I started using Windows Vista back when the RTM was first released to the developer community. This was the final release version of Vista and, while I resisted earlier Beta versions, I thought that using the final release would be relatively stable. I installed it on a relatively new Dell Dimension 9150 box with 4Gb of Ram.
I loved Vista at first, it was a little slower than XP and I had to really do some searching for drivers, but I was on the cutting edge. I installed it on a laptop I was using for a contract at the time and impressed everyone with my cool new interface.
Eventually, my desktop PC got slower and slower. It performed terribly. I spent hours looking at start-up processes and background processes that kept running. I think I spent several days looking at the Windows search background indexing alone. The laptop had all kinds of problems, too. My desktop started taking 10-15 minutes to boot. I spent hours on the web looking for solution.
My PC problems had the effect of causing me to hate computers in general. It took so long to load Visual Studio. I turned off all background instances of SQL Server and MySQL. I even started to think about abandoning software development all together. Too many sleepless nights started to cloud my judgment. My PC was unusable, and I had 4Gb of RAM! I had been using Vista for over a year.
I started using Ubuntu on my laptop. My contract was over and all I wanted was to use the laptop to check email and surf. I was amazed with how fast it was. I was determined to become a Linux guy! After nearly ten years as a VB and C# developer, I was going to go back to PHP.
But Ubuntu didn’t help me like I thought it would. I found the most simple things to have a huge learning curve involved. Now, I could learn how to do things like set up dns entries for web testing, etc, but I was frustrated with having to learn a new thing for everything I wanted to do. Also, if I stepped into another contract, I didn’t want to be that guy who keeps saying “I know how to do it on Linux, but Windows? I don’t know.” Besides, I still had to keep my Vista desktop intact to I still had all of my Outlook contacts, Excel (xlsx) files that didn’t open in OpenOffice, etc.
Then Visual Studio 2008 release candidate was released. I really wanted to try it out. So I set up a partition on the laptop and installed XP. This was like a breath of fresh air. All of my Windows apps worked like a dream. Windows booted quickly. All devices worked. When I opened Outlook 2007, it just opened–it didn’t pop up two minutes later after I forgot I clicked on the shortcut.
All of the people I worked with who criticised me for installing Vista too early, who told me to wait for SP1–they were right. In fact, I think SP1 might still be too early.
I’m back on XP. I’ll stay here for the next few years, I think. There are no Vista-only apps out there that I know of. If you are thinking about upgrading, even as late as January 2008, I would recommend sticking with XP.
Yep, as I’ve argued with many a user (usually trying to remotely log in to their corporate network and failing miserably), unless the new OS has some fantastic new feature that helps them do their job better, they’re best off sticking with the older operating system.
When they say they want to stick with the new OS “just because” it’s newer and more exciting, I will tell them then to put on some pants and come to work because I’ve got more productive things to do with my time than spend time researching compatibility between a new OS and older applications that have no idea what this new OS is doing.
I only upgraded to XP from W2K because it happened to be on the new laptop I bought. Linda’s laptop has Vista on it and I can’t say there’s anything about it that wants me to upgrade my other PCs. The only thing that sticks in my mind about Vista is that there are no printer drivers available that allows printing to my ancient three-year old printer.
Like the new blog format!