Vista Reliability...

Later this afternoon I'm going to reboot this Dell Latitude 820 for the second time since I finished building it with 64 bit Vista. I experimented stopping some services to give Virtual PC some extra memory, and I've stopped which ever one is responsible for elevating privilege. Since starting a service needs elevated privilege this wasn't a very good thing to stop. Task manager says Vista has been up for 218 hours (which is net of time it's been in sleep mode).

On Friday I went to a lunch which was addressed by someone from the Master of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists  (one of the 107 livery companies of the City of London). I didn't think it was a great address, not least because he re-delivered an ancient joke as a Bill Gates one. You've heard it I'm sure, someone from the computer industry said once that if cars had developed as much as computers, they'd all do 200MPH, get 500 miles to the gallon and cost £100 to buy. To which the car industry replied that would be fine if you were happy with a car which crashed every once in a while, where different models had different controls...

Laugh ? I thought I'd never start. And the minor controls do change from car to car. And my car has been out of action 3 times in the last 20,000 miles due to punctures (I hadn't had a puncture in about 200,000 miles, then get 3). Just as well I don't fuel-up at my local Tescos

When I got back into my car it reminded me it will shortly be due for a service. According to the trip computer I average about 48 MPH  - so roughly every 208 hours of use I have to be without a my car for a day while someone carries out preventive maintenance at the cost of a couple of hundred quid. Not the sort of availability we'd accept from a computer, is it.

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