Leaving Windows Vista behind — the return to Windows XP
After over a year of non-stop problems with vista I have returned to Windows XP on my home computer and plan to do so at work within the next week. I know we all complain about Microsoft, but in the case of Windows Vista it’s exceeding well earned.
I will start with my Wacom tablet. The first thing I noticed from day one was that it was not working properly. After installing the Wacoms drivers, Vista’s horrible pen drivers took over. Even once I figured out how to disable them, both my work computer and home computer never stopped showing up as a tablet PC. Then their was the issue of Vista ceasing to even recognize my Wacom device after locking the PC or going away for a bit. I would come back only to find that the mouse cursor would not move at all, the solution? Reboot or use the keyboard shortcuts!
Okay, so Wacom i devices are not that common, I should cut Vista some slack, and maybe I would if that wasn’t just the tip of the iceberg. There is the weirdness of logging in one morning watching it take an extremely long time (not unusual for Vista) because it has lost my user settings and is recreating my desktop from scratch! In frustration I powered off only to have it magically work the second time around. I had to use this power off trick several more times when this happened.
The problem I experienced the most of all, both at work and at home would happen my dialogue focus was lost. What do I mean by this? Well, when I clicked an okay, cancel, continue, etc. on whatever dialogue box was on the screen, Vista would lose focus of that window. I could not click on any buttons! The solution? Reboot of course.
These are just some of the major headaches I’ve had, but others have had problems too, just searching Windows Vista will get you page after page of angry users who can’t get printers to work, extremely long boot times, Office crashes and many more, the list goes on and on. Vista is a huge resource hog too, and I have a fairly fast laptop. I feel like I have just upgraded to a super computer. My start menu pops up instantly, browser tabs are instant, I can even multitask with speed again. I don’t get the constantly “Program not responding”. I should have done this a long time ago; the number of hours lost is probably quite high for me. I will never touch Vista again, lets hope the next Microsoft OS is better.
Another interesting stat to watch is the decline of Windows XP users on W3schools browser OS stats. Windows XP over the past two months seems to be gaining users? Maybe it’s just an anomaly.
ruffdeezy June 1, 2008 at 2:15 pm
I specifically got XP so that I could run it on my mac, I was tired of vists, maybe vista was one of the reasons I switched to mac.