Cutty's Blog

When Vista was released to MSDN subscribers I figured it was time to take a look at it given it was the RTM version (I just didn't have the time to put up with beta and RC issues).

I have an old laptop that is still reasonable spec (2.4Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 80Gb HDD), it runs Windows XP just a treat. Just so I had a backout strategy, I bought a new hard drive and installed to that rather than blow away my existing XP. Well I'm glad I did that now.

The install went well, very painless (Linux distros take not, you don't have to recompile the Vista Kernel to instal drivers!). That is until I started using Vista.

First off there were no graphics drivers for my ATI Radion 7500 Mobility card in the laptop. So no dual screen ability. I got around that by installing the XP driver instead. There are no drivers for my wireless card - the XP ones don't work so had to live without that.

Then there was the new "improved"? security features. "We see you want to take a crap. You need to be Adminstrator before you can take a dump. Even though you are already an Administrator, please confirm you want to upgrate to really, really Administrator mode so that you can take a crap." People thought that "Clippy" was annoying, wait till the world sees this. Anyway, I turned that off after trying to put up with it for a couple of days - I imagine the rest of the world will do the same.

To be fair, Vista boots up and shut's down pretty quick. But once it has booted it goes into some sort of limbo mode and it takes about 15-20 minutes before anything will run properly. And I can't run more than 2 or 3 apps at once cause it then stops responding completely. I also find the new menus and navigation in Windows Explorer very frustrating to work with. Yes I could switch to "Classic Mode", but what would be the point.

Yesterday I tried to watch an AVI file on it. Kept stopping and stuttering and was a complete waste of time.

Later I tried to get IIS to work so that I could edit my website using Visual Studio. After a couple of hours of Googling, got past all the 500, 401 etc errors, only for IIS to serve up blank pages. No errors, just blank pages. And as for the IIS adminstration tools, how backward. IIS is generally used by people who have an ounce of techie knowledge. This new interface treats me like I'm a 2 year old. I don't want goofy big buttons, and to have to use the back button like I'm in a browser. Give me something that doesn't insult my intelligence.

The same can be said for the new Control Panel.

So yesterday was the last straw. After having persevered with it for 2 months now, I have decided that I need a bigger gruntier box with all the latest hardware to run Vista properly. Sorry Microsoft, but my old laptop is just not that dead yet. It still runs XP beautifully.

So, after failing to find any overwhelming reasons to stick with Vista, and that is has much more negatives than positives, this weekend I'll be putting the old XP hard drive back in the machine.

Good luck Microsoft in selling Vista to the public, I don't think it stacks up in terms of Cost-Benefit for most people.