Don’t install Vista

For some odd reason, last week I decided to install Windows Vista. Stupid move.

I’ve never been on the anti-Microsoft bandwagon before, even when I was an electrical engineering and computer science student, since Windows was doing just fine what it was meant to do from Windows 2000 on. I was entirely satisfied with XP. I find Linux to be far too mess-with-to-keep-it-running and MacOSX was hardware-dependent so I couldn’t test it. I was convinced that upgrading to Vista would not be the terrible nightmare that the media made it out to be. I mean, it’s still based on XP code in there so it couldn’t be too bad.

I was wrong.

So far, and I’ve been at my internship most days so I haven’t even really been able to give it a proper stress-test, these are the things I hate:

1. NO stable drivers. There are way, way, way too many drivers that simply suck. My sound support is crap, I lost my TV-out on both my videocards, my older devices aren’t recognized, ARGH!
2. How is me authorizing every-single-thing I do exactly make things safer? No wait, I don’t even care, I’d argue that being less safe but less annoyed wins out in this case. Off it goes. See the Apple ad about this very subject.
3. Aero is nice to look at (though still not on MacOSX level), but there’s still software out there that brings Aero to a crashing halt, throwing the interface back to Basic. I don’t mind that. But what I do mind is that there’s a 1 in 5 chance that Aero completely screws up coming back and takes all Aero-related windows with it. In fact, that just happend as I’m writing this and I’m looking at a blank taskbar.
4. The stupid window flipping scrolling thing. That you’re supposed to replace alt-TAB with. That thing’s the most hilariously inefficient part of Vista yet.
5. General inefficiency CPU and RAM wise… my 1 gig of RAM is used 70% just with Windows on idle, CPU goes all over the place all the time. No idea what it’s doing.
6. Oh, and just one last pet peeve… the fucking screensaver pops up when I’m watching videos. I thought this was fixed back in ninety-fucking-nine. Off that goes too.

Urgh. I might just upgrade to XP if I have a few days left over.