I started using Vista 32bit Edition on my desktop computer at launch for about three months and was very disappointed by the driver support from Nvidia.  My Nvidia 7900GTX SLI setup worked fine in XP but with Vista my machine would start displaying artifacts after the machine had been running for a day or two.

I took a break from Vista and returned to XP for another couple months until late 2007 when I received a free copy of Windows Vista 64 bit Edition from my Microsoft Action Pack.   I bit the bullet and installed the 64 bit build, interestingly things have been improved vastly and I am fairly impressed by this version of Vista.  While Vista is still slow in comparison to XP for file transfers and boot speeds I have noticed Vista is faster when resuming idle applications than XP was.

My experiences with Windows Vista has also brought up some truley unique bugs, after installing a copy of Atari Arcade Classics with Starforce protection.  Afterward I was unable to boot and was forced to do a system restore that led to all sorts of problems, inevitably I had to reformat my computer to recover from that disaster.

On a more regular basis though I am confronted by an unknown set of bugs that tend to lock up my machine on me more often than XP did.  One such problem seems laughable considering it even exists in a modern operating system.  If I have an application that I delete or move to the recycling bin without removing a shortcut to that application I find that even clicking on that orphan shortcut causes explorer to crash for me.  Keep in mind this is 2008 and Windows Vista doesn’t have a great reputation as it is.

Posted on August 12th, 2008 by Furious Citizen
Filed under: Microsoft, Technology