Udo's Techblog

I'll "downgrade" to XP again. See, I already knew that (stupidly enough) all graphics cards need to use the same driver for a multihead setup to work under Vista. But if you're like me you perhaps foolishly thought that just popping in any two relatively new ATI cards is gonna work, you'll be in for a little surprise.

Windows Vista is a very slow system, it's constantly doing stuff that I don't know about and that, if I knew about it in the first place, wouldn't want to be done. The eye candy is nice, but that's the only thing making it hard to look back. Oh, and I won't miss the thousands of stupid system-modal security warnings; just as much as the constantly crashing Explorer. Yeah, and local HDD-to-HDD filecopy with speeds somewhere around 5 kBytes/second, never failed to amuse me.

Wouldn't it be truly nice if Vista wouldn't regularly display messages like "COM surrogate has stopped working properly", "Sir, I believe your installer died on you" when it in fact didn't and the always helpful "In order to make your work experience more enjoyable, Vista has decided to freeze all Explorer processes until you get back from the bathroom, make yourself a nice cup of coffee and watch the beautiful clouds outside for a while". Yes/No/Maybe/Cancel/Fuck-Off-and-Die?

Neither will I be sad to see Windows Media Player go, which did not work at all with any kind of video except WMV - I highly recommend Media Player Classic to any Vista users out there if you want something that remotely behaves like a media player, because it does esotheric stuff like playing media for example without crashing spectacularly.

By the way, now I know why even the cheapest Dell with Vista on it has a 240 GB hard disk drive: because the system just keeps on gobbling up those GBs, I have no idea where they do. Hopefully to a better place.

Speaking of hard disk space, you can't resize a Vista partition. If you try with an external tool, it'll just destroy all data on it. And Vista's own resizing tool gives you the option to decrease the size by like 1 GB, when the total free space is somewhere around 200 GB (and that's after defragmentation!). Oh, and apropos defrag: don't use it, it'll literally take days for one sweep to complete and it's still not gonna make the slightest difference.

And every so often, Vista decides to switch off Aero Glass, even if the CPUs are coincidentally not "idling" at 65% usage. That's the time, when the user has to close down random applications until the user interface returns to a normal state. Oh, and the switching from and to Glass freezes the computer for like ten seconds. Of course, you as a user (defined as: The Sucker) don't get the slightest control over any important UI settings. What a freaking brilliant concept.

Wow, what a rip off! Windows has somehow managed to get more annoying to use than Linux/KDE, and that's saying something!