> on a side note: I personally love Vista now that i have been using it for a
> while. I normally would reinstall xp every other month or so and notice a huge
> difference in performance. With vista i notice absolutely no drop in
> performance/no noticeable difference after reinstall. So maybe rethink the vista
> thing, but then again some people will just hate so they can be haters. Nothing
> wrong with that.

Vista is a really mixed bag.

I have a completely different experience with XP than what you describe - it was very stable and with good performance. Stuff that broke was only one program if I fiddled with it, or something I freshly installed. Did you run stuff like Spybot Search & Destroy or Ad-Aware? That goes a long way to make sure crap doesn't get installed and slows down your system (I once had a job where users thought I was a magician because I would make their machine go much faster by a little Spybot job).

Anyway, back to Vista. I've decided to take the plunge when I got a new laptop, so went for SP1. Was it the big horrible thing a lot of people make it out to be? No, and some things on it are very nice (I like the new interface).

However... I honestly feel I've went back to Windows 98/ME. In the two months I've had it, shit would break for no apparent reason, and the system would crash for really stupid things. Take the sidebar for example. Because of something stupid I did, I got 50 gadgets on it. Then the system would freeze when I try to remove one. Luckily, because I've seen my share of shitty OS problems, I suspected it was due to the sidebar alone. I've googled around, found where the sidebar config was, and manually fixed it.

But that's me - I'm only comfortable doing that because I've fiddled many times with config files in Linux, OS X, and Win9x. The thing is, this is exactly the kind of crap that you're not supposed to have to do with Windows. I realize it's just the sidebar, but this kind of bug shows shoddy programming and that the sidebar was added later on as an afterthought cool feature. No problem with that, but they could make sure it doesn't freeze the damn system! In a Mac, for example, they would have got a bunch of testers to make sure the most visible parts doesn't break (I've seen a lot of shit go wrong on a Mac - but they do get the visible things right). In Linux, well you expect to have to pop the hood open half of the time anyway so no big deal. (I like Linux [Ubuntu/Xandros] but I still won't fully switch. I do run it on a VM on Vista so I can fiddle with it though).

There's also the user control thing which is not as annoying as they make it, and disk usage is not too bad (or at least I haven't noticed it). I guess SP1 improved things.



[download a life]