with a Product Key. As Vista was
preinstalled, you need to contact the system manufacturer to see what, if
any, your downgrade options are. If they don't offer one, then you will need
a retail product and must also ensure that the manufacturer at least offers
supporting drivers to download for your system.

As to your other comments,

1. Vista has higher resource and higher requirements than XP. On the same
hardware, obviously XP will be faster. All versions of Windows have had
higher resource requirements than their predecessors, it should be expected.
Part of the design is to concentrate on using the capabilities of newer
hardware. On good hardware, my Vista installations move faster than XP ever
did.

2. You're blaming Microsoft for a failure of the software developers to
bring their programs up to the new specifications? They've known for several
years what the basic parameters were going to be, the first public alpha was
put out in WinHEC 2003. I know Microsoft can be faulted for some issues, but
the majority lie in the hands of the application devs.

3. Most likely buggy drivers. Many network card drivers have trouble with
the new stack, particularly the implementation of the IPv6 protocol. Some
are still sorting it out, some have workarounds, some have up to 'snuff
drivers out there now. You need to check with the card maker for the
appropriate action.

4. IE has never been the best browser, just the most widely used one as it's
integrated into Windows. If it doesn't work well for you, then do as you
have done and use an alternative. That's why they're out there. As to
individual responses from problem reports, don't expect one, a dev told me
once they get around 17,000 per day. The data is then collated and
prioritized by an automated function. The dev's only see the end reports
summarizing it, not the individual reports. That function is chiefly used to
gather data so that efforts can be concentrated on the most widely reported
issues. If a fix exists for a particular issue, you get the automated
response from oca with a link to a patch or workaround, but that's about all
you should expect.

5. You are aware, I'm sure, that the option to revert to the classic menu
style still exists, right? Personally, I like the new menu, particularly the
integration of the run box into the search line.

6. No, it doesn't sound familiar. It would indicate either some corruption
of the shell, or that some malware or non-compliant process is running and
interfering. Surprisingly, or perhaps not so surprisingly, explorer.exe can
often be affected by addin/plugins that load with IE as they share several
library files. On several systems I have worked on, I've found this to be
the cause of all sorts of errors.

Every version of Windows has required some adjustments on the part of the
user, the software programs, and on Microsoft's initial thoughts on what it
should be. This is just part of the learning curve, and requires that the
user make some adjustments in order to feel comfortable with it. It's funny
to me now to work on XP systems, as they seem so dated in their approach.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/
Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com

"Michel" <Michel@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:65D6A7C4-E7EB-4ABA-BABC-BF9E310B88EA@xxxxxx