How Windows Vista Makes Us Appreciate Windows XP

Why is it that Vista causes so many headaches over so many ridiculously petty issues, issues that don’t exist in XP. For instance why does XP do performance better than Vista?, why does XP do dual monitors better than Vista?, why does XP do networking better than Vista? And why the hell is DirectX10 only available for Vista? Is it because Microsoft knows that gamers are the key to making Vista appeal to the masses? There’s no technical reason why DX10 shouldn’t work on XP. It’s all a pathetic marketing tactic, Microsoft knows that their OS sucks. Bill Gates himself, at his last CES appearance, confirmed that Vista could have used a bit more polish before release. And let’s not forget the list of primary features that were discarded so that they could ship the OS to retail in Dec 2006, thing’s such as WinFS and Powershell.

WinFS and Powershell were reasons enough to buy Vista. But no instead we’ve got features like Flip and Flip3D which is remarkably un-useful , I don’t know anyone that can honestly say that their use of Flip3D increases their productivity, it’s just a fancy excuse for making the OS look cool, and really it’s not even that. I much prefer Beryl+Compiz in Linux, their 3D implementation of the desktop is FAR superior and will actually increase your productivity….and it looks way cooler than Vista’s. Getting sidetracked…

Vista’s performance on my company laptop, an HP 6710b is dismal at best. Except for the ultra-crap integrated Intel GFX card the specs are fairly decent, a T7500 CPU @ 2.2Ghz, 2GB of Ram and a 120GB 5400-rpm HD. Upon first boot I was given the option to install either 64bit Vista or 32bit Vista, I opted for 64bit but that was short lived as it’s performance felt as if it was running a Celeron 466 with 128MB of ram. So I went over to 32bit and it performed substantially better, but it still was not as good as the performance I was expecting to see.

When I leave for home for the day I put my laptop into standby mode and undock it and pack it into my bag, next day I dock the laptop and turn it on but for some reason Vista takes an extraordinarily long time to get to the state where it’s ready to be used. There is so much disk thrashing going on I am often left in awe at how ridiculously slow it is. Then there’s the shoddy dual screen issue. Whenever I lock the laptop, then unlock it after coming back Vista goes through this sadistic ritual. This is what happens, I unlock -> and immediately move the mouse to an application I want to use -> 3 seconds into this Vista decides it’s going to flash both monitors for a couple seconds, shuffle the apps between windows -> and then finally it settles down. It’s highly annoying. I read that you can disable the TMM service which will eliminate this problem but then dual screens won’t work properly. How did this product make it past QC?!

Then there’s the other issue with the standby/wakeup ‘feature’, but at this point I’m not sure if it’s the laptop or Vista as the culprit. Basically after putting the laptop into standby mode it will turn itself on while it’s in my bag, install some updates and then sometimes it will shutdown, other times it will just slowly drain the batteries until I realise that the bag is getting quite hot and something is not quite right.

Oh let’s not forget the Vista Aero problem. Even though this laptop is certified to run Aero (I get a 3.4 on the Windows Experience Index) it barely ever does. For some reason whenever I unlock the laptop it reverts to Vista Basic, why? I have no idea but I can’t re-enable Aero, I lose all 3D functionality and all transparency, the option to re-enable is simply unavailable, I have to reboot to get it working again and hell if I do that, it takes between 5-10 mins for it to bootup and get to the point of actually being acceptable to use!

…and then there’s the obscene networking performance, this ranks really low down there with the rest of them. For an entire year it’s been well documented on other sites just how bad copying over a network is with Vista. Microsoft finally released a publicly available Service Pack (still in Beta) which eliminates the issue, but again, how did this OS make it through QC?

My biggest issue with Vista is the enormous amount of disk thrashing that it does. Even with 2GB of RAM, and even with a 4GB USB Flashdrive configured with ReadyBoost the disk thrashes away leaving me to wonder how much it has reduced the lifespan of the hard drive.

At this point I would love to have stayed with XP on my home machine, if XP supported DX10. This is the primary and only reason I still use Vista.

I do not wish for my worst enemy to experience Vista.