Sometimes I wonder how non technical people manage to function in their daily life.

I am not talking matrimonial problems or existential crisis, I am referring to trying to take advantage of the wonderful tools we enjoy nowadays without going ballistinc and contemplate either suicide or monastic life.

Take my latest adventures with Vista:

A few month ago I purchased a brand new workstation. This time I wanted to spare no expense in getting the best my money could buy. I have grown tired of "making do" with inferior tools and since I am a professional I figured I deserver professional equipment.

Still, it wasn't like I could go buy a pre-made $10,000 workstation, so I contacted Tigerdirect.com, gave them a budget and built my computer with the help of a pretty knowledgeable (I thought) salesperson.

I have to say that I am happy with my new machine. I ended up purchasing a Systemax Workstation with the latest dual quad chip running at 2.7 MGz and I made it a point of requesting 8GB of RAM onboard.

When the machine arrived, it was indeed very fast. Problem was that it came with Windows XP Pro, not the 64 bit version I requested. That made my loading up on RAM futile, as Win XP 32bit only sees a maximum of 4GB ( and at that it will subtract any RAM sitting in the video card, for a total of 3.25GBof RAM ).

I should have done more research and insisted on a 64bit version of the OS, but eventually I decided to wait a bit until I tought that Vista was at a usable stage so I could upgrade directly to the Vista Ultimate 64bit OS.

Vista arrives

Finally, a couple of weeks ago Vista arrived, along with an Nvidia (Realtek PX8600 Winfast) that I figured I needed to run the Aero interface properly. The video card was one of the few areas where I skimped since not being a gamer frame rate was not a great concern.

Immediately I could tell something was not right. The system, even after a grueling optimization session, did not run even close to its XP incarnation (thankfully, I dual booted on two separate drives). But even more maddening, I discovered that with 8GB on board, my system is actually slower than if I take 4GB out (2×2GB modules).

I run a Photoshop file with a bunch of filters, I made an action and I tested it in both configurations.

The 4GB system run it in about 1 minute while with 8GB it takes 1:14. 14 seconds slower. Disappointing at best but also very maddening. Practically I invested close to $600 between OS, Video Card and RAM sticks to make my machine actually run slower.

The screen goes crazy

If that wasn't enough, I also started experiencing what I can only call: "Crazy Display"

With no rhyme or reason, my screen will go black, the taskbar pops to the top of the display (but doesn't work) and if I move my mouse cursor around I can actually "paint" the interface elements (windows, dialog boxes, alerts, etc.) into showing up.

It will suddenly quites and seem to work only to start again and violently flash from black to white showing some of the open windows.

Hitting Ctrl-Alt-Delete takes me to the usual and annoying Vista screen, but everything goes back to normal. When I click on the Task Manager and I return to the regular display, nothing has changed and finally I have to exit again and restart.

So far I have been unable to find any action I may be doing to cause this. It seems to happen completely at random. A kind poster on bleepingcomputer.com has suggested to reinstall the drivers, which I will do as soon as I can (the post is here ).

Since this is something that is hard to explain and harder to research, I decided to post a video I took with my phone here (Warning: It may take a long time to display):

Vista Crazy Display

As you can see (if you can - I know the quality is crappy) it is really hard to describe.

To go back on the topic of the poor business exec having to deal with this kind of stuff, it's really a myatery to me how most people that have not spent the best part of their professional lives dealing with these issues, can solve problems such as this one without going crazy.

Coming soon: Professional Audio on Vista.