It’s a Love/Hate Relationship.

My new-ish notebook came pre-loaded with Windows Vista, I’ve been running it for a few months now and although its sleek and feature packed, I’ve been seriously considering throwing XP Pro onto it just so I could have the compatibility and performance my business needs demand.

Now that I’ve had a chance to really use it every day for work and everything, it’s turning into a hassle. Between the endless compatibility issues, all of the options and things being nearly impossible to find, and the poorly designed and highly annoying UAC that you can’t really actually turn off - It’s all very hard to get used to. XP was just so lean and fast where Vista could be summed up in a single word – Bloated.

I was going to go through with formatting it, I was going to put XP onto my new Vista laptop but I really do want to give Vista a chance, I don’t want to give up just yet. That and the hassles of formatting my notebook and re-loading everything so it would be ready for work in the morning wasn’t very appealing. I mean, one of the reasons I bought a brand new notebook was to have Vista, when I attended the Vista launch and received my 2 copies of the Ultimate Edition pre-release and I was sold. Brainwashed. I had to have it.

So today I sat down and spent some time with it and I was determined to get a couple of the huge compatibility issues resolved. I finally got printing to work with the network printer in the office, and I obtained pcAnywhere 12.1 so I could stop using the stupid web remote for my remote desktop needs. So I got what I needed to work for now and I also flipped through some optimization tips I found. I think I’m overall content with its performance although I’m still far from impressed.

If you’re interested in my opinion and your looking to upgrade to Vista, Don’t. I would hold off a bit longer and wait for the dust to settle, Microsoft just released a couple major patches just this week to address and improve various compatibility and performance issues. Although I have installed them and haven’t really seen a difference myself, it does show that Microsoft is still working out the kinks.

There is news that a Vista Service Pack 1 isn’t too far off too, so I’m assuming there are still a ton of bugs and things that need to be addressed if they are working on a whole service pack this early in the game. I would wait until the OS is really ready to be released out into the wild before I’d actually go out buy a copy of it and upgrade. I actually have 2 fully legitimate copies of Vista Ultimate lying around collecting dust right now; I refuse to upgrade my desktop to Vista at this point. It still seems like I’m beta testing with the weird problems I’m running into. When it comes to buying a new PC that happens to be preloaded with Vista, obviously it’s going to be un-avoidable but at least you won’t run experience the driver problems like I’ve seen with people upgrading.

If you’re running Vista right now and you’re interested in the newly released patches I mentioned earlier, they haven’t been released to Windows Update just yet, but you can find more information about them and the download links in This Ars Technica Article.