Not staying the course (with Vista)

Here I sit, 10:00PM on a weeknight formatting my harddrive after backing up all my important data. Looking over my shoulder I see the yellow progress bar of the XP setup telling me that the quick format is almost done. Soon setup will be copying the old files I know so well back to the system32 folder and I will begin my day tomorrow with the fresh feeling that reloading XP from scratch brings. Maybe I just wasn’t ready for the future. Maybe the future is broken. Maybe XP is just better.

I’ve been running Vista on my Dell Latitude D620 laptop for the past 4 months, enjoying some of the great new features such as the integrated search (Start, type “SMS” and you’ve got the SMS admin console at your fingertips), the live thumbnails (wow, I can see what my browsers and media players have open when I ALT+TAB!), and, um, hmm… what else was there? Well, I can’t remember right now. The only thing I can remember is that routinely I’ve had to suspend my computer just to get my wireless working, had to wait for what seemed like hours to copy files across a gigabit network, watched packet captures that showed my computer (while looking idle to an end user) pouring out megabyte after megabyte of unnecessary traffic onto the wire, and have had to hold down the power button to shut down my laptop more times than I can count just to try and get some work done. There is no way that Aero is worth this. A pretty UI does NOT make up for (so far) the most unstable and counterproductive OS I’ve come across (next to Windows ME).

I’ve seen XP / Vista performance comparisons that show that even if I wait for Vista SP1, I’m still going to have a crippled system. Granted, Vista SP1 is supposed to have some stability and reliability fixes in it (and boy does it need them), but just look at the charts, man. In another post, the team doing the comparison goes over what the test entailed. I can buy it. I’ve had enough of wasted time, lost data (powering off your PC after notepad freezes when it can’t connect wirelessly to your home folder to show a save dialog REALLY sucks), and all the frustrations that have gone along with my Vista experience. I didn’t really mind the UAC prompts so much, and I liked the look of the UI, but GIVE ME MY XP BACK NOW!

I’ll post an update once I have everything back to normal to verify that the issues were XP and not hardware.