Kougar, what other than failed RAID setups don't you like about Vista? It seems to me that the RAID issues is what's turning you off of the OS. I haven't had any serious gripe with Vista for a while, but I admit I only use it for benchmarking, and only benchmarking. So, if I were to use it as a regular OS, I'd probably find more to complain about, but that goes with any OS.
The RAID problems were just the showstoppers. This is only some of the RAID problems Vista had
Link, and was only a small part of the RAID issues I ran into. In fact I am no longer sure if it isn't the drives... I am not willing to install XP in a RAID 10 setup to figure out if it is the OS or the Seagate drives to blame as that would wipe out my Vista install (in regards to the ongoing data corruption issues).
Rob, I tend to sound off against Vista plenty on these forums, so I made a point to never actually start a full out rant. But since you ask...
I'll mention a few. Way over a year ago I had written several pages of complaints and a list of problems in a very lengthy Vista rant to a word file, but I eventually deleted it. I don't fully hate Vista, it does have plenty of advantages over XP which contributed to why I upgraded to it in the first place. But the best descriptive I can come up with that properly describes my two years experience with the OS, is that it was half-assed.
What kind of OS randomly changes folder view settings? Or how files and folders are arranged? I can change the folder back to how I prefer my folders to be viewed and sorted, close it, then reopen it and most of the time it changed again! Not just folder views, but how folder contents are sorted as well. Using the Folders option to set ALL folders to the same setting doesn't do anything either. Both folder view and the arrangement of folder contents are still randomly changed, its never been fixed although MS acknowledges the problem exists.
What kind of OS decides upon a random restart (out-of-the-blue) to tell you the install is no longer valid and must be registered online again? Nothing had changed, no new drivers were installed, the BIOS was not touched. Yet just a single reboot later I need to reactivate my OS to regain its lost functionality. This has occured three times that I still remember. Sometimes another reboot later Vista will automatically go back to normal without the need to reactivate as if it never happened.
There was a subset rant to this in regards to the Microsoft Licensing Service failing to autostart. This bug was eventually fixed somewhere around six months after launch... basically when their licensing service fails to autostart the entire OS locks down and nothing works because it can't authenticate itself.
No messages are displayed to notify the user, not a single message of any kind. The Control Panel will refuse to open, Administrative Tools is for all intents and purposes locked out, any kind of control menu, the personalization menu, right-clicking My Computer -> properties,
everything is disabled and you are left using a crippled desktop and wondering if something just hacked or infected your OS to lock you out of your own computer. Every tool or menu or informative panel you need to troubleshoot what is going on was disabled, but doesn't actually tell you it was disabled. Instead they just decline to open.
Then there is the "bloat". Vista does have bloat. A fully updated Vista is much closer to XP now I will freely admit, but it still isn't as quick to respond as XP nor as fluid... and it was god awful before SP1. Browsing directories, waiting for folder views to refresh, simple navigation around the user interface, all of those took longer or suffered from lag as they updated. And then there were the file transfers... MS forgot that old cliche "If it ain't broke, then don't fix it". Well, file transfers weren't broke in XP but they sure fixed it all right. Last I have seen it still doesn't equal (or beat) XP even after they rewrote entire batches of code and disabled their "improved" methods of file transfering to better mimic how XP transfers a file. I frankly had no idea a simple file transfer could become so convoluted and take a hill of protocols and mountain of code, but they pulled it off. Yet XP was still better, and they did the best they could removing the protocols and code Vista started with in order to make it
emulate how XP transfers a file. Back to the "bloat", there are more processes running amok yet they aren't spendthrifty when it comes to sucking down RAM or virtual RAM. I don't have any fancy numbers to quote anymore, but Windows 7 seems to proove that did not have to be the case. MS simply declined to optimize, polish, and generally tune Vista instead.
Then there is the disk thrashing... for the first year when a forum goer would post about all the constant, unending hard drive activity I told concerned or worried users it was normal and was more than likely caused by the windows indexing/search service. Well oops, that's incorrect. Thanks to the Sysinternals ProcessMon utility, I now know what is bombarding my disk with write commands, and it almost never was the search indexing service. Instead it was the MS licensing component. I do not remember the exact process name and should have taken a screenshot for reference, next time I am using Vista and notice it occuring I'll do so. However the disk thrashing would occur upon boot, and would not cease until the system was fully restarted. What was causing it was some part of the Microsoft licensing component package, constantly issueing the following commands (read, cache, delete, write, read)... and repeating in a loop. It was reading, writing, then deleting the same 2-3 cached files repeatedly in an intermittent loop. Of course it took far <1% CPU usage to do this, so any scan of the task manager would show nothing amiss with the system process running the commands. I have a fully updated Vista x64 install and it still occurs... and all four Seagate drives are buzzing away at full volume whenever it occurs.
I'm sorry, but I used an overclocked Pentium 4 system with the same install of XP for not quite three years, and I never had the frustrations I had with Vista regardless of if I left the system at stock or not. Yet because of the RAID corruption issues I've had to reinstall three times, not counting when I changed from an OEM Ultimate x32 to a retail Ultimate x64 install. And still my experience with Vista never really improved. Things were so bad I set the entire system to 100% stock, even removing factory overclocks where applicable and installed a fresh install of Vista, yet the same problems continue to plague my installs. Over the past two years the only thing I've not changed hardware-wise was probably the Q6600.
Writing this up just got me genuinely frustrated again, so now you see why I deleted that Word doc file that contained a few pages of rants and evidence backing up my frustrations with Vista. I'd love to say Vista is analogous to the infamous "lipstick on a pig" metaphor, ie it's pretty and dressed up but it's still a pig... but that would be an untrue oversimplification of the problem and just me venting. Mostly.
Vista has its advantages over XP, but they pale in comparison to the disadvantages and general step back in most other regards. I've not even given the Vista SP2 beta a glance, because I don't think it can be fixed with even a service pack. I'm just happy Windows 7 has all the positives of Vista without most of the negatives... its an OS that rivals XP in terms of performance with all the benefits Vista had to offer, and it is just a beta. Of course I thought the Vista betas and both Vista Release Candidates were great too, and perhaps you can get a glimpse now of how well
that turned out for me.
