Upgraded to XP Pro

I spent this weekend upgrading my new Thinkpad T60p laptop to Windows XP SP2. At least that's how it felt.

When I started my new job at CoreStreet, I insisted on building a machine that could fully handle the full weight of Vista. We're talking about a laptop equipped with a Dual Core 2.33 Ghz 3GB RAM 100 GB hard drive and 512 MB ATI Fire GL graphics adapter. If there's a laptop out there that's Vista ready, this is it.

Let me start by saying, that I am a Microsoft developer to the core. I've been developing solutions using Microsoft tools since 1990. I am currently a MCT and a MCSD .NET. I drank the Kool-Aid a long long time ago. So, when a good friend of mine at Microsoft told me he got nearly the identical laptop, and that HE was running Vista and it was "awesome," I just had to have it. I had read a lot about Vista and seen plenty of demos. I primarily use my Operating System as a launching point for my Virtual Machines. I don't put the full stress of development on the base OS - that happens on my development images - typically Windows 2003 Server. I use VMWare Workstation 6.0 for my virtual tasks - due to Microsoft's lack of USB support in Virtual PC. I figured the people having problems with Vista, were the same people that try to run every new piece of software on the market and fill their system tray with tons and tons of utilities - that's a recipe for disaster and one that I don't follow.

When I arrived at CoreStreet, our IT manager handed me the laptop, kind of chuckled and said - well, it's already bluescreened 2 times on me. Heh... umm... not good, but who knows what he was doing. I was anxious to get started with Vista, booted it up and waited. And waited. And waited. Wow. Brand new laptop and the boot time was much longer than my 3 year old desktop running XP. Now, I can't blame all of the boot time on Vista. IBM certainly is to blame as well. They put every piece of management software known to man on the machine. How annoying.

Speaking of annoying - the user account control feature of Vista has got to be one of the most annoying "features" ever. I quickly googled how to shut it off, and within a few minutes, it was gone.

As annoying as all the IBM pre-installed junkware was, it wasn't a showstopper. I could live with it. I then proceeded to install the few bits of software that I needed - VMWare Workstation and the Cisco VPN client. Uh oh... strike one. The company only owned version 5.5 of VMWare Workstation. Not Vista compatible. A trip to VMWare's website informed me that version 6 had just been released and it was compatible with Vista. Time to pull out the old credit card. No big deal, installed the new version of VMWare Workstation, upgraded my virtual machines and I was up and running.

Next step, the Cisco VPN. Again, same deal. New version of the VPN client was available, compatible with Vista. Installed. No luck. Ugh. Since I was new at the company, I really didn't need the VPN immediately, so I left it to our IT guy to look into the problem.

I also had problems with two other pieces of software that really need to reside on the host OS - Easy Media Creator and TheaterTek DVD.

I managed to get up and running fairly quickly. I could read docs and e-mail, which is all that mattered on my first day. That night, I brought the laptop home and connected to my home wireless network. Cool, seemed to work OK. After about 10 minutes, the wireless network disconnected. Within 10 seconds it reconnected. Hmm... no big deal, probably just some interference. Ten minutes later, same thing. Ugh. All night I dealt with it going offline/online.

I began my hunt for updated drivers and found that the laptop was completely out of date with its drivers. Funny, here was a brand new laptop and there were new versions of pretty much every driver. I began the process of downloading every new driver and methodically updating all my drivers and testing after each update.

Once I had the drivers updated, things seemed to get better. I believe the new power management driver along with the new wireless driver fixed my problem. I was then able to connect to the wireless network without interruption, well, almost. Occasionally, my wireless connection would drop out and the only way to reconnect would be to disable and re-enable the wireless adapter.

My big shock with Vista came the next day when I went to copy a fairly large file from a server on the company network. It was a 4 GB file. Should have taken a few minutes. Vista took forever to get going with the file and then calculated that it would take over 2 hours! WHAT??? Surely, this must be a bug? I did some googling around and found some fixes to make the copies start faster, but the actual network copies NEVER got better. I tried the same file on a Windows XP virtual machine running under VMWare - under 10 minutes.

I could go on with my Vista experience, but it doesn't get any better. Blue screens when docking/undocking; extremely slow standby/wakeup; flashing video when docked; incompatible devices; constant hunting for new drivers (often beta). You get the picture. All this for an OS with a really cool looking interface. umm. ok, great. But, could I run anything new? Could I run anything that I couldn't run under XP? Since I'm not a PC gamer, DirectX 10 didn't matter at all, so the answer was, no.

All these hassles were for more glitz and Windows Sidebar. Wow. So, after 3 months of living (suffering) with Vista, I gave up. I tried. I really tried to like Vista. In the end it feels like Windows ME all over again. I formatted my drive, installed XP and now my machine is fast, stable and runs everything I need.

Take it from me, if you are a business user and need to be productive with your computer, stick with XP.