I tried Windows Vista for a week, loved the new Explorer, loved the new visuals and animations, hated the crashes and Explorer would lock up a lot.

A while back, a few bloggers talked about how much faster and better Windows Server 2008 was than Windows Vista; so I figured I would give Server 2008 a shot.  A quick Google search turned up www.Win2008Workstation.com. I followed the guides on that site, and I now have a desktop which looks like Vista, but performs much faster, and I get MUCH fewer lockups of Windows Explorer.

I did have to set DEP to "Essential Windows programs and services only" otherwise some games and programs wouldn't install.  But other than that, its been a great experience! Way to go Windows Server 2008 team!

So in my last post, I ranted (well, tried to, but my rant got wiped out when Vista crashed) about what I didn't like about Vista.  Now I'll rant about what I do like about Vista.

Task Manager and Resource Monitor

Both the Task Manager and the Resource Monitor (formally performance monitor) on Vista received a much needed revamp.  The fact that task man now allows you to go to one place and see all your running programs and services, and even allows you to start/stop services from within the task man is a huge improvement.  And with perfmon, being about to see at a glance what is going on with your CPU, disk, network and memory is awesome!  While the old perfmon was OK, the fact that you had to 1) add all those things separately and then try to discern one from another because they were all overlayed on one graph was kind of a pain.

Animations / Eye Candy

In ALL previous version of Microsoft Windows, the first thing I would do is turn off ALL the animations, I always found them to be annoying, distracting, and a waste of my time.  But I've found the animations and eye candy with Vista to actually enhance the experience of using the OS.

Start Menu

The start menu in all previous versions of Microsoft Windows was always a jumbled mess of applications, and God forbid you had more than a dozen or so applications installed, your start menu would become just unwieldy.  I used to organize all my programs by type, Internet, Utilities, Audio & Video, and Development to try and tame the mess that was the start menu.  Now, it really doesn't matter how big a mess it becomes, the fact that I can press the Win key and start typing makes the whole thing more manageable, and a heck of a lot easier to use.

Programs and Features

The abomination that was formally Add/Remove Programs has finally been fixed!  As a developer, with all the software I had to have installed, it would take several minutes for the Add/Remove Programs dialog to come up and populate. Now, it pops up right away, and starts populating.  I haven't had it take more than 10-15 seconds for it to fully populate with all my programs!  And, it even tells me down at the bottom that I have 101 programs installed, for a total of 9.57 GB of space.  Pretty handy. That fact that I can sort all my installed programs by size is really nice as well.

Overall

Overall, when I can get Windows Vista to not lockup, I'm happy with it.  If things continue the way they have been today, I think I'll stick with Windows Vista.  I can say though, that game performance is pretty crappy.  I'm getting a solid 10-15 frames per second less in Half Life 2 :(

I was 3 or 4 paragraphs into what was going to be a very long rant about Windows Vista.  About how some programs were crashing and other programs were losing there settings under Vista, and wouldn't you know it, I was trying to move some files around and Vista locks up.  Not a hard lock (nothing works), but explorer got wedged, and then one by one every process on the laptop got wedged.  I couldn't even use taskman to kill off the offending processes.

If things don't improve dramaticly for me this weekend, then I'm either going back to XP, or switching to Server 2008.

I really wanted to like Vista, but right now, I'm inclined to agree with everyone else out there that Vista sucks