When Vista first came out I jumped on-board and decided to give it a try. I bought the Ultimate edition just because it sounded the best, and installed it. After fighting the OS to make it do what it is meant to do out of the box, I decided to go back to XP. I put the problems down to early bugs.

Six month later Vista SP1 is released and I decided to really give vista a try a second time. The install went a bit easier because I remembered most of the tricks I had used before. This time however I was in for the long haul and was determined to make things work the best I could. This decision ended up causing me a lot of headaches.

I am going to go over some of the issues I encountered when getting this to work, some are small and others are show stoppers.

Sound Mixer: I was excited by the idea of having independent controls for each application. It sounded like a nice new feature. However I attempted to increase the volume of my music application, and accidentally went above the master volumes level. For some reason the all the volume levels snapped to 100%, nearly destroying my headphones and my ears. So I never played with that feature again.

Fonts: The overall appearance of Vista was touted as the main improvement over XP. But the most important part of the display looked terrible. The fonts in Vista looks fat and blurry and had a slight green cast in the anti-aliased parts of the font. I tweaked Clear Type, turned it off, changed the screen DPI, nothing helped. With each change it just looked ugly in a different way. With clear type off the fonts look as bad as I have ever seen going all the way back to the Amiga days.

PDF Printing: Adobe Acrobat 8 Pro is a everyday application for me now, and I am constantly using the PDF print driver. Out of the box the PDF printer does not work at all, I had to update Acrobat, and go searching for a hot fix on Microsofts site. Eventually I got it working.

I thought it might be more an Adobe problem, but the PDF printer for Quickbooks has even more problem.

Applications Support: Quickbooks 2008 would crash whenever I tried to use the built in "E-Mail Invoice" functionality. I had to use Outlook Express to send all invoices. Also I could not print any invoices, or save them as PDF files because of the PDF Printing problem. The fix for that involved adding new print ports, and drivers.

Speed: Windows Vista just seems to be bloated and slow. My current XP install boots in under 20 seconds, and pretty much ready to use in 30 seconds. Vista takes a good 40 seconds to boot, then the hard drive is still going nuts after a minute. That's with indexing, and system restore off. Even when the system is up and running everything just feels a little slower.

These were the main problems I encountered. But there were many small bugs that alone are not a big deal, but when combined drive me nuts. Things that are well known problems like "Cancel or Allow" dialogs, drivers, etc.

What I am Looking For: To be honest I think for Microsoft to have a future they need to go back to basics. Just make a really solid simple system, with no bells and whistles. Just a Kernel, a file system, etc. All I want to have installed are basic apps like calculator, and notepad.

Then have all the other bullshit like voice commands, five versions of .NET, Internet Explorer, be optional extras which you install after.

I do not see this happening in Windows 7. So maybe on my next major hardware upgrade I will look into Mac. But my perfect setup would be Linux and Adobe CS4 on it. A man can dream anyway.