Windows Vista: I Hate You

By the way - this article is posted on my own site - so it's not copy and pasted. I wrote the original. Yesterday I took the leap and got a copy of Windows Vista, the new operating system by Microsoft and recipient of much news since it’s launch a month or so ago. I found out the real reason for poor Vista sales. I will make this short and sweet. It took over 5 hours for the install to complete but only 15 minutes for me to realize I’d made a mistake. Here’s an overview of what I experienced. 1. Boot Up: At least twice as long as XP 2. OS Interface: Oddly cheap looking, over glossy, bad rounded corners, horrible drop shadows 3. Performance: Terrible, my computer chugged with every breath. P4, 2 Gigs of Ram. 4. Applications: Errors everywhere, Vista blocked a ton of startup programs, audio stopped working, Ableton Live (my audio recording platform) did not function at all… disaster. I immediately started searching Google for how to “roll back Vista install to XP” to my amazement I found hundreds… thousands of people who’d posted the exact same phrase. They were all people that like me who had installed the new OS only to be horrified by errors and zapped system resources. After reading for a few minutes I determined that there was no way to “roll back” to XP and I’d require a complete format and clean install of Windows XP… thank goodness I still had the XP install disc handy. It took about an hour to format and reinstall XP and now I sit here with a clean install, which I love. Currently I’m reinstalling Photoshop, Flash, et al and I now have a clean slate to start with. I’ve taken the opportunity to switch over to using as much open source software as possible as a way to support the cause and sleep at night knowing I did not steal my software. There is really no reason anyone should have to pay for or pirate the majority of the software they use on a daily basis. It’s all out there and it’s all for free, just waiting for you to come and download it. So far I’ve replaced the following 1. Microsoft Office with Open Office 2. Winzip with 7Zip 3. Nero with CDBurnerXP Pro 3 As for Vista… I have promised that I will never… never install Vista again. What a disappointment… what a waste of money and what a bunch of hoopla over nothing. Carry on.