This isn’t a blog entry where I’m going to analyze the technical differences between the two operating systems or give a list of pros and cons why you should or shouldn’t run Windows Vista. What I am to do here is catalog MY experience with Windows Vista and MY reasons why I’ve decided to return to running Windows XP.

Well, I should actually say I:

“[...]decided to upgrade to an older, more familiar experience.”

Last December I purchased a Dell 9200 desktop. Decent specs:

• Intel Core 2 Duo 6400
• 4GB DDR2-800
• 2x SATA Drives (WD 300GB, Seagate 750GB)
• XFX GeForce 8800GTX

I decided to run Vista Ultimate edition because, well, because I wanted the Ultimate Edition Who wants second best, right?

Anyways, things took some getting used to and it took nVidia a while to release some STABLE video drivers for the 8xxx series that supported DirectX 10. Once they got their shit in line my system was fairly stable during gaming. While running Vista I played several DX10 games as well as some non-DirectX10 games such as Guild Wars.

Overall, I didn’t find Vista unstable. To the contrary, I never had a major crash while running it. So kudos to Microsoft and their WHQL program for checking drivers and making sure they won’t threaten a systems stability.

I think the tide started to turn in the favor of Windows XP while working on development projects. The laptop my company provided me came with XP already installed and our company VPN client only worked with XP. So it was only natural that when at home, even when just fiddling away on the internet, I’d be using my company laptop. Whenever I’d use my desktop, it would feel like I was using someone else’s computer.

So after living with Vista for a year, I decided this weekend to switch back to XP so my personal computer and work environment would match up in case of emergency.

I can say that after using XP on the same machine that I’ve been running Vista on for a year, that XP is way, way faster and is a more pleasurable user experience than Vista. Basically, I feel like Windows Vista is an OS with training wheels you just can’t take off. It’s protecting the computer user “AT ALL COSTS!” Pop up confirmation Windows, IE7 being anal retentive, being locked out from certain folders on my computer (like trying to save a file to the root directory on C: in a program I forgot to start as Administrator).

One thing I’ve defiantly noticed is that file browsing is amazingly fast. I have several folders on my local computer as well as my NAS that have several thousand files and folders. XP seems to handle these folders in Windows Exporer without any slowness, unlike what I encountered with Vista.

So where do I stand on XP vs. Vista? I think you have to look back to the first year Windows XP was released. There was a lot of push back from the professional community because it was new and handled things a little differently than Windows 2000. In fact, a lot of companies didn’t even consider running Windows XP until AFTER Service Pack 2 was released (which was three years after the release of XP).

Now take that, and compare it to Windows Vista where the differences between XP and Vista are far, far greater than that of 2K vs. XP. I think adoption of Vista in a professional environment will be slow, if at all.

In the end, I believe Vista is a great OS for the beginner to novice home user. It protects them from any mistake they may make (by running a Trojan, visiting a malicious site, etc., etc.) . For the advanced users, I think they’re going to end up sticking with XP.

Personally, I don’t need the extra security enhancements Vista has to offer. In my fifteen years of computer use, I’ve never had to install a firewall, virus scanner or use a Spyware cleanup tool. I’ve somehow avoided these nuisances by exercising common sense. As for DirectX 10? Well, when there’s a compelling reason to run it (other than “because”), I’ll take a look at it again. So far the performance comparisons ran by the guys over at HardOCP have shown negligible performance gains, and in some cases, even slowness when running DirectX10 vs. DirectX9.

I’m curious to hear everyone else’s thoughts