Friday I got home from work, popped DBAN in my desktop PC, and wiped out my primary OS hard drive, in which my primary OS was Windows Vista. It felt good.

I’ve been running Vista as my primary OS since January. It has been nothing but a headache. Several times I’ve contemplated removing it and re-installing XP. I talked myself out of it. “Give it time… it’s a new OS”, I kept reassuring myself.

Everything was slower. Why? Nice (but useless) visual effects? I enjoyed the new theme at first, and I guess I convinced myself it was worth the sacrifice in speed. As time went on, the newness wore off, and I found myself growing increasingly irritated with waiting at least twice as long for an application to open. As well as having a few of my XP compatible applications not work.

My desktop PC is decent: * AMD Athlon X2 4400 Toledo * Asus A8N-SLI Delux Motherboard * 2GB Corsair XMS DDR 400 SDRAM * EVGA GeForce 7600GT 128MB GDDR3 * WD 160GB 10K RPM Raptor (Main OS HD) * Other goodies that don’t affect performance.

The Vista Performance Rating tool gave it a 5. It sure didn’t feel like a 5. I gave SuperFetch plenty of time to “get to know me”. I saw some improvement in how applications launched over time, but I still wasn’t impressed.

I think the straw that finally broke the camels back came when I read of the improvements that would come with SP1. First, how can you work on an OS for 5 years, then come out with a Service Pack a year after it’s release? That’s a marketing scheme if I ever saw one. Everyone knows what a Service Pack is, and how they supposedly make everything better. True, SP2 for XP did make things better. I think Microsoft is playing that angle a little too hard.

Anyway, I downloaded the “speed fixes” that were supposed to come with SP1 for Vista: 1. Performance Update 2. Compatibility Update

I installed both and tried them out for 2 months. I was impressed some at first, but again it wore off.

Now that I have XP installed with all major updates, and have the same functionality as Vista with Google Desktop and Picasa, I know I will never go back to Vista again. I have a triple boot of XP, Ubuntu, and openSuSE 10.2 x64 up and running now. The next computer I buy will be a Mac.