Windows Vista... Just Say No

As I previously mentioned, my wife's new computer arrived last Sunday, preinstalled with Windows Vista Home Premium. You can read about my experience (at least with Outlook) trying to get it set up. Seems my inital optimism at getting Outlook to work was misplaced, as Outlook wouldn't download any of her Hotmail (yes I used the Outlook Connector) and neither would Windows Live Mail beta.

Back into the breach this past weekend, this time a format and install. Twice. The result? Some sort of sync error whenever I try to download from her Hotmail account. So Hotmail no workee. Only way to check it was to go to the Hotmail site. That was late Saturday night. I fired off a scathing email to MS Support and went to bed.

So what did I do? Well, after spending Sunday playing with my son at the pool and on Playstation, I did what I said I should have done in the first place. Sunday evening, I did a quick format, popped in Windows XP, and two hours later had EVERYTHING up and running without any issues whatsoever. She's back on Outlook Express 6 (which is what she liked anyway), Office standard is installed, and all her messages, files and docs copied over from the old machine, which now does duty as a file server for backups.

So let's sum up last week's adventure:

Windows Vista Home Premium
Est. total time: 30-35 hours
End result: failure

Windows XP Pro
Est total time: 2 hours
End Result: success

Let's hope this new computer lasts as long as the old one.

Windows Vista and Outlook 2003 - mapi32.dll Error Fix

I finally purchased my poor wife a new computer. She's been stuck on my old Pentium III 450 from 1999 for a couple of years now, ever since I upgraded. It's still serviceable and accomplishes what she wants, which is primarily email and some word processing, but man is it slow loading. And it won't even run some of the online flash games the kids like to play - the graphic are all jerky and stuff. Even GMail is slow because of the client side AJAX stuff it needs to do.

So I got her a new small footprint computer from Cyberpower Inc., pretty basic configuration: Socket AM2 Athalon 64 X2 3800, 1GB, 80GB drive, DVD+-RW. Came in a cool square box about the size of four shoe boxes stacked 2x2. And (deep breath) I decided to take the plunge and get it with Windows Vista Home Premium preinstalled.

It arrived in a week and I set it up last weekend. Vista comes with a free 30 day trial of Office 2007, but I already owned Office 2003 standard and I'm not interested in upgrading. So I after stumbling around in Vista for a while, I managed to set it to classic mode so it looked like Windows XP and I could actually find what I was looking for, I (in this order):

1. Installed Office 2003 Standard (Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, Excel)
2. Uninstalled the Office 2007 Trial version

Then I tried to run Outlook 2003 so I could set up her email....

Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook. MAPI32.DLL is corrupt or the wrong version.

Doh!

Outlook won't even start. All I get it that error. I'll spare you the two or so hours of research, uninstalling, re-installing, repairing and other efforts and just give you the solution that worked for me:

• Locate the file MSMAPI32.DLL in Program Files\Common Files\System\MSMAPI\1033
• Rename the file to something like MSMAPI32.XXX or MSMAPI32.OLD

Now restart Outlook. Hopefully you get the same result I got: Outlook showing up all nice and pretty and ready to play.

This doesn't address the further issue of setting up Outlook to work with her free Hotmail account. I know, I know, I've been trying to get her off Hotmail for years.

An aside - so far, Windows Vista has caused me nothing but headaches, mostly (I admit) because I have to fumble around to find things I know inside and out when it comes to XP or 2000. Would you believe some of the system files and folders don't even allow permissions to the Admin account?

If I had it to do over again, I would order the computer with XP Pro.