First problems with Windows Vista SP1

published: Tue, 25-Mar-2008   |   updated: Tue, 25-Mar-2008

So far, Service Pack 1 has been fine. I installed it early last week and haven't seen any problems. I did recalculate my Windows Experience Index and it notched up from 5.1 to 5.2 (these are the memory scores, otherwise it would be 5.6), but I'm going to guess that's because I was borderline before and the hardware has settled down in the past month of use.

Today though there were two issues that came up, one definitely due to SP1 and the other borderline.

The first issue is that starting Adobe Illustrator CS2 now produces a screen flicker as Aero Glass is turned off. There's a cute little toast box that comes up: "The color scheme has been changed to Windows Vista Basic". It seems that Illustrator "has performed an action that requires Windows to temporarily change the color scheme to Windows Vista Basic." Fascinating that it had never done this before, and a day or so before installing SP1 I had been working extensively with Illustrator.

The interesting thing is that the error message box goes on to say that it will change the color scheme back to Aero once Illustrator terminates. And so it does, with more flicker.

Anyway, it's annoying. Possibly not enough to remove SP1, but definitely annoying. I dare say there will be some fix along soon.

The second issue was iTunes. Here things are definitely not so clear- cut since iTunes has an annoying habit of having problems anyway. I'd bought myself an iPod Classic and it arrived today. So I plug it in and after a small bit of configuration, iTunes started to download every single track I had to it. Nice.

And then after 35 of the 42GB had been downloaded, iTunes crashed.

After I started up iTunes again, the iPod was left with this 35GB orange block in the general information display in iTunes. So I had to restore the iPod's software (resetting it didn't make any difference). THen following a bunch of wasted time trying to work out which tracks were causing the problem. Turned out to be an image I'd associated with Vegas' eponymous album. Removed that and everything was fine again.

Then I tried to upload a video ripped from a DVD to the iPod. iTunes crashed again, after the file had been uploaded but before (or during) its update of the database on the iPod. I reripped the video (luckily I was only testing with a 45 minute episode of a TV series) at a different resolution. iTunes crashed on the upload. Reripped it again at yet another resolution. iTunes crashed. Downloaded a free video from the iTunes store. iTunes happily downloaded it to the iPod.

This one has me flummoxed. The crash is occurring in quicktime.qts, but I have no idea why. For you see, QuickTime plays the ripped videos just fine.

(Yes, all Apple software is quite up to date.)

So, it looks like I'm going to have to wait until a fix appears from Microsoft, Adobe, or Apple. Or all three.