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First off, I had the following system configuration when I tried Vista:

  • Chieftec LCX-01-B-B-SL
  • Seasonic SS-600HT
  • Intel D975XBX Bad Axe
  • Core 2 Duo E6300
  • Zalman CNPS 9500 LED
  • Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400
  • EVGA e-GeForce 8800GTX
  • 1 x WDC WD1500ADFD-00NLR0 (150GB Raptor as a system drive)
  • 2 x WDC WD2500YS-01SHB0 Matrix RAID (400GB strip, 32GB mirror)
  • Pioneer DVR-111DBK

As you can see my computer was built using high-quality components. It has been working for over a year without a single BSOD under Windows XP SP2.

Enter Windows Vista. I decided to try 32-bit version so I can experiment with DirectX 10 API and see if it can be usefull for my developer work.

So, I installed a trial version of Vista on my Raptor. After several reboots I finally got to install software. Already on the first note everything felt slower. Disk was trashing almost all the time, dozens of useless services were running and even the simplest operations like deleting files were slow compared to Windows XP.

My first thought was to wait for the things to settle down, so I "used" it for a while, tried to play a game, it worked. Finally I figured out that for any serious work I need more RAM. That is exactly when I concluded that one should stay away from 32-bit Vista because adding more RAM was pointless if the system couldn't use it just like the venerable 32-bit Windows XP couldn't.

Since I had some large datasets and my processing application needed to be able to use more RAM I decided to give 64-bit version a try.

This time, I installed 64-bit trial version of Vista along with all the latest drivers. It worked fine for a while. Raptor was mostly quiet, no disk trashing (obviously additional 2GB of RAM helped), system was responsive as it should be, I started installing applications and setting it to my liking and even got to writing an email in Outlook and then BANG!!! — it just froze!

Yeah, you read it right — it froze, no reboot, no BSOD, nothing, it just sat there frozen until I hit the Reset button. After reboot there was no error message except that it noticed unproper shutdown. No shit Sherlock?

I disabled unneccessary services, checked everything tried running Crysis demo and it worked, but after a while it froze again! Now I was seriously pissed off. I had to perform some tests of the code I written and I couldn't do it on an unreliable system. Less than 24 hours ago XP SP2 was working flawlessly on the same hardware so I instantly ruled out hardware problems. But what is the problem then?

I remembered to take a look at the Event Log and there was nothing unusual there at least first three times I checked. Then I saw dreaded machine check exception.

I really don't care if that was caused by a bad driver, or by the OS itself but that kind of instability is simply unforgivable for something that has been 5 years in development not to mention that it shares the same code base as the previous Windows versions which are reasonably stable by now.

If you are now thinking that perhaps my hardware is really broken, think again — I just installed Windows XP Professional x64 Edition SP2 which works just fine, just like 32-bit Windows XP SP2 did before I decided to mess with this abortion called Windows Vista.

Was there something I liked about Vista? Frankly: no. Everything (and I mean literally everything) has been moved around. Experienced Windows users like me have serious problems finding stuff in Vista. What's there to like if you were used to something being in the same place for more than 10 years through 5 versions of Windows (for example "Add/Remove Programs" icon in Control Panel) and now you have to hunt for it?

To add insult to an injury, menu bar has been banned from all applications save Notepad and Calculator. Whose bright idea that was? So much money wasted on usability testing with illiterate morons.

Guess what? There are visually impaired people among us, and they can't distinguish menu selection bar which differs from background color by approximately 1% in lightness. Not to mention that they do not like to stare at the Vista Aero a.k.a. lightbulb color sheme. Furthermore, UI which uses exclusively pictograms and hides other means of navigation is bound to fail with visually or otherwise impaired people or even different ethnic groups. For example, does a picture of an open letter envelope mean "Mark as read", or perhaps "Open this message", or even "Insert attachment"?

Such basic and yet grave faults come directly from a preacher of carefull user interface design and consistency. Five years of development and they have learned NOTHING! Microsoft has clearly lost its direction. Lets wait and see where the flow will bring them and in the meantime AVOID WINDOWS VISTA BE IT 32-BIT or 64-BIT VERSION LIKE THE PLAGUE! Don't say I didn't warn you.