Hasta la vista, Vista!
Today, after nearly 5 months, I said goodbye to Vista. I had been struggling for quite a while but with so much work I decided to put off the format and re-install. However, today I had had it. Sure, people can say "it's not Vista, it's your hardware". That might be even 100% true, however, I am not going to dump a perfectly working laptop that's around 1 year old just so that I can install Vista on it. When hardware manufacturers start providing better support for Vista and not abandoning their customers, and when Vista cleans up some of the issues it has, then I'll try it again. For now, I've gone back (and after a long day nearly finished installing) to XP, where things run smoothly on a machine with 2GB RAM, and I don't have to wait for things to happen. Here's a list of some of the reasons I got rid of Vista (on a Fujitsu S7020)
1. Many devices not supported, including: Graphic card, Bluetooth, Modem, System devices to name a few. Others I had to hack a lot.
2. CPU was constantly up causing overheating and the fan being on continuously.
3. Since my video card doesn't support Direct X 10, Windows Movie Maker no longer worked (and thus nor did I get to use my video recorder)
4. No support for Aero
5. The Windows sidebar consume too much resources. Google Gadgets have better choice and run better.
6. The search in Vista is just pathetic compared to Google Desktop, not only in terms of speed, but in ease of use.
7. UAC: It gets tiring, and it's a lame excuse for improved security.
8. Explorer would take ages sometimes for context menu to come up (no, I didn't have any non-reachable network drives)
9. Random errors.
10. Display would sometimes switch off and one or two times I even got a message saying that it had been disabled due to copy protection.
11. WMV would be distorted, this is even original ones.
12. I wasn't really making much use of the filtering or the shortcuts in the explorer.
13. Explorer bug: Not being able to multi-select files and having to "Reset" folder settings. Random occurrence.
14. Explorer bug: My source code files ARE NOT songs and they don't have a title to them or a rating, so stop organizing the explorer view with those things!
15. Slow, it was just getting too slow.
16. Probably one of the most annoying of all: kept losing my Internet connection. I'm connected via a router at home. Every now and again, Vista would just drop the connection. I could connect to other machines on my network. Those in turn could connect to the Internet, but Vista, dead!
As I said, it could all be my hardware, but I don't believe I should invest more money in hardware when I have something that runs perfectly well with XP. If there were any features in Vista that I would find really compelling, then maybe. If it's eye candy I'm after, Stardock does just the trick and does it better. So until I don't get a new machine, I probably won't install Vista again on this one.