My Vista Experience, Part Two

Well, it's been a rather disappointing couple of weeks in Vistaland, as it seems one disappointment (read "performance issue") after another rears it's ugly head.

I've been trolling the message boards to get a sense of Vista-related problems, and it seems most fall into the following categories:

1. Devices (printers, scanners, etc.) that won't work due to lack of updated drivers.

2. Applications that don't run because they haven't been upgraded (for example, I tried to run Second  Life, to no avail -- as of now, it won't run on Vista).

3. Big performance hits to PCs that have been upgraded from XP to Vista. Apparently installing Vista on top of XP produces extra processes or some such situation that causes new core 2 systems to crawl. It seems that this isn't a problem on virgin Vista systems. If I had  purchased an XP-based screamer, that ran  laps around older PCs, and then started behaving like an ancient 486 system after installing Vista, I'd probably be livid.
 
4. Trouble with all the application nesting -- many tools and apps that were right out in the open in XP are buried behind multiple screens in Vista. The reorg of the interface takes getting used to, to say the least. At least there's a way to set the interface to trusty XP mode -- but since the major guts of the upgrade was supposed to be in the GUI, that's definitely taking several steps back.

And here's a new one for the books  -- as I haven't seen it described anywhere yet. Internet Explorer has been crashing repeatedly and the problem has gotten so bad I now defer all browsing to Firefox, which works like a charm. Not only is Firefox noticeably faster than IE,  but it  hasn't crashed once (as opposed to dozens and dozens of times for IE).

At some point soon, when I have an afternoon to kill, I'm going to be calling MSoft to find out what might be the problem here, and how to fix it, but this situation is rather disconcerting, to say the least.

Due to all the issues above, there are numerous reports of people being forced to buy a Vista system, then after getting it into their hands proceed to wipe the OS off the hard drive and install XP instead. Microsoft should be ashamed and taken to task for releasing such a half-baked product into the marketplace.

A number of defenders have placed blame on device manufacturers and third-party app vendors for not working hard enough to make their products Vista-ready, but I believe that MS is equally to blame, if not more. In fact, there have been reports of MS withholding necessary code and support to developers as they were trying to update their products.

I smell a revolt brewing, as the frustration level of new Vista users builds to a breaking point.

My recommendation, if you have a fairly new PC or laptop that is up to date with the necessary XP  patches, DO NOT UPGRADE TO VISTA. If you're in the market for a new system, decide very carefully if you're willing to buy a system that probably won't run everything you need it to, and you're ok being a guinea pig for Vista debugging.

Much better to wait out the necessary patches and updates that hopefully will be forthcoming over the next year.