Bad Vista!

Being hit by the ‘Wake up call bug’…

Lately Vista x32 has been acting like the bitch queen from hell on my PC, there is just no reasoning with it at all because it does what it wants regardless of your needs. When the OS (Operating System) works it is a dream to use but when it doesn’t it becomes rather irritating. To the point where I’m actually thinking about the damn thing even though I’m at the dinner table with my girlfriend – in a resteraunt. She’s thinking about future things and I’m thinking about how to get more speed out of the OS…

Over the weekend I decided to reinstall Vista in preparation for Service Pack 1 due later this month. At the same time I decided to dedicate a hard disk to XP and dual boot between the two OS’s, mainly so I could play older games, which don’t like Vista. Upon installing XP, the setup utility would crash after it had pre-loaded some XP bits on to my system, this was rather puzzling. I performed a full chkdsk /f which took a solid 2hrs, much to my annoyance.

Hours later the setup utility was still crashing. All I wanted to do was format the hard disk XP would reside on! So I tried vista’s setup with the same result. Then I remembered that vista, for some unknown reason has lately been seeing my DVD drive as a SCSI device. This doesn’t harm the functionality of the drive inside vista, but it seems the OS setup’s utilities don’t like it. It turns out that there’s a few SATA sockets on my mobo, which are RAID dedicated and Vista does not like this….arse. So I removed the DVD drive SATA cable and shoved it into one occupied by one of my many internal hard drives. Viola! The drive was now recognised as an ATA device and XP installed flawlessly, as did Vista x32. However, I was in for a shock.

XP was the shock. A dated 7yr old OS, which required 134 updates after SP2 was installed. The non-bloated bastard brother of Vista decided to knock me sideways by loading up in around 7 seconds on a WD Raptor 10,000rpm hard disk. By comparison I could return from a visit to the loo and Vista would only just be at it’s login screen firing up. In fact it was so fast that I actually questioned myself as to why I’m using Vista. Sure it looks great, but the whole Aero interface had worn thin after a few months of it’s release and I was coo’ing at the slim XP interface.

So why am I using it? DirectX10 is about as useful as acts in the UK to circumvent street crime. Vista may be smoother and quicker than XP in most areas but lately it’s been feeling heavily bloated, even though I have trimmed the number of active services down as much as possible.

I tried to watch some videos this weekend on Vista via Zoom Player, except it was a stutterfest for some reason. It wasn’t the video, it was wmpnetwk.exe (windows media player network sharing service) using up 70% of my CPU cycles to do something random, whilst Zoom Player chugged along with Danny Glover in Predator 2 sounding like he was underwater. What the hell was it doing? I observed this service over the course of the weekend and came to the conclusion that it’s a greedy bastard using a large amount of CPU time for what? It never did this before. I’m not currently sharing any media given that my Xbox 360 is dead, and I haven’t added any media folders for monitoring yet since I am on a new vista install.

Of course there is more to Vista than that, it’s heavily redesigned and updated to easily cope with future hardware and technology and do agree that it handles that very well. XP fares somewhat worse here, for example setting up XP to stream media to a 360 – a nightmare in itself requiring a heap of updates. Anyway, I’m still questioning the need for Vista right now. XP may be an old aging OS, but on a 4GB 3.7GHz dual core system it really flies

We’re talking Bugatti Veyron vs an F1 Grand Prix car, and you can decide which is which.