I have been a Cingular / AT&T customer now for almost 12 years. It has always been a love / hate relationship. Their latest incompetence however takes the cake.
I recently upgraded my laptop to Vista Ultimate RTM. This license came benefit of my participation in the Vista beta program. At work I have several machines running Vista Enterprise which cam through the Microsoft Volume License program. The point being Vista is launched and business users are currently using it.
My experience overall has been great. I had to upgrade a few applications here and there but overall almost every applicaiton amongst the long list that I run is ready to go. The exceptions so far have been PerfectDisk, Camtasia and Cingular Communications Manager.
I contacted the first two companies Raxco and TechSmith and was basically told that Vista isn’t shipping so they don’t support it yet. I begged to differ and they pretty much told me, “Well, business users don’t count. Customers won’t have it until February.”
Of course my response was, “Aren’t business users customers?”
Cingular however took the cake. I was planning on waiting awhile to contact them until a massive windstorm hit the Seattle area. I have now been without power, etc for 6 days. I was thinking it might be nice to be able to use the Sierra AirCard 860 / Cingular 3G service I pay $80/month for from home while the power and internet connections are down.
Finally broke down and called Cingular today. After the requisite wait I was connected to a representative who wasn’t sure if they supported Vista or not. His response was let’s try the same things we troubleshoot on Windows XP. Guess what no results. He then calls someone who tells him they won’t be supporting Vista until February of 2007 when is ships. I indicate to him that it is currently shipping. He sticks with it is not shipping until February 2007. I ask to speak to someone who might have some ideas when support would be forthcoming. They are all in meetings. I ask for the case number. Their case tracking system is down.
Now I await a call back that I sincerely suspect will never come. I will update this post if I ever get a straight answer.
Browsing the net it appears that Chris Pirillo published a fix that worked for RC1 and before. On the Cingular forums they mention that it appears the NDIS stack changed slightly post RC1 and that their NDIS shim no longer works.
All I know is that neither the Cingular Communications Manager or the Sierra AirCard Watcher work with Vista Ultimate RTM.