Vista, Heal Thyself

When Windows Vista launched, I did something that most self respecting geeks wouldn’t dream of doing.  I upgraded from XP instead of flushing my system for a fresh install.  I thought, “What the heck? What’s the worst that could happen?”

Upgrading to Vista turned out be no be too bad, actually.  At the time that I upgraded, Vista had only been out on MSDN for a few days and was not in general release at all.  The biggest issue I had was with ISV software that would not run on Vista.  It took a few weeks to get hot fixes for things like Mind Manager.

My biggest issue at the time was with printing.  There was a defect in Vista (a known defect) that caused the print spooler to die abnormally in systems that had been upgraded from XP.  I was unable to print for almost a month. I was tempted several times to roll back to XP because of this, but I never got around to it.

One day, I forgot that it wouldn’t work and printed again from my Vista machine.  It worked perfectly. Why? Windows update, that’s why.  I was able to look into my Windows Update history log where I saw the update that fixed my system.  I have to hand it to Microsoft on this one, they released a bug fix and it just worked.

This event was a few months ago, obviously.  But this Dr. Dobbs article reminded me of the incident and how worthy of note it was. Self updating software really has come of age.