My Vista experience so far has been miserable. I have seen more bluescreens in 5 days running Vista than in 5 years running WinXP. I set up Vista 64bit on my PC and Vista 32bit on my father's new office PC (32bit because there are no 64bit drivers for the scanner and the WiFi NIC, woot).
Now, not all of this crap is neccessarily Vista's fault but the fact is, I had none of these problem running WindowsXP. So here we go:
- UAC is infuriatingly annoying and it's such a fucking lame attempt to shift responsibility for Vista's lack of a coherent security architecture to the user.
- Windows Defender bogs down the system so severly that it's simply not an option to use it. What an utter piece of shit. Switching it off improves Vista and application start up times significantly and it also gets rid of really odd errors that have been driving me insane, like
nHancer giving an error message because the application starts up faster than the associated service.
- There is no Vista 64 compatible version of Avira's AntiVir, so I have to use AVAST!, which sucks.
- absolutely no way to run DOS programs (don't ask) in fullscreen mode (or at all using Vista 64).
- The Sidebar is worthless. 99% of the gadgets suck, there aren't a lot of them to begin with and most of them do the same stuff. How many fugly SEARCH EBAY! gadgets does a man need? Plus, it takes forever to start up.
- IE7 doesn't run stable under Vista. It crashes frequently. I'm not the only person with that problem, in fact, it's so widespread that it's used by the makers of the IE7Pro add-on to advertise their crash recovery feature. Pathetic.
- The driver signature thing sucks and, if you installed the the
recently released update that supposedly gets rid of all the GPU problems and nvlddmkm.sys crashes (hint: it doesn't) that make Vista 64 useless as a gaming platform, you can't even switch it off anymore. YAY, no more ATITool and Rivatuner for j00!
- Vista doesn't wake up from hibernate mode on either PC (never had any problems with this under XP)
- I use XMPlay for my MP3s and 2 out of 3 times when I double-click on a mp3 I get a "file not found" error... I have to do it several times until the file is recognized. This is especially annoying when downloading a mp3 and trying to run it from the browsers "download complete" dialogue box.
- Slow speed when copying files, less than 50% of WinXP. I wonder how that severe bug made it into the RMT version. Copying files takes fucking forever. There is a
new patch that reduces the problem to a certain extend.
- I found it virtually impossible to copy files over the wireless network at an acceptable speed, no such problem on my XP laptop that sits right next to my desktop and actually has worse signal quality.
- The weird file system. So now you can add a fuckton of meta data to files, which no one will ever do, so there's essentially a ton of empty columns in Windows Explorer. You can do shit like giving files a 5-star rating, for whatever reason. I had to spend hours configuring Windows Explorer to make it reasonable to look at. And you have to do it for every "type" of directory over again.
- Most applications under Vista, for some reason, don't memorize the last location where you saved a file, so almost every file dialogue starts off in the default user/documents directory which frequently drives me into apoplectic rage.
- Horrendous Nvidia driver issues (the constant nvlddmkm.sys crashes with G80 cards) and it's not yet clear whether it's a Nvidia or Vista problem. On the one hand, Nvidia has been releasing drivers that supposedly fix this problem for months now (it never actually worked), on the other hand we now have a MS patch that supposedly fixes the problem (see above, doesn't work either). Other NVidia driver problems include issues with TV output, flat panel scaling (can't change it) and video quality issues
- The aforementioned video quality issues took days for me to work out. Apparently, the NVidia's Vista drivers have a scaling problem when VRM 7/9 is used as output renderer. Essentially, what you get is horrid aliasing and this problem has been around forever.
Unless you're using Microsoft's bloated Windows Media Player (which uses EVR as default renderer), you have to use a media player that allows you to manually switch the output renderer to EVR or Haali's. It took me days to figure that one out. This doesn't work for all media types, btw. RealMedia files and older Quicktime stuff is virtually unwatchable under Vista.
- There is no Nvidia driver tray icon under Vista.
- Vista makes extensive use of the virtual directory feature for language localization purposes... so things can get very confusing if you try to figure out where stuff actually ends up. I tried to reorganize my start menu by directly working on the start menu directory (of which there are apparently two, one for entries for all users and a uset specific one) and I somehow ended up with a half English, half German mongrel of a start menu. Why can't it be as straight forward as it was in WinXP?
I haven't done much gaming since I installed Vista, partly because of the frequent nvlddmkm.sys crashes.
- EVE Online reboots the PC with a blue screen if you use on-board sound. Worked fine with XP. It's not enough to disable on-board sound in Vista, you actually have to disable it in the BIOS. Sure, it's prolly as much EVE Online's fault as Vista's but the fact remains that I didn't have this problem under XP.
- Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. First of all, it's a nightmare to get it even to run under Vista in the first place and then there is a reproducable nvlddmkm.sys crash on Korriban, which is fucking odd because everything before and after that works.
- Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II always starts in windowed mode and has severe sound problems. Sometimes, dialogues with with no voice-overs skip so quickly that you can't read them (like in "fraction of a second" quick).
- Civilization IV crashes frequently in the late game, rarely did so under WinXP
- Do I even have to mention the noticably lower graphics performance of games under Vista?
Vista... man, it sucks. I want to listen to music with my favourite player application... *DING* FILE NOT FOUND. Hey, let's watch a video... nice aliasing right there. How about a game... great, yet another nvlddmkm.sys error. And hi2u, Mr. IE7 Crash.
I guess I can consider myself lucky that I don't run SLI or surround sound, neither of which would work properly.
But hey, at least it does look pretty and the Windows Explorer has a semi-useful search box, right? Installing Vista 64 has been a waste of time and money. If you're a gamer with a G80 card, you should avoid Windows Vista like rape.
It's like we're on different planets with this. I did have a few issues with Vista 32-bit (turned out to be old nForce 4 drivers not being updated), but 64-bit has been very stable for me with G80 the last month or so. Tho I'll admit I haven't gamed with it yet.
