Vista? Has fixes? Get out of town!

After my morning cup of coffee (Mountain Dew), there's nothing I enjoy more than applying some sweet, sweet patch paste to an otherwise finicky operating system. Hence why I was happy as a spider pig on a ceiling this morning when I noticed the "new Vista patch omg" story on my Google RSS feed. Props to Ars Technica for the catch. Here are the details.

There are two patches. One's called "Performance and Reliability," and the other is called "Compatibility and Reliability." Like a bowl of Raisin Bran, that's two scoops of reliability for your vitamin-deficient Vista. These will surely be rolled out to automatic updates sometime in the near future, but early-adopters can now get their first chops at defeating a number of Vista's unruly bugs. That includes my favorite, the "ETA: 8.51 years" issue, which plagues those of us who like to transfer freakin'-huge files.

Other fun bugs that are getting the big whack include the ol' "a computer that has NVIDIA G80 series graphic drivers installed stops responding" bundle of joy, the ever-generic, "visual appearance issues occur when you play graphics-intensive games" problem, and the ungodly critical "you receive a "Stop 0x0000009F" error when you put the computer to sleep while a Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) connection is active." Take that!

The performance patch fixes the aforementioned "Why is Vista telling me it's taking so long to transfer a file" issue, as well as an untimely memory leak in the Energy screen saver (one of my personal favorites), and a few hibernation-resuming peculiarities.

If you ask me, I think that these two patches should be mutually exclusive. You know, like picking a class in an RPG or something. Once you identify yourself as a "performance" user, you should be stuck on that road and/or patch-cycle until you reinstall the OS. Same goes for you, fans of compatibility. Thankfully, I don't work at Microsoft, so all Vista users can install both patches and relish in the joys that pre-patch-day upgrading bring.

I installed the patches at home this morning, but didn't have enough time to tinker around with Vista to see if anything's better (or, as is sometimes the case, horribly worse). Will's been having a little trouble getting the patches to install in the first place, so if you're in his boat, it might behoove you to wait for the automatic update version. Still, if you can, fire 'em up! Let me know if it breaks your system! Inquiring minds want to know!