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Farewell Vista, Hello XP
How to make the switch back and
deal with the
gnarly problem of transferring your Vista e-mail, contacts, and user
data back to the old standby operating system.
After exploring
Windows Vista for about six months on my test-bed PC, I
decided two
months ago that, along with upgrading the motherboard and CPU in my
main work machine, I'd "upgrade" to Microsoft's latest operating system.
Vista's
new navigation features had slowly grown on me, though I hadn't tried
to work daily with the OS. Vista's appearance has it all over
standard
XP, and there are tons of usability features that beckon--after you
turn off the incredibly annoying User Account Control that constantly
bugs you when you want to install programs or tweak things.
For
example, I love being able to shut down with one click; I like the junk
filtering in Windows Mail (Vista's upgraded version of Outlook
Express); and I appreciate the way I can easily drag User
folders
(formerly My Documents) to a new location so I can consolidate them
with other data that I regularly back up.
Annoyances Drive Me Backwards
Unfortunately, small time-wasting annoyances in Vista cropped
up almost immediately. Auto-complete of e-mail addresses in Windows
Mail works only with the 29 most recently used contacts (I have well
over a thousand), and overall the program is slow. The Search Indexer
had an irritating tendency to start when I watched an HD DVD,
and despite of the absence of multimedia files in a folder,
most folders showed useless columns for Artists, Tags, and Ratings. I
must have wasted an hour changing them to Size and Date Modified
headings--and then the folder would sometimes magically change from
detail view to icon view. To be fair, that last part is a holdover bug
from XP, but all I've described was just the tip of the iceberg.
As irksome as these things were, I considered them livable. It
was only when I discovered that my sound card's drivers for ASIO (a
high-performance audio standard for recording musical instruments and
vocals) didn't work well under Vista that the balance tipped
irretrievably towards "downgrading" to XP.
The beta ASIO drivers may have been spotty, it may have been a
system configuration problem, it may have been me--Vista is actually
reputed to be much better for Pro audio--but I decided that it was time
to revert to good old stable XP with its mature driver support.
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