I think I am going to have to delete Vista…

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My laptop came installed with Windows Vista Home Premium.
I tried. God, how I tried. But I am sick to death of it. I can’t find anything. In the name of security, it squirrels things like screenshots away where they cannot be found — not by its “search”, anyway, which refuses to look everywhere even if you choose “Everywhere”. You can find things by hand that search will never show you.
Drivers don’t work. Games don’t work. Ventrilo doesn’t work right if I have EQ2 on top — never had trouble with it under XP. EQ1 doesn’t work (I know other people have gotten it to work with “run as admin” and “windows xp sp2 compatibility” but trust me, I know about those and have tried them).
All I do with the machine is play games and sometimes browse the web. I use my Linux machine for everything else. So of those simple, easy things I need the machine to do — it cannot.
Time to scrape that crap from the laptop and put XP on it.
I gave it my best shot.

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12 thoughts on “I think I am going to have to delete Vista…”

  1. Like you, I only use Windows to game. I dread the day I have to switch to Vista. I know that one day there will be a game I want to play in the worst way, and it will be Vista only. I’ll resist at first, but eventually I’ll cave, and then I’ll be a sad panda.
    Oh and thanks for making me even more afraid. When someone as tech-savvy as you proclaims that it’s too broken to make work, it chills me to the bone. 🙂

  2. I would not recommend it for gaming. Other people, though, aren’t having any troubles at all. Maybe it’s the graphics drivers stopping me from running EQ1? Maybe! The nVidia drivers claim my hardware doesn’t exist or they have no drivers that match it, or I should be sure I’m using Windows Vista 32bit (which I am, says so right in the System control panel).
    Whatever. I’m using the XP license from my old computer on it. I’ll keep the Vista disks around for when they fix it. As long as games still work on it…

  3. It seems to be ok lately on my desktop. But then all I’ve tried is LOTRO, WoW, CoX, and Railroads!. But about 2 months ago it was awful, mainly the nvidia graphics drivers were causing most of the problems. They’re a lot better now and haven’t had as single crash in over a month. (I have an 8600)
    However I’m not sure about Vista on a laptop. Often I’ve seen videocard drivers just not work on laptops, and you have to get special drivers, and they don’t seem to be supported very long.
    I have started playing Shapeshifter. I am on level 8 now which is probably as far as I can get by hand. The last two levels each took a few tries. I’ve been feeling similar to what you describe in your first article on it: like I’m getting dumber every day. I have to start making some change. I’ll be looking for a new job soon and this will help me get motivated or confident or what have you. Do you still have that other blog about it? I couldn’t find it.

  4. It’s shewhoshapes.wordpress.com — I link to it in my blogroll.
    MMOs really did make me dumber, but only because I let them. I just won’t play mindless games any more, no problem. Just waiting on MMO devs to get out of their comfort zones and do something creative — and I think that is happening.
    Shapeshifter is a game that makes me smarter — love that feeling.

  6. When Vista came out, I read (not personally confirmed) in a few places that they have a way of tracking unauthorized progs too. Goksga mentioned people having problems with making hardware upgrades and it not working because the hardware is different from what MS has on file associated with your copy of Vista.
    I agree with what Amber mentioned about the day arriving when we HAVE to have Vista. 🙁 I haven’t been able to get SP2 to work on my computer right, let alone trying Vista.
    On top of MMOs making one feel dumber every day are certain television news channels.
    Oy.

  7. My cpu is about to turn 4 years old. I want to replace it and have been keeping my eye on the deadline for sales of XP. I want to wait a bit longer to buy, but I want to get in before Vista is my only option. I game too much on my home machine to use Vista.

  8. The search needs a bit of tweaking, like specifying the paths and file types and works great. Drivers are pretty stable now I would think, at least for me they are.
    But like you said, if your primary OS is Linux and you just boot to Windows for gaming, XP might be a better choice for performance anyway.
    One thing I hated was that when I ran a game in a Window mode, and some UAC dialog popped up, BAM! Crashed. Happened to me in both Lineage 2 and Vanguard.
    I don’t feel the OS itself is ‘broken’ or bad though, just that there’s big architecture changes that takes a while before it gets properly adopted and implemented.
    Just for the record, I’m running XP primarily 😛

  10. BTW Tipa, you’ve probably already deleted Vista, but I’m wondering if you tried using Google’s desktop search. I use it at work and really like it. Of course this doesn’t address your other issues, but for anyone that’s stuck with Vista, using GDS might help you to at least find stuff.

  11. The adoption rate for Windows Vista is absolutely horrible due to problems with its security features and video drivers. These problems might be straightened out now but it was bad enough in the begining so that those who did adopt early now warn everyone else not to get Vista. A couple of IT friends I know say their new number one job is putting Windows XP on computers that came installed with Vista.
    I thankfully lucked out and bought my last new computer in November right before Vista started invading the market.

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