Let me start this post by getting a few things out of the way:
- I have nothing against Microsoft. In fact, I have depended upon their products for years, and am quite happy with a few of them, most notably Visio, Excel, and Virtual PC.
- My issues with the Windows operating systems were mostly taken care of by Windows 2000. XP was icing on the cake. I’ve been really satisfied with XP since 2001.
I say this because I’m about to slag on Windows Vista, and I want it understood that I am not a reflexive MS-basher. I’m not a Mac or Linux fanboy, either (although I regularly use OS X).
A few weeks ago I decided to load Vista on my 4-month old Dell Inspiron 640m. It’s got a Core 2 Duo proc (the T2050 @ 1.6GHz), 1 gig of RAM, and a 120GB HDD. The graphics adapter is the ever-popular Intel 950GM.
Having learned my lesson about upgrade vs. clean install back in the Win98 days, I wiped the HDD and installed Vista. My troubles started as soon as I started playing around with the OS. You know that User Account Control “feature” that everyone’s talking about? It’s a major PITA. Vista was constantly asking me for confirmations, to the point where I simply started automatically confirming whatever it asked.
I’m a fairly sophisticated user and I take care to run firewall software that monitors inbound AND outbound communications, as well as keeps tabs on applications’ behaviors (such as when apps are requesting access to OS resources or services). So I shut off UAC.
Well, it turns out that certain applications won’t install correctly unless UAC is enabled. I’m not talking about obscure apps; I’m talking about things like Adobe Reader. I found myself enabling and disabling UAC ad nauseum as I installed and configured my applications.
My next problem occurred when I wanted to ensure that my command-line based backup process would work with Vista. A while back I bought a fantastic little network-attached storage drive from SimpleTech, which I highly recommend. I use the XCOPY32 command in a batch file along with Window’s built-in scheduler to ensure that my and my wife’s files are backed up regularly to the NAS drive. (And to several other portable drives as well; I like redundancy.) It’s a very simple-to-use and dependable little process. Or it was, anyway, until Vista entered the picture.
After migrating my data back to the laptop, I tested the command-line backup file. I figured better safe than sorry. I honestly expected it to just work. I ensured that the NAS drive was mapped to a drive letter, changed the data paths to reflect the new default locations for Vista user data, and ran the file.
Vista barfed. It thought my NAS drive was full and would not write to the drive. But my wife’s Windows XP machine (correctly) saw the NAS drive as having 145GB free, and had no problems backing up to this drive.
So, Vista had two strikes at this point. The 3rd strike was stability and performance.
Soon after loading the rest of my standard apps (Office 2003, Visio 2003, Nero 7, Flock, Firefox, Quicken 2007), I noticed that Vista was often unresponsive for seconds at a time. This happened A LOT. It didn’t matter what I was doing; at random times the “wait” cursor would spin for 5-15 seconds. Most of the time this would be the cue for the laptop’s cooling fan to engage. (And it usually stayed on for 20 or 30 minutes once it started.) The unresponsiveness and “hanging” behavior was especially pronounced when Outlook 2003 was launched. When this happened I basically couldn’t use Outlook at all.
At times it was so bad I found myself taking the PowerBook out of sleep and sneaking a look at my emails via the webmail interface while Outlook and Vista churned and churned…and when Outlook finally came back, I responded to my mail using the Outlook email composer.
So let’s review: UAC was annoying me to no end. My simple-as-dirt backup system failed under Vista. The system was unresponsive and “hang-y”. And Vista was making my normally-silent-and-cool laptop’s fan spin constantly.
After about 4 days of putting up with this, I decided enough was enough and scrubbed the unit down to bare metal, then reinstalled the XP image I had made shortly before “upgrading” to Vista.
To console myself, I loaded the subtle and attractive Royale Noir XP theme and used an old MS Powertoy freebie to switch the desktop wallpaper every 15 minutes. (I have amassed a huge collection of landscape pix and Hubble shots over the years, so the wallpaper switcher puts them to good use.)
I’m done with Vista for the foreseeable future. With a rock-solid XP SP2 install, an attractive theme, and the wallpaper switcher, I have all my needs met – my computing environment is stable and predictable, the system is responsive, the visual appearance is attractive, and the overall user experience is pleasurable.
I suspect many other people have had a similar experience with Vista.
