Windows Vista give me XP back!

So I joined the beta of Vista as Microsoft gave the impression that you were able to run Vista for a year. I was foolish enough to believe that they would allow us to upgrade to the release version. Instead you were stuck with a beta copy. So I download the release version off of torrents and used a technique to validate it with my beta key. This loop hole was soon closed and they shut down my copy of Vista. There was lots of ways to hack Vista which are quite complicated but it can be done. But after running Vista for three months I found that a number of issues made me want my Windows XP back.

Vista Issues:

DRM - Microsoft has taken all your control away and gives it to companies. So basically if you have want to make a copy of of a video or game you bought you will have a tough time doing it as the DRM will try to prevent you from doing it. I have also discovered a paper that shows that the quality of all multimedia is downgraded and then upgraded to perform this kind of control, so you actually get reduced quality. You can read the whole paper here.

The DRM protection layer also allows for another issue which has yet to happen. If a virus writer can infect the protection layer then they can reduce your copy of Vista to a basic level as if you were running a copy that wasn't validated. The reduced functionally limits your internet access after an hour, among other things.

Forced to Upgrade - you will be required to upgrade to more memory, a better processor, a new video card, basically a whole new computer. So you aren't buying just a copy of Vista, you are being forced to upgrade your whole system to what a gamer uses.

Annoying Features - Vista has tons of annoying features that have nothing to do with usability or improving the user experience. For starters the start menu is a worthless piece of garbage where all your programs are trapped in a tiny space. The only saving grace is that there is a search bar to find your applications. The gui is a mess with different modes of using the forward and back buttons that you are often confused and you don't realize you had other choices. The 3d alt-tab isn't done via alt-tab, you have to click on it to activate it (talk about dumb). Security that is always popping up in your face warning you that you are doing something dangerous (it also slows down your system so you will end up turning it off for the speed boost). Networking is now hell due to the security; I couldn't share my printer over the network or even share a folder over the network. It is about three or four times more complicated than in XP. CTRL-ALT-DEL now sends you to the log out screen and then you choose that you want task manager (yay for extra steps). This happens with lots of dialog menus in the control panel so it take you three steps to get where you are going rather than one step like in XP. Many things are renamed so you have to relearn the whole system all over again.

Incompatible - The screen flickers many times as the system drops out of 3d mode and back to 2d mode for apps that aren't compatible like Java. I found many of my games didn't work as they have copy protection that won't work under Vista. Other games just run and then fail. For example Gothic III just bombed upon launch. The compatibility mode blows and usually doesn't work. Older hardware which works just fine on XP won't install. It appears that they are working with hardware manufactures to force you to upgrade. For example I have a Philips USB webcam and it gets detected and installed with XP but Vista won't find it and use it. As it is USB there are no drivers I can go get and install, so I would have to go buy a new piece of equipment and throw away a good working item.

Vista is really a bloated OS that doesn't offer any business any reason to upgrade to it. As a personal user it offers some eye candy but for the price and he problems it really isn't worth it. They only rock solid feature which isn't out yet is DirectX10 which won't be available until later this spring. There will be very few directX10 games until late 2007; most likely they won't appear until 2008. I suspect that Microsoft will be forced to release DirectX10 for XP as they will have pressure from the game producers and video card manufactures.

Going back to XP was hell because Vista changes many things on your system. For starters you will find that you have no permission to alter directories on the system so you can't rename the windows directory; you end up having to install into it. This will fail but you will now be able to rename the windows directory so you can install a good copy of XP. Alas there is another issue. NTFS has been altered so that it can create symlinks. Thus Documents and Settings has been changed to Users. This will cause some problems for some applications. I couldn't remove the Users directory and finally when I did rename the User directory it was recreated when I reinstalled XP. For some reason XP couldn't create it's Admin and user accounts so I was stuck in a weird default account. Finally I gave up and wiped out the entire drive and reinstalled just fine.

Beware if you are using linux to read Vista drives it may cause corruption as the NTFS is different.