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Uninstall problem with Vista

Bill Morris

Commodore
Commodore
From a story at Slashdot:

"I am surprised that nobody seems to have mentioned this here yet. Possibly after one of the latest updates in Windows Vista, two strange things happened: first, the Uninstall option is no longer available in the Control Panel when you right-click on older programs (most likely, those installed prior to the update in question, because uninstall works fine for recently installed programs — the Uninstall button is also missing on the toolbar at the top); second, some programs are no longer shown on the applications list in Control Panel (e.g., Yahoo Messenger). A Google search returns quite a few hits on this issue (e.g., one, two, three, and four) but everybody seems to be waiting patiently for a sign from Microsoft. But the company seems to have no clue or they would have fixed it already. I am just curious how many of you are experiencing this nuisance."

link, with comments
 
My wife's laptop (which has Vista) is most certainly experiencing this problem. She went and uninstalled one program, and after that, her list only showed 8 programs (out of over 50).
 
My wife's XP box has crashed, and all the new computers in the stores around here have Vista preinstalled, which means Word, etc. she has on CD won't work. If we buy a new Vista box and try to install XP or Ubuntu, what's going to happen? My suspicion is that the chipset in a new machine wouldn't be supported.

And a quick look at reconditioned computers advertised on the Web gives me the general impression that Vista may be driving prices of used computers up. I suppose it's a boost for packaged XP, as well.
 
I would think XP would support most stuff out right now, even if it's being sold with Vista installed.

One way to find out is get the manufacturer and the model number, go to their website and check the driver page and see if they have a XP version of the driver.

If it's a custom built box by a local comp store, then I'd bet that shiny new penny I found that it will work with XP. They're not going to get there hands on anything you or I couldn't and AFAIK, there aren't any Vista only motherboards out there.
 
LCARS 24 said:
My wife's XP box has crashed, and all the new computers in the stores around here have Vista preinstalled, which means Word, etc. she has on CD won't work. If we buy a new Vista box and try to install XP or Ubuntu, what's going to happen? My suspicion is that the chipset in a new machine wouldn't be supported.

And a quick look at reconditioned computers advertised on the Web gives me the general impression that Vista may be driving prices of used computers up. I suppose it's a boost for packaged XP, as well.

I think I can guarantee XP will work. It would be very unusual for a company to release a piece of hardware that didn't support the previous version of Windows especially only six months after the release of Vista. Most hardware released today still supports 2000 and some even supports 98SE.

Charlie
 
they gave Vista the wrong name. It should more acurately be named Millenium Edition II (MEII). ;)

I have a feeling that it will end up much like ME did (back in the day),in the next year or so.
 
^^^ The Inquirer always calls Vista MEII. :)

When I tried to uninstall Vista Beta last summer it ate up 20GB of my Hard Drive and no matter how many times I reformatted it comepletely, the missing 20GB would only appear when Vista was installed again.

The only time I will ever use Vista is if its the default, pre-installed OS on the machine. Upgrading is a BAD idea, especially if you might think you want to uninstall it.
 
I also read that if you use the Vista-compatible version of Word to open and save a Word file created with a previous version of Word that file becomes incompatible with previous versions. I sometimes receive scientific papers to correct before publication, almost always as Word files. If I do such work for somebody and send it back, and either of us is on the wrong side of that kind of divide, there's going to be trouble. But if true, I imagine this will cause trouble for a lot of businesses, not just ghostwriters and editors.

The article I saw on this was about Microsoft trial software, but I take that to mean it applies to Microsoft Office, as well. Here's the link:

link
 
TimelessTrek said:
^^^ The Inquirer always calls Vista MEII. :)

When I tried to uninstall Vista Beta last summer it ate up 20GB of my Hard Drive and no matter how many times I reformatted it comepletely, the missing 20GB would only appear when Vista was installed again.

The only time I will ever use Vista is if its the default, pre-installed OS on the machine. Upgrading is a BAD idea, especially if you might think you want to uninstall it.

When you loaded Vista on was it a clean install or an upgrade? Vista does provide an uninstall facility if done as upgrade so it may of hidden a chunk of space with a large hidden/unmovable file to allow for the uninstall.
 
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