Keep Vista or roll back to Windows XP? That is the question

By Apr. 23, 2007, 5:00am PT 31 Comments

Vista_logo_2Xp_logoThe recent news that Dell is going to be offering Windows XP on 6 models of new PCs (again) wasn’t surprising to me.  Dell reportedly made the policy change in response to customer voting on their IdeaStorm website where customers can enter suggestions to the PC maker.  Dell had only been offering Vista on new PCs since it was released to OEMs earlier this year and the decision to offer XP again was not something that Microsoft was happy to hear, I’m sure.  I have been running Vista on my Fujitsu P1610 since early this year and while there are many things I really like about the new OS there is at least one time each day that I wish I still had Windows XP installed. 

I’m not exaggerating, at least once per day during my mobile meanderings Vista does something that holds me up and makes me sit there twiddling my thumbs.  When this happens there are usually other people present who have to wait for the Fuji to come back to life too.  I realize that the P1610 is not a powerhouse PC with it’s 1.2 GHz Core Solo processor, 1 GB of memory and integrated graphics but it was tagged as "Vista Capable" and it does run Aero Glass so I would expect at least acceptable performance and most of the time I do get that.  My quandary emphasizes that old adage that the whole is only as strong as the weakest link in the chain.

First the good things about Vista that keeps me coming back day after day.  The Tablet PC functionality is outstanding and makes interfacing with the Fuji so much easier than XP in every way.  The new Tablet Input Panel (TIP) not only looks better but it works much more productively and makes the Tablet functions feel like an integrated part of the OS, which they are.  The ability to train the recognizer is a tremendous improvement over the XP version and makes the handwriting recognition even more accurate, believe it or not.

I find the whole Vista interface easier to operate with either the pen or my finger (the P1610 is a touch screen Tablet) in almost every way.  There are a lot of interface improvements and I won’t list them all here as that’s not the purpose of this article.  Suffice it to say that I really like the interface and would hate to give it up.

So with all the good things in Vista why do I keep coming back to the question of rolling back to Windows XP?  If I had to sum it up in one word it would be unpredictability.  Vista runs fine almost all the time and the performance is fine even on my anemic hardware.  The problem is that I can’t predict when it’s going to enter into one of its disk thrashing fits that totally paralyzes me.  I’ve documented these thrashing episodes and they can last 5 minutes or more, with me sitting there like a fool, needing to get something done and not able to do so.  I’ve had observers comment on these bouts and ask what’s causing them, something I can’t answer.

Little actions that execute perfectly under Windows XP can trigger these paralytic episodes, but not every time.  Docking and undocking the Fuji can be an exercise in frustration, with the screen changes as it connects to my external monitor sometimes triggering bizarre behavior and total system stoppage.  Docking the Fuji can take 30 seconds to make these adjustments or it can take 5 minutes.  It’s very strange.  Even undocking the Fuji which should just involve it disengaging itself from the peripherals attached to the dock can be quick or painfully slow.  There’s no rhyme nor reason and I often feel like I’m flipping a coin to determine if it will be a quick and normal operation or a slow and irritating action.  This just isn’t right.

Rotating the screen orientation is something I do a lot during the day as I go from slate to laptop modes and back and I experience the same frustrations.  I never know if it’s going to be quick and painless or productivity halting.  It’s the same thing either entering Standby or resuming from it.  I’m ready to throw the Fuji into the bag after telling it to standby and I have to sit and wait to make sure it totally shuts down.  I can’t throw it into the bag while it’s shutting down because if it takes 5 minutes it will get super-hot in the bag.

Every time one of these system stoppages occurs the disk is thrashing so much I’m afraid something is going to go wrong and it will not come back.  It has always come back so far (knock on wood) but the fear is there, heavy disk thrashing has never had a happy ending prior to Vista.  I cannot believe that with the programs I have running most of the time that there is a need for all of this paging or whatever is causing this slowdown.  I can think of no good reason for the paging if that’s what it is because I never have more than three programs running at once, I’ve never liked keeping a bunch of programs open.

So I continue on, every day loving that which is Vista until it makes me hate it so.  And every day I swear I’m going to roll back to Windows XP.  If it wasn’t such a big ordeal to switch back I would have already done it.  And I’m sure that once I rolled back to XP I would be lamenting how much I miss Vista.

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