Not Vista any time soon
Microsoft Windows Vista has problems. Here’s one in particular I came across recently. A colleague asked for my help solving a weird problem he was having with his recently bought HP Pavilion dv6000. The computer came preloaded with Vista Home Premium.
It had an admin account and a user account. Upon logging in, the user account worked fine, but the admin account seemed to have a mind of its own. It would warn that the password had expired, and then would go on to prompt for a new password. Good so far, but upon changing the password twice, it would throw up this following error:
Configuration information could not be read from domain controller, either the machine is unavailable or access has been denied.
In effect, the machine was virtually locked out from admin access—we knew the admin password, Vista read it correct but refused to login.
I sent a summary of this phenomenon to a trusty old friend—asking for his help. The fact that he found it strange confirms that this indeed is a problem, which appears to have no quick fix. He responded with this:
The error indicates this machine was part of the domain (DC) which is now not available to provide authority to change the password. Was this activated as part of the domain?..My worry is home vista premium cannot connect to domain (the software stack is absent in it).
So how did we go around it? Well, we didn’t, or rather we couldn’t. I used an Ubuntu live CD to copy some important files from the admin account before trying the restore CDs that HP shipped with the computer.
The restore CDs refused to re-image the disk, because admin password refused to get “registered”. The HP Support refused to help—said it was not their problem, and the computer store in Houston that pre-installed the OS for my colleague charged him a hundred and fifty bucks more to reinstall the OS again.
Stories like these don’t instill much confidence when you’re contemplating about upgrading to Vista.