I’ve been using Windows Vista on various systems for almost two years now. First, as part of the “family and friends” beta test, then with the final released version. But this last weekend I reformatted my computer and put Windows XP back on. It does feel good to be home.
Now I’m not here to rant about Vista. There are plenty of other internet “experts” who will froth at the mouth about how Vista is a disappointment or is not wanted. My reasons, however, were much more about getting things done and less about ideological statements.
The computer I’ve been using Vista on for the last year isn’t new. It’s a three year old 2.2GHz Athlon 64 homebrew, with 1GB memory, a 10,000rpm SATA drive and an old GeForce FX5200 Ultra video card. Compared to the ancient HP Kayak dual P3 system I used for the beta test, the Athlon 64 is a beast, but now it is considered barely adequate.
Getting Vista Ultimate x64 installed got off to a bad start. The ULi-based motherboard my system is built around has an on-board SATA controller, but the Vista installer blue-screens when it tries to detect the hard drive. To get around this I installed a generic Silicon Image based SATA card in one of the PCI slots. With the latest drivers (from the SiL website) I was able to install Vista and start to get to grips with it. Other issues came about because the USB 2.0/IEEE1394 controller wasn’t supported and there were no drivers available from the manufacturers site, and my TV tuner card (a MSI TV@nywhere Master) wasn’t supported. After removing these devices the system worked okay, but was noticeably slower than with XP. That’s to be expected somewhat; when I first upgraded an old system from Windows 98 to XP, there was a considerable drop in performance. Every new OS version adds features to make use of the latest and greatest, at the expense of the older systems out there.
So I get Vista running and have all my applications installed. There was a slight learning curve with the user interface, as there are considerable changes between XP and Vista, but nothing that some poking around could not solve. Several older applications required being run as the administrator user all the time, but newer applications worked fine. Generally, things were “okay” but not great. Mostly due to the lockups.
At random times the system would hard lock. No response from the keyboard and the cursor wouldn’t move. The only resolution was to power off and restart. I tried different drivers for all hardware, both Windows supplied and ones from hardware manufacturers, but the system still was prone to lockups. The logs had nothing of use, and the system wasn’t writing dump files. I tried a different video card (an old ATI Radeon) but the system still locked up (and I had to dig deep to remove the ATi drivers when I put the GeForce back in). I tried memory tests (no errors) but RMA’d the memory and processor anyway, but the system still locked. The only error in the log referred to the Silicon Image controller not responding, but these errors did not coincide with the lockups. Oy.
After a year of going in circles, my patience ran out this weekend. Three lockups in 10 minutes were the final straw. After I got the system running again, I dumped all my personal data onto the second hard drive and reformatted. I put XP back on the system, applied all the patches (400MB of downloads!) and updated all the drivers. It kind of feels good to be back and to be honest, for what I do most of the time there is no appreciable difference. Except the system is much more responsive running XP than it was running Vista.
Now I’m not going to place all the blame at the feet of Microsoft here. I spend all day at work sitting in front of a Vista system, and something like 20% of all installed computersat my place of employment are now running Vista and we don’t have huge system problems there. I think my issues are all related to hardware incompatibilities despite suitable Vista x64 drivers being available. Microsoft can’t produce drivers for every piece of obscure hardware, and they can’t test every single combination so there are always going to be compatibility issues creeping in. This is one area that Apple has it easy – Mac OS X is only going to be installed on a relatively small number of hardware combinations. This makes it easier to test out all possibilities and develop solutions when problems occur.
I did briefly consider some kind of Linux, but I have an application that I use a lot that’s only available for Windows or Mac OS X, and my ability to download large files is limited by the only internet connection available at home. I could have ordered CD’s, but the reload was somewhat a spur-of-the-moment decision and I didn’t want to wait.
So I’m back on XP and happy again. My system hasn’t been locking up when it feels like it. I still have the Vista DVD here and will most likely use it when I build a new computer sometime soon; I’d kind of like an Intel Core 2 Quad system with at least 8GB memory. That should make Vista fly!
