I bought a Toshiba notebook with Vista Home Premium on it yesterday morning and am just waiting for the store to open so that I can return it... Actually, Vista itself I quite like and the hardware is magnificent but I just keep wishing I had XP Pro on it. I have a first generation centrino notebook (1.4 Ghz, 1 GB 266Mhz RAM with 279 programmes installed) running XP Pro and the performance differences between it and the Intel Core 2 Duo machine with 2GB 667 Mhz RAM that I bought are not great enough to justify having made the purchase. That coupled with the number of times that I had to reboot the new computer and watch either a Toshiba utility or a Windows utility configure my machine has left me with a permanent tick... Seriously, it took about an hour and a half to get to the point where I was looking at the desktop - what happened to the good old days when you bought a notebook and the only thing you had to wait to "do" was run it off the battery? Note that what concerns me about the boot time with the new machine is that this is after using it with only StarOffice, Webroot Spysweeper with Antivirus, and YourUninstaller 2006 installed and surfing the web and noodling around with the StarOffice suite (wanted to get a sense of how it handled multitasking with something other than notepad and the Office 2007 demo). So, it's got fewer than 50 apps installed and runs 28 processes after booting to the desktop. My older Centrino has 279 apps installed and is running 46 processses after booting to desktop and does so in roughly the same amount of time as does Vista.

The new machine is more comfortable multi-tasking but it doesn't boot any more quickly and I might as well get my money back and wait until I *have* to upgrade my hardware before doing so. I backup my harddrive obsessively, so configuring a new machine in an emergency will be only slightly more aggravating than setting up the current one. The attraction of this is that the longer I wait, the sexier the hardware is going to be (and hopefully Vista will be that much better at utilizing the resources on offer).

Incidentally, I still have a PIIIE notebook running Win2k Sp-4 and it's still more than capable - runs Office 2003 just as quickly as the centrino does on half the RAM (512MB 100Mhz).

Sorry for the rambling and incoherent post...

Guess what - fired up the Win2k machine after I posted above and the monitor is shot (looks like something dropped on it...). It works but there's a big, inky black spider web in the upper right hand corner extenging into the middle of the screen  I guess I'll have to keep my eyes peeled for a parts machine going cheap. Too bad - I feel like I've lost an old friend.

Guess what - fired up the Win2k machine after I posted above and the monitor is shot (looks like something dropped on it...). It works but there's a big, inky black spider web in the upper right hand corner extenging into the middle of the screen

Eek! 

On the off chance... this is a tube monitor, right?  Does it have a degauss button?

Sometimes a strong magnetic field in close proximity will cause CRTs to display large black purplish bruises on one or another edge.  Degaussing it would be a free fix, if it works.

If you live in the Atlanta area, I have two ancient but still working 21" CRT monitors, just taking up space in my server room.  Yours for the takin'.

On the off chance... this is a tube monitor, right?  Does it have a degauss button?

Sometimes a strong magnetic field in close proximity will cause CRTs to display large black purplish bruises on one or another edge.  Degaussing it would be a free fix, if it works.

Tube monitors (the last few I had before going TFT) tended to de-gauss by themselves on power-on, so a de-gauss button probably wouldn't have helped much... there's some stronger de/re-whatever-magnetizing devices that can be used in the severe cases, my mum got our TV fixed back several years ago with one... that was back when I thought it was fun to play with magnets and went all "ooooh, the news reporter is purple ".

Tube monitors (the last few I had before going TFT) tended to de-gauss by themselves on power-on...

Ah!  Mystery solved, albeit 5+ years late.

I once had this 20" tube monitor, big as a beach-ball.  Upon power-on it would make this god-awful mmmmmmmmMMMMMMMMMMM (wait for it) GABUNG!!!  noise.  That was probably its auto-degausser, but at the time I thought it was about to kill me.

Another clue I should have noticed: All my paperclips would fly up out of the desk drawer and attach themselves to the glass.

XP for me!!  I bought my first new computer in six years in 2006 just to be sure that I would not have to be saddled with Vista.  I had been happily using Win98 but the threat of built-in DRM and the enormous overhead that it requires spurred me into action.  The video drivers for video cards have become gigantic - one set of drivers for an nVidia board was as large as the NT 4.0 o/s.  It is no wonder that the Vista systems are slow with that kind of overhead.  The Vista components are now written in "modules".  There are 6 (I think) video modules, of which 4 are concerned with security.  The size of the o/s is another problem.  There is no way that the o/s code can be grown by a factor of eight without a performance hit.  As for the security of the o/s, it is a bit different from XP, so it will take a few months for the hackers to catch up.  From my recent reading, all that it means is that rootkits will be written in User mode rather than Kernel mode to circumvent the User Account Management feature.  All this wonderfulness is costing us money.  When there is a huge coding overhead for Vista drivers, hardware manufacturers will add that to the price of new hardware.  In addition, because of the performance hits, we will have to buy better hardware to enjoy the same performance.  Add this to the generally user-unfriendly approach of Microsoft - limited installs of the software you have actually paid good money for - activation on only one machine, ever, meaning that if you upgrade your hardware, your o/s may no longer work - and you can count me as a no for Vista, and a vote for XP only because there is not a better choice without having to learn Linux.  Every time I think about Vista, I come back to Linux.  I may go there yet.

Number of Voters:  1238
First Vote    :  Tuesday, 29 January 2008 21:48
Last Vote :  Thursday, 05 June 2008 11:37

2k/XP: 62.8 %
Vista: 29.3 %

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I run Vista for the last 18 Month, but I'm going to switch back to XP. Vista is nice, but in my opinion XP "feels" better. I haven't had problems with Vista, but it feels weird - like something is not matching... Cant describe what it is