>I have a new laptop and have been slowly loading things on it. It's running Vista Business. This morning I hooked up my fingerprint reader, webcam, and external harddrive and installed the drivers for each. Then when I tried to shutdown the machine .. it's stuck. It's sitting there saying "Shutting down..." and it's been that way for over 30 minutes. I even tried to power it off .. wait a while .. then turn it back on and it said "Shutting Down..."
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>Help .. I'm dead in the water on that machine.

Cathy

I've been running Vista Ultimate for just over a week or so and I have to admit that it feels pretty much like beta software. I've had random lockups and hiccups since day 1. Heck, it even blue screened while booting into Vista the first time. It was right when it got to connecting to my wireless network.

In the last 10 days, I've discovered things that work and things that don't work. To use it successfully, you don't do the things that "don't" work.

While I like the interface over the XP interface, I really haven't noticed that much of an improvement. No question that it's not as fast as XP, but this could be due to the constant interruptions by UAC (user access control) which rears it's ugly head every time you try to install or change something that's been installed previously.

I'm running a new Thinkpad T61 and I really like it. But when docking and undocking I continually run into problems. I was trying to install Photoshop Elements 5.0 last night and it locked up twice before I could get it successfully installed.

My suggestion is to check the events log and see if you can identify a driver or service that is causing the problem. In my case, I know that Lenovo is working on some driver fixes for this particular model, and in the meantime, you just have to work around the issues.

I'm resisting going back to XP even though this would be a much less trouble. But as a software developer, I know that I have to cross the Vista gorge sooner or later. Might as well be sooner...