Vista SP1 - BSOD, Bugs and Aggravations

I'm fed up with this particularly useless piece of "assistance" from Microsoft. Nice idea the "Problem and Solution Centre", especially since this Vista HP laptop is BSOD'ing every day now, so I thought I'd check to see what it had to say about the current state of my somewhat poorly system...

Aha! Let's follow that link and follow those obviously helpful steps...


What driver? Which device? How about a link to the Knowledgebase?

I have lost count of the times I have clicked the "No" brackets- this-was-not-helpful-at-all-quite-the-reverse-thank-you-very-much- if-you-want-to-add-my-blood-pressure-to-the-list-of-problems-now- close-brackets button and conveyed my displeasure (in decreasingly moderate terms of course) in response to the helpful question "Was this information helpful?", so maybe, just maybe, a little humiliation is in order.

Yes, it's in order - but whether it will help or not is another issue.

(BTW, the laptop manufacturer reliably informs me that the BIOS does not need to be updated and rather wished that MS would stop suggesting this as it creates an inordinate amount of completely unnecessary work for them...)

And, just to round things off, in case you are ever worried about whether your Drivers are properly signed and aren't entirely certain, please be aware that neither is Vista, so don't expect much help there either...

So, as you can see snapman.sys (of which there is only one on the system) is both signed and not signed... maybe Acronis signed for the fact that they weren't signing it? Who knows, but I see the imprimatur of MS behind it all.

By the way... the BSOD's are all 0x9F "DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE" errors and I suspect MS again with regard to the USB drivers: instead of just dying some 10-20 minutes after plugging in my Lexar JumpDrive Lightning II drive when I plugged it in today Vista refused to acknowledge the existence of the device at all then crashed when I took the non-existent device out again...

Of course everything was just dandy before SP1... but, 'tis true - plus ca change...

As as I saw in a forum sig recently "The mouse has been moved - please restart your system to apply the new settings"...

Annoying Stuff