Solipsistic Meanderings » Vista wins and wobbles

September 23, 2006

Vista wins and wobbles

Yes, I know, I was supposed to write this one about a fresh install of Vista but I was prevented from doing so by Vista itself :p The actual fresh install, which I did several days ago, went really fast. The fabled 20 minute install was (almost) true. The copying, extraction and installation took about 15-20 minutes but then there were several reboots while Vista did all of the other configuration and customization stuff and that took about half an hour or so. Still, it did feel much, much faster than an update install.

Most of the issues that I’d faced with my upgrade install of Vista were gone but there were new issues to replace them :p I could run Explorer fine now but I had to re-install most of the programs that I use again before I discovered that a couple of ones that are really important to me would not work correctly or would have issues. Then, FireFox started showing erratic behaviour – I lost bookmarks and settings and had to restore and then toolbar customizations and window positions would not be saved. I am not absolutely certain that this was all due to Windows Vista but I had enough troubles to make using Visa a bit of an issue.

Now don’t get me wrong, there are lots neat features to Vista that I really want. The alternate clocks are one thing – you can add two extra clocks so that when you hover your mouse pointer over the system clock, you can see the time at two other locations. I used to have to use a third-party application to do that in the past. Then there is the Vista start up, it starts up fast and feels very responsive – none of the sluggishness you experience with XP when you first start up and have all your start-up items starting at once :p

However, I had so many issues with Vista, that I was forced to go back to XP. And that was a story in itself because it took me about a day to get all the Vista stuff off my partition and to put XP back in :p Sure, I could have simply formatted the partition but I didn’t want to and so, most of that time was spent struggling with all the folders that Vista had added and setting the permissions on them back so that I could actually delete the folders. One thing Vista seems to do right is to set good security permissions – the bad part is that even the XP installer cannot overcome the security to overwrite existing Windows files :p Anyway, after a day of struggling, installing SP2 and then all the patches and so on, I’m back in XP. I still have my new Vista install on my machine but I’m not sure I will be booting into it anytime soon. Maybe when Vista goes gold and more of my apps actually work there …