If it's not working on a plain vanilla desktop PC, you can rest assured it's not working on thousands of other systems -- make that hundreds of thousands. Cancel all leave in the support department and brace yourself for a tsunami of calls.
A copy of Vista was couriered to the Reseller News office on Monday -- or was that Tuesday?
Either way, there newspaper deadlines to deal with so installation didn't start until first thing Wednesday morning.
There's a drill to successfully installing new operating systems on soho computers.
First, make a full back up of all important documents. This took an hour or so. No problem.
Next, run a ruler over applications like Outlook that store in the Program folder rather than the My Documents folder. OK, everything is nicely locked down and safe.
Then insert the Vista DVD. It runs, it seems it runs slowly, but it does run. Up comes a low-resolution screen -- minor alarm bells ring -- maybe Vista hasn't correctly detected the video card. Nevertheless, it appears we are in business.
Working through the initial standard install steps takes about 15 minutes -- then another 20 minutes or so for everything to load, unpack and install. So far so good.
Then Vista reboots. Up it comes, a green bar on a black screen and, whoof, the monitor switches off. A little investigation shows there's no video signal. Presumably, Vista hasn't detected the card and hasn't fallen back to a default option.
Three additional installation attempts later, the problem hasn't gone away. The computer may be working normally, without a video signal there's no easy way to know.
This may be a trivial problem. It may be something that can be fixed in a jiffy. But rest assured, hundreds of thousands of users -- many without a lot of tech-savvy -- are going to experience something similar over the next few weeks. Customer support is about to go into overdrive.
