Vista. Echh.

Rescued a Vista Ultimate Edition machine from having to be upgraded to Windows XP last night. (Yeah, you read that right.)

I didn't install this box, and I have no idea why the guy who did installed Vista on it. Unfortunately it's a "mission critical" machine for the organization it belongs to, and it had picked up a trojan or a virus somewhere along the line (yeah, it was being run wide open in an Administrator account and being used by multiple people on that rarely-logged-out account; I'm now in a position to impose a better security regime, and you better believe I'm going to do so). In the process of delousing the machine, I managed to get it into a state where it refused to access the Internet, and decided that it might be time to try the mighty Microsoft System Restore application to roll things back a bit.

Yeah. That worked. The machine was being logged into a domain, so after System Restore finished, the Administrator account failed login due to the "trust relationship" with the domain having failed. Since I don't have access to the domain controller (another legacy of the guy who installed the Vista box) and couldn't figure out what local machine account to log into, I was mightily screwed, and with payroll coming up on Monday.

I finally figured out that the way to handle this was to boot in safe mode and log in with the domain admin account. Voila! Then I created a new local Administrator account, rebooted, and logged into that. No problem.

I still hate Vista. This box is a P4, and still takes 5 minutes to boot to a login prompt, and then 5 more minutes to get to the desktop. At the sign of any more trouble, I plan to lobotomize it and install XP Pro. But at least I can do a backup and not lose any files now, which is more than I could have done for the past week. (I did and do have a current backup of my QuickBooks files, which is the most important thing on the machine; I can always install QuickBooks somewhere else and be back up and running, but what a pain.)

As intimated above, we're going to lock down the box from now on and we're building another machine to run XP for people to use to surf the web and do various Office tasks. The second box will also be the backup for the Vista box so if it craps out again it won't nearly cripple me. When I have to do a payroll every two weeks, I don't have much leeway for downtime.