OK, so I am a die-hard tech junkie. I usually am one of the first to try anything. Perhaps that’s why I was in the PAID Vista beta and I immediately paid $250 for Vista Business on my laptop the week it was officially announced. I was excited to see the all the visual eye candy of “Aero”, use the new screen flipper to change tasks, and replace my dedicated image editing tools with all the built in imaging facilities. I thought life was going to be good. That was 4 months ago. I really tried to live with Vista on my laptop. This week, I have decided to Upgrade back to XP. It took me 2 solid days, but I couldn’t be happier. Read on and learn why I made this decision.

Eye Candy:

The first thing In noticed after installing Vista was the new UI was beautiful. Everything looked great. Then I noticed that things were really slow. Dragging Windows and multiple applications on my screen was a painful test of my patience. My laptop harddrive was constantly spinning. My Vista performance index was at 3.0. Hmm, time to optimize. I shut off all the Aero effects, went to a simple classic UI. I turned off all power save features and selected maximum performance. My index increase to 3.2. Still not so great, but the best I could do for now.

Sounds:

I use Skype constantly. When I bought my laptop everyone was amazed at how I could have a conversation using the built in microphone of my laptop and the video cam. The conversations were so clear that I used my laptop as a speakerphone to talk to our development staff in Europe. After I installed Vista, that all stopped. Echos and crackles were the order of the day. Upgrade the drivers you say! I did that – about 5 times. I tried drivers from laptop manufacturer, the soundcard maker, and any other related things I could find in blogs. No luck.

Get a set of headphones like everyone else. I tried 4 sets. Vista was trying to be fancy and actively would switch drivers when it detected my headphones. Sometimes the detection worked, sometimes it didn’t. Sometime I would plug in the headphones and hear nothing at all from laptop speakers or the headphones. I never had these problems before. So basically, I was not in a good place if I cared about sound of any kind.

Networking Hell:

Being able to connect to other computers is a given. I have multiple computers at home and work that I interact with all the time. Well. Vistas great “improved” TCPIP stack that was supposed to be error correcting, made networking a nightmare. Half the time my other PCs wouldn’t be accessible and then the times that they were, the transfers were so slow that I would shut it down. After hours of searching on the web for help on this, it was clear that I wasn’t the only one seeing these issues. I had to turn off the fancy new TCPIP and revert to the older ones. After that, most of my networking activities were back to normal. Still had a few issues, but at least I could connect.

Battery Life:

I make lots of trips. My laptop with an extended battery used to last an astounding 4 hours! I could fly cross the USA and watch 2 movies. I could goto meetings without a power supply, confident that I would make it through the presentation without incident. I could put my machine on standby for days and turn it back on in a few seconds. I once forgot my power supply and worked at the office all day on batteries alone. It was great to have that kind of security.

After Vista, I am lucky to get 1 hour. I tried different batteries and super power save modes. Not much changes. I tried switching to the “low performance” graphics card settings. Vista would barely run. OK, I wasn’t going anywhere without an A/C adapter now.

Upgrading to XP:

So, if you are a laptop user and value fast performance, great sound, network connectivity, and reasonably battery life, Vista is not your friend. I tried for 4 months to adapt. I had spent half a day installing Vista and I didn’t want to regress. Coupled with the fact that you can’t downgrade and keep your applications intact, that meant that I was going to have to do a “clean install”. It was going to take days.

Two days ago, I started to copy all 60GiGs of my data onto an external hard drive. After that was complete, I whipped out the “restore” disks and chose to take my computer back to factory settings. I started at 8:30pm. I was 4:30am when I found myself nodding off in my chair, so I went to bed. XP was running, but I had a lot of applications and data to restore.
The next morning, I started to install all my most used applications. It was like seeing an old friend when those familiar XP apps popped up on the screen and they ran FAST! I changed the look and feel options a bit and it felt like a new computer. I logged into my network and everything popped up quickly and was accessible. I called my brother in law with Skype and he told me I sounded clear as day.

I plugged in a standard battery and the indicator said that I had 2 hours and 15 minutes of runtime. With a sigh and a smile, I looked at the clock and realized it was time to head home. It was 6pm and I had the familiar feeling that all was right in my computing world again. I have upgraded my computing experience from one of slow frustration to being able to work worry free. It took 2 days, but it was worth it!

Anyone want to buy a slightly used license of Vista Business?

P.S. I also built a honking new desktop to run Bioshock. It’s got a Core 2 processor 4G of memory and the latest NVidia 8800 graphics card. On that machine I installed Vista Ultimate. I am totally happy with that. That machines scores a 5.9 on the performance index. Lesson learned? Make sure you really have the horsepower to run Vista!

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 at 3:28 pm and is filed under Mobile Markets. 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.