Windows 7

We've been running Windows 7 at home for some time, but yesterday I was scheduled to have it installed on my work's laptop as part of an internal pilot. There's been a few horror stories floating around from those who have already undergone the transition, so I wasn't expecting the upgrade to be glitch-free, and I wasn't disappointed. What should have taken a little over three hours turned into an overnight job as the rebuilt machine failed to get its encryption keys from the central server - the request stuck in a queue 11,000 items long with no way of reprioritising. Poor design, which has resulted in me having to go back in (thereby wasting an hour and a half from an already packed day) to collect it this morning.

I can only hope the works build is more stable than that on my home PC. Since upgrading I've been suffering regular blue screens (three or four a day sometimes, but usually at least two on the main occasions I wake it up from a sleep) in a video driver - atikmdag.sys. If you can be bothered, you can Google that for yourselves. I have. Pages and pages of forum entries bemoaning the problem, stretching back as far as Vista's first release in 2007, and still - three years later - no fix. It's a problem with a feature introduced with Vista known as TDR (Timeout Detection and Recovery) which was intended to allow the OS to recover from video card/driver timeouts without blue screening but which, when it fails, er... blue screens.

The failure has been attributed, at various times, to having two memory sticks instead of one (which can increase the risk of memory timeouts), Windows Aero features, hardware overheating (seems strange, because I always experience it either immediately after boot, or on wakeup, when the hardware is cold), hardware fault, or graphical driver errors. I've disabled Aero, but I still have two 1GB memory sticks and I may well have a transient video card fault, but I'd be willing to bet on the driver being the real problem. I had some similar issues on XP before upgrading the driver. Unfortunately I'm already on the latest W7 driver, so if that is the problem, at least for now, I'll have to put up with it. :(

At least W7 loads a heck of a lot faster than XP! (lol - but it's a humourless, hollow lol)