This post is aimed to those who are thinking about upgrading their OS to Vista. I know it is a bit late, but its makes my opinion more weighted as I had plenty of time to evaluate it. I acknowledge that there may be lot of happy users that do not have any problems with it, so consider my experience like a worst one, but the one that may happen with you.
First of all, I'm an early adopter. I always hasten to see new products, even if I realize that it can break my system. This means that I ready to sacrifice some stability in the name of new features.
So did me when I installed Beta 2 of Vista on my home laptop. And that did not stop me to install release version of Vista, when it came out, on my work machine. So what did I end up with?
- Expectations that most software that does not work on Vista is updated to work with it
- Expectations that my OS (release version) works that stable as previous version of it.
That both expectations are funny by themselves, but those of a typical user of OS, I believe. So what we end up with after 11 months after Vista release?
- No enough drivers still! When you are going to install some new device, it turns our there is no drivers for it. Okay, the situation becomes better every day, but be ready to that you just CANNOT use some of your hardware. It is ought to notice, however, that when there are drivers, Vista does it very smooth to install them.
- Vista that was installed on my work PC became so unstable so I was not able to work. Windows explorer consumed all CPU resources when I ever clicked on toolbar. I admit there are tremendous possible causes to that, but, based on my experience, that happened only with Vista.
- Visual Studio has just closed sometimes. That was very pity, especially when I was in a middle of something.
- IIS had crashed on unexpected shutdown. There was electricity strike and my IIS did not outlive it. So I had to use IIS on other machine for several months. I just was not able to repair it anyhow I tried.
- My sound card was not performing well on Vista. It just stopped working sometimes, and the only was to reset the machine.
- On my home PC I have to repair network connection each time PC was waked up.
- Some applications just was not able to run on Vista
When your PC starts performing bad it is an only way to reinstall OS on it sometimes. That is the favorite answer of our network administrator to a tight problem – "you have to reinstall Windows". And that happened with me too quickly. I've downgraded to XP on my home laptop first, and that was RELIEF. I did not thought it will so good to return to XP, really. Machine became much more stable and faster. So, I did the same for my work PC, and now I'm happy with Windows Server 2003 on it.
What features I miss now
Quick boot time. Yes it really boots fairly quickly and when you log in it is not stalled by launching all your start up applications, but does it in background. On XP you should just wait.
Pictures rotation. Unexpectedly I found that my new camera + vista can rotate photo as it should be. I was surprised a much. That is really great feature and I really miss it now.
Screenshots. There is handy application that comes with Vista called Sniping Tool. I have been using it.
THAT IS ALL. I have used to side bar, but there is Google counterpart that can be run on XP. Window search that is built-in Vista also can be replaced by Google search.
Now when I look back I realize that it was bad experience. Yes, Vista looks good, but it performs worse than XP and no so stable. So I do not suggest upgrading to Vista, unless you have very simple PC config and is not rely on it much.