La vida con Vista

(Life with Vista)
My PC is an 8 year old box that I put together myself (because that is what I am good at) containing a P4 – 1.7Mhz processor, 640Mb of RAM, 60Gb Hard Drive and a 32Mb Video Card. This probably seems archaic to some, but it was well built and has served me so far. It originally had Windows 98 installed, then I reluctantly upgraded to Windows XP (Pro) and recently I tried MS Vista. Big mistake.

The Vista experiment on this PC lasted all of about 2 hours before I wiped it and went back to XP; it was so slow it was non-functional. Even though Microsoft says this PC falls within the usable parameters, it was far from it.

So I acquired a new PC to put Vista Business on – an HP with an Athlon 64 X2 processor, 2Gb of RAM, 400Gb Hard Drive and a 256Mb Video card. Should be a speed demon right? No. Loaded with Vista Business, it was no faster then my 8 year old box running XP.

I love a good puzzle, so instead of just wiping it and installing “Red Hat Enterprise 5”, I started to look for all the speed tweaks. Ya. Ok. Not. While MS Vista looks really cool, it is functionally retarded (and I mean that in the nicest way possible). Everything takes twice as long to get into, has extra security hoops and more check boxes than ever before.

So I started with the security and turned OFF that annoying “are you really, really sure you want to do that thing that you just clicked with the intention of actually doing something” message. This is also knows as “User Account control”. Turning this off seemed to make most of the system much faster right away. However, there are still the periodic delays when I open, well, anything. Many times when I open a folder, the mouse pointer turns into a green spiral that turns like a clock, obviously timing the opening of an event like the Hourglass used to do. I have to assume this has something to do with indexing files, but it often just stays there, for hours.

Don’t even get me started on the networking issues – I have a Red Hat server and a mixed bag of clients that are Win 98, Win XP, Linux and now Vista. Guess which one I have the most connection problems with. Once I made it through all the hoops to make the connection to the SMB share on my Linux server I thought it would be OK, but even though it is mapped and the credentials are saved, Vista still makes me log in to view files where it was automatic with ‘XP and transparent in ’98. Most of my old remote access tools don’t work and Remote Desktop is a complete write-off.

So now what? XP is dead and Vista is the current standard OS from Microsoft, and any new software I build needs to support it, so I HAVE to make this puppy work… somehow…. I’ll dig in deeper and let you know how it turns out….