You think Windows Vista has been causing you fits? Consider the case of Cringester G. M. Back in March I reported on the problems he was having with his “Vista compatible” Dell 9200 and its Intel RAID array controller. Fortunately, this story has a happy ending, thanks to patient persistence on the part of both G. M. and Dell tech support. The trouble began when G. M. upgraded his XP machine to Vista. At first, The trouble began when G. M. upgraded his XP machine to Vista. At first, his PC would just randomly freeze for 30 seconds. But when he ran iTunes or any graphically intensive program, Windows went spiralling into the blue screen of death, then rebooted. When it came back, his RAID array was kaput. He wrote: Pretty much doing anything with iTunes could trigger the failure and the destruction of the RAID array. The error would occur randomly with almost any program that started doing a lot of page swapping – but I was having particular problems with Corel Paint Shop Pro, Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum, and Sony DVD Architect. I’ll spare the ugly details about all the fixes G. M. tried that didn’t work, or the time he spent on hold waiting for Dell support, or the chat sessions with techs whose only solution was to a) reinstall XP, or b) call Microsoft, or the many hours logged on the Dell Forums with other similarly afflicted owners of Dimension 9200s. After I politely inquired on his behalf, Dell sent him a new Dimension 9200 last April. This one had the same problem, only worse. A few weeks went by with no word from Dell. Finally, after sussing out the problem on his original machine, Dell sent him some beta drivers and instructions on how to delete some troublesome keys from the Windows Registry. Eureka! G. M.’s RAID drives now work without any more BSODs. This happened last May. Now, finally, I have a Dell-endorsed solution I can share with other Vista/RAID sufferers. Per Dell spokesmaven Anne Camden: This issue appears to be solved with an updated driver: the Intel Matrix Storage Manager Driver (v7.5.0). Frankly the symptoms described by most customers – hard systems lockups for 15-30 seconds at random intervals – a general enough to be attributed to any number of causes. In this case, a combination of some excellent sleuth work by both the forum members and the Dell engineering team determined that the application of this driver solves the issue the majority of the time. [UPDATE: Dell has since provided me direct access to the executable file containing the new drivers. You can download it here.]Kudos to Dell and our intrepid Cringester for finding a fix. But what an incredible hassle the transition to Vista has been for some consumers. G. M., who when he isn’t rasslin’ with RAID arrays is CTO of a small software company, says there will be no Vista for his firm in the foreseeable future: I installed Vista on my home machine to get enough experience with it to make better decisions about when / how to implement it for our 70 some programmers. Based on my experiences, and that of our regular tech support staff we’re holding off, and still buying XP machines for now. Vista is pretty, but not ready for prime time in the business environment. Imagine buying a new car and having to wait six months for a set of radials that are compatible, or getting a new car stereo and discovering it can’t play CDs produced before 2006. Only in high tech can companies get away with this kind of crap.Got high tech tales of woe? Lay ’em on me below or send me an email. Saddest stories qualify for the coolest swag. Software DevelopmentSmall and Medium Business