For instance, in Vista's Disk Management console snap-in, you can now shrink and expand partitions (whereas in XP, you had to use Parted Magic or a similar tool, or reformat altogether). The Disk Cleanup tool is improved very much.
How often do you need to resize partitions? Sure, it's an advantage that you can do it, but just how much "value" does this add? For me, it would be none... I don't trust partition resizes... there's potential for losing a lot of data if something goes wrong
The new start menu in Vista is nice enough, but since I use FARR, I hardly ever use the menu.
Visual tweaks? Ugh. I hate the Aero look of Vista. Unfortunately, it's all-or-nothing - you can't get Aero acceleration with the classic theme, how mindbogglingly silly design is that? And Microsoft obviously doesn't support custom themes unless they're signed by MS, so you have to resort to hacks to get a different look.
The sleep mode in vista totally obliterates XP's wannabe Stand By mode (major plus for mobile users).
How so?
The wifi, you can not beat the wifi manager on Vista. It just works.
Heh. The amount of problems I've had with Vista wi-fi, ugh. And the diagnostics were useless - basically "uh oh, didn't work" shit. Was reaaaally obvious that I had to drop to an administrative-rights cmd.exe shell and use a cryptic netsh commandline to disable "auto-tuning", oh yes. With XP, my experience has been that things just
worked, no need for broken diagnostics in the first place.
Too bad DX10 isn't going to be ported to XP (and don't give me crap about "it's new architecture and can't be done" yadda yadda, it's perfectly doable), so eventually I'll probably have to go Vista (or the next version, anyway) if I want to play games. But as it is now, not many games support/require DX10, and the ones that have it optional don't get that much advantage from it anyway.
Note that this wasn't meant as a diss, if you're happy with Vista, that's fine and good. Just wanted to say that I don't particularly like it, and don't see much advantage in it over XP... it does have some base features that are better, but who runs a base OS with no extras? And, for me, it has so many little annoyances that the overall experience is worse than XP. I'd sure love having the enhanced prefetch, prioritized I/O and transactional NTFS, but meh.
I'm getting a laptop soon, so there's probably no way around Vista I guess - it's such a nightmare hunting for XP laptop drivers now
. So I guess it might be time to see how many annoyances can be fixed with
vlite, and then give it a chance. But I have a suspicion that I'll end up hunting for XP drivers after all
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