See ya later, Vista

Note: My desire was to publish this few weeks ago (when Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 came out), but I forgot it with all this xmas madness. Anyway, here it is.


When Windows XP came out, I tried it as soon as I could. My experience from Win2000 was a disaster, so I made a backup of my W2k, and tried XP for a few weeks. I ended restoring the backup because of lot of compatibility issues.
Vista came out recently, and I thought "maybe this time will be different". So I made a data backup (not a complete system backup, just data, photos and such) and tried Vista Ultimate.

And now, I'm going back to Windows XP SP2. Why? It's not that Vista is bad. For a user it's great and will give very few problems. But for more advanced users, like me, that use some specific software, It's not the time to switch yet.
Vista itself is very robust and does it's job very well. The problem is that the "breaking changes" (and subtle changes) transform a relaxed walk into a mountain climbing...
My VS2005 works with some problems, IIS 7.0 works with problems, SQL 2005 doesn't works (Express version does work, I mean the commercial Version). Visual C# Express Ed. doesn't works, so XNA doesn't too. My favourite Antivirus (Kaspersky) doesn't works yet (I had to switch to NOD32 by force)...

Most software works (by elevating it's privileges and running it in "Windows XP SP2" Emulation mode), more or less without flaws, but I like to play with my toys (.NET, VS, XNA...) and if I can't play with them properly, I'll change to wherever I can actually use them.

Pros

  • Searching... I wasn't a good friend of Index Search and Windows searching features, but after trying Vista's ones I must admit they're VERY good and handy ones
  • Searching again, this time in Control Panel... This one really helped me out to find all the new or reorganized Vista config. features.
  • Image Viewer. Windows XP's Image Viewer sucks a bit, but this one really made me forget my (old) ACDSEE 5.0. I just missed a "convert to" feature (between BMP, GIF and JPG files at least)
  • Vista Gadgets. A nice addition. Probably the thing I'll miss more... They are both fun and useful.
  • Media Center included. It was cool when I first turned on my X360 with the just installed Vista laptop on, and both communicated to each other and I only had to "pair the devices" with a code the XBox gave me.

Cons

  • Some speed issues: Even after setting display to "Windows Classic", other things like listing the start menu items or moving/copying/deleting files are noticeable slower than in Windows XP.
  • Sometimes a folder doesn't remember my personalized view of it and reverts to Details view (I prefer List view)
  • Memory consumption. Even with classic view, eats more memory. Comparing with my desktop gaming PC, which has XP, Kernel Memory eats twice, cached memory 4 times more, and overall while the desktop has 749MB out of 1024MB free, laptop has 32MB out of 1280MB.
  • Network Connection Manager. Very cool, good looking... but I can't change my adapter properties if I'm not connected. I used to change between home and work IPs, gateways, DNS and such. Now I can only do it before unplugging LAN cable or after plugging home's LAN cable. And it could store different network settings (assigning a name looks cool but if it does nothing else is a bit stupid.

Not sure where belongs

  • New security system: Now Windows is quite more secure, I admit it, but it's very very very annoying to have to elevate privileges to almost every software excepting two or three. This will be surely issued when new versions of everything appear, but until then I got tired and modified the machine policy to automaticly elevate privileges without asking confirmation.

Mayble some of my cons are from my lack of "Vista knowledge", but my point of view here is from someone who sees the operating system just as a door to the rest of software, not as a "enjoyable experience" fancy and beautiful but time consuming (both mine and CPU ;).

Update: Seems that Vs 2005 SP1 is out. But XNA is still unsupported under Vista (can't remember where did I read it, but it was from someone of the XNA dev. team).
Also, after reinstalling XP, I've noticed some speed increase while doing mundane things like file copy, internet surfing, using multiple apps at once...

Tags: Systems-IT

See ya later, Vista article, written by Kartones. Published @