Oh Vista, You So Slow!

After reading this article, I would have to agree that Vista is simply a dog.  It’s not even close to XP, let alone Ubuntu in the performance department.  I do give it points for eye candy, but I have enough trouble with it that I only keep the Vista side for gaming and do most of my daily tasks in Ubuntu (and XP since we use Visual Studio at work).

One of the major sticking points of Vista is the absolute doggedness in which it copies large files over my network.  Sometimes it plain just doesn’t work!  I’ll try to watch some Divx files and they’ll transfer over so slowly that it’s just unwatchable (that’s if they even transfer at all).  This is even a known bug and is supposedly addressed in SP1…we’ll see!  When I switch over to Ubuntu, it just works and smoothly at that.

I’ve also run into a several occasions where not only does the Vista-side not sleep or hibernate properly, but it will actually bork power management thus not allowing the m1330 to charge its battery until I reboot.  Oops!  So not only will my machine not hibernate, but it will not charge when plugged in!  Doh!

Anyway, I’m thinking of having moving my home server back over to XP since all I really need it to do is  download TV torrents to protect against Tivo snafus, SyncToy files around my network, run mozy backup, and host my top secret financial spreadsheets.  I’m sure XP SP3 would be a great candidate for this.  Of course I’m considering Ubuntu on this machine as it’s free and I’m getting pretty good at using it on a regular basis.  My main concern however is to ensure that my designated backup solutions just work.  In this case, mozy would need something that runs on Ubuntu (which they do not have yet).  The least trouble would to just let Vista live on that machine, take the patches as they roll in, and not rock the multiplicative onsite/offsite auto-backup rube-goldberg machine that I have cobbled together.  This will most likely be the case but I’ll probably end up cleaning things out on the server and XP will probably be my go-to OS.

I’m rather curious why Microsoft would invest so much time and effort to ship SP3 on XP when Vista is supposed to be the new flagship.  I mean, being a former MS employee, I know of the inner-workings and can see how this could happen, but honestly this sort of thing just confuses everyone.  Can anyone tell me the difference between MSN Messenger, Windows Messenger, Office Messenger, and Windows Live Messenger?  I’ll give you a hint…two of them are the same exact thing with different names, but the other two had distinct teams working on them even though 95% of the functionality overlaps.

Ok, ok, how about this one:  Windows Photo Gallery and Windows Live Photo Desktop.  Two separate apps that do just about the same thing except one is bundled in Windows and another comes as a download from Windows Live.  As you can see, confusion and duplicative efforts are Microsoft’s middle name even when it comes to their flagship Windows products.

Windows XP Speed Boost Coming with SP3 – Yahoo! News