More Vista pain

I finally cracked. I'd had enough of the complete lack of support from Dell about my lack of sound on Vista. The guy said he'd get back to me, of course he never did. Emails to Dell got no response. Yeh I could kick off another support call but it would just involve several hours of them uninstalling and installing drivers and failing to get anywhere, which I've been doing pretty well myself for several months. To top it all off, Dell sent me an email asking me to fill in a questionaire about my customer service experience. When I clicked on the link, all I got was a message telling me my access had expired. They even sent me a reminder to fill in the survey a few days later, again access expired. Hey Dell, there may be a reason you're not getting much feedback on your customer service...

So I thought, stuff this I'll buy a new soundcard, £20 and all my pain will go away. It all started out really well, Vista recognised it, went away to find the drivers and everything installed correctly, or so it said. Then I tried to actually get some sound out of the PC, nothing, nada, zilch. I pressed the dreaded 'Test' button, 'Failed to play test tone'. Aaaagh! Cheers Vista, why couldn't you play the test tone? I almost long for the usual massive hex number, at least something to work from. The event log is empty.

So now I have no idea what the problem is caused by. Presumably it isn't a driver or hardware problem, so is my Vista install broken? I really don't want to reinstall the whole thing.

On another note, Vista has developed a nice habit of locking up completely, the mouse stops moving, the keyboard doesn't respond, CTRL-ALT-DEL does nothing, the only thing I can do is hit the reset button.

Five years, thousands of developers and what do we have? A prettier version of XP that for me is less stable and other than IIS 7 doesn't really offer much new.

Disabling the Dell malware

When I purchased my new PC it came with a whole host of crapware that I didn't want. Most of this could be removed but one piece of software remained, an extension for IE that brought up a Dell search page whenever a website failed to load. I've never tried to get rid of this because it's never caused too much harm but today it began interfering with my work so it was time to get rid of it. IE7 makes it pretty easy to disable pointless or dodgy add-ins. If you have the same problem as me, go to Tools/Manage Add-ons/Enable or Disable Add-ons and disable CBrowserHelperObject object. No more 'helpful' Dell search page, yippee!

Dell vs HP

I've got a new computer from Dell and now my HP DeskJet 5550 doesn't work. Funnily enough the reason I've got the printer is because my de-facto mother-in-law bought a Dell computer and the printer wouldn't work for her either. Who's to blame for this I wonder? I've been fiddling around with it for most of the day and can't get it to work. I can print out the HP test page but any other page refuses to do very much except throw out a blank sheet of paper. Based on my experiences with the new computer that have been mostly positive (except for the shitload of rubbish software it came installed with) I'm going to blame Hewlett Packard.