I have absolutely had it with Windows Vista.

(For those of you mostly interested in looking at my pictures and seeing how my life’s going, this is mostly a rant. Ignore it or else just bear with me. I’m trying to get some time to try to capture week 2, though I’m nearly halfway through week 3…)

It is, in a word, unusable. So much so that I’ve ended up ordering a Thinkpad T61 with Windows XP Pro on it. The machine spec is pretty similar (1.8ghz instead of 1.6 ghz) but it’s actually usable. Better than usable, in fact. Pretty good, even.

For instance: Power button to logon:

• Vista: 2 1/2m
• XP: 52s

Logon to functionality:

• XP: 36xs
• Vista: 2m+

XP does not:

• hang for no reason
• crash on login
• go into infinite loops when trying to delete files
• randomly crash explorer
• randomly crash Microsoft software (OneNote 2007, designed for Vista!)
• randomly deinstall software
• randomly try to reinstall software (vista edition of Symantec Antivirus)
• randomly disable my software (Nero, Dreamweaver, Adobe Acrobat)

I have absolutely had it.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have been a UNIX (linux/AIX/Solaris) administrator for the last 9 years. For much of that time I’ve been pretty anti-Microsoft, and some things still annoy me, but I have reached the point where I want stuff to “Just work”, like my BlackBerry. I’m tired of recompiling kernels and mucking about in /proc to make stuff work. I’m tired of reading MAN pages and downloading beta software patches every time I want to do something wacky and out there like, say, watching a DVD (I was doing this on my Debian box back when it wasn’t really supported and, yeah, it was fun). But I just want the machine to work.

XP does, more or less. It should work a little better than it does, and Outlook shouldn’t be such a pig, but the GTD plugin works and helps me manage my very busy life and I no longer have time for Vista.

I think I’ll probaly be able to sell the X61 tablet for close to what I paid for it. I guess I’ll be out the $90 I paid for Symantec AV and the $70 I paid for the Vista upgrade for Nero. Oh well, I should have followed my own advice: wait for the first service pack.

I have not, however, seen a system this unstable than Windows 95. It reminds me of a ‘98 installation after a year. This is unacceptable. There’s a lot of stuff that they got right but it just doesn’t ultimately work, and I’m unfortunately too busy to try to make it do so.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 at 2:21 pm and is filed under reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.