I'm not going to lie to you all. Vista looks great, but it runs like shit.

---PROFANITY WARNING--- Nothing too severe but I'm not pulling punches with this one.

In the interests of telling you all where I am coming from I've been into computers since 1988 when I played a game called SUBBATTLE on my uncles Apple IIGS. My first comp was a 486SX 20mhz with 4 MB ram stock. Since then I have run DOS 5.1, 6.2, Win 3.1, Win 95/98SE, I've had a P3 500, a P4 2.4 Ghz, and now I am running

Vista, on this computer, which has a Q6600 2.4 Ghz Core 2 Quad processor, with an Asus P5K Deluxe Motherboard, 2 GB of PC2 DDR2 6400 RAM, LeadTek PX8600 GT 256 MB $100 Bargain card. I have 2 Western Digital Caviar 500 Gig harddrives.

My scores by VISTA, are...

CPU 5.9
MEMORY 5.6
GRAPHICS 5.9
GAMING GRAPHICS 5.5
PRIMARY HARD DISK 5.7

I'm not sure if these are on a scale of 0 or 1 to 6! But what the hell scores higher than a quad core? LOL My bottleneck is my Geforce 8600 GT, which I knew, but for $100 and really the 3rd best DX 10 nvidia card it seemed like a great idea. It runs Supreme Commander at about 20-30 fps on high, in XP SP2! so I really can't fault it at all, and I was in fact expecting to see a lower than 5.5 score. What troubles me, is that the scores are good but the overall performance of the OS is really not that great at all.

Now when I first put this computer together I ran an old OEM cd with XP SP1 on it, and upgraded and patched up to XP SP2, and everything was, happily very good. I have to say I was impressed with the performance of the system, both responsiveness wise and overall, it was running cream of the crop. I mean compared to my single core rig running the same speed and with less than 1 GB or ram it really was screaming. If something locked up as occasionally happens, you could just alt tab, close that sucker down and run it up again. No probs, at a maximum save and reboot and be back up in 2 min. XP SP2 is good!

The disc gave me a 30 day free trial period with which to run until activation. Try as I might to find illegitimate ways to get past activation, and they do exist I guess, I couldn't get anything to work lol, though I only really made a few half assed attempts. So going legit I called Microsoft hoping for a cheap and easy fix. Well to upgrade I'd have to have WIN 98 ME or 2000, and unfortunately I didn't have any of those stone age OS's discs around to play upgrade with. A retail copy of XP still costs over $200 OMFG and I can tell you why. Microsoft knows XP is bigger than VISTA, and still more profitable!

OEM Vista Ultimate for system builders, on the other hand, $149, from newegg, was the cheaper option and I'm sorry to say it would appear the one with less value.

Vista : Summed up for you in a few chapters The Great, The Good, The Bad, The Annoying, The Just Downright Pathetic!

Chapter 1 VISTA: The Great, It comes with Chess. Another feature I like is the system health report. I'm not sure if this is in XP but I've never seen it, anyway, it give you a bunch of info on the hardware/software, what's not working even if it appears to be so. Much more data then clicking on a component in the device manager in XP which basically says "this device is working properly" for everything. A nice feature and one that I don't think was advertised.

Chapter 2 VISTA: The Good, hey it looks sweet. I really wish the visual effects could have made it into WIN XP SP3, and maybe if VISTA continues to suck as much as it does it will. One thing I do like about Vista is the way the title bar draws kinda glows behind the words, and how the close box is a little bigger, easier to hit the first time, and how the windows pop up and fade out. I also like how it is kinda blurry behind a window but still semi transparent. Neat style.

So far its stable, and with 60 processes i.e. train tracks, it sure as hell better be! Not that XP really is all that unstable. But Vista thus far feels more stable. So good deal!

Smooth, fast install, but I couldn't get my RAID to work. So I'm not sure if that is the OS or if that is my BIOS. But given my expectations I wanted it to just work lol. So I'm blaming VISTA! Ok I'm not, even though I feel like it, I'll give you this pass Vista, you deserve one free phone call right?

Unfortunately even the good is really an overall negative.

But sorry Microsoft, I'm not a style man, I'm a substance man, I paid for performance and right now VISTA is not achieving an equal to or greater level of performance that I can get and did get with XP on this system. So as much as I like it, it's all bullshit that I don't need or want to sacrifice ram for, or cpu time or any of that flash.

It feels like these enhancements were for visual need alone, to sex up the look, and make it more flashy, to get you to buy it, in most cases, the visual things don't add any value whatsoever and they tax the system resources! If that sounds like a tech answer, consider I drive an 89 Buick and its peeling paint. It's 4 wheels and runs, but it ain't high maintenance. Vista seems to be high maintenance. Who the hell wants that!

Sure it Vista Ultimate looks nicer, but XP isn't a pig, it's a clean, slick, and easy to read and use system. No?

There is something called Readyboost, which allows you to plug in a flash drive, and the OS uses it to pre-load commonly used date for programs. So it's like having extra ram at the flash card prices, not as fast, but faster than Harddisk speeds I guess. Big deal, well not really. I have my 2 1 GB of them plugged in and it doesn't seem to really be doing anything with them.

Bottom line is You don't need this for what you are sacrificing by going with Vista over XP.

Chapter 3 VISTA: The Bad, Oh God where to start? First it has to be performance. With each new implementation a substance improvement has been performance. WIN 98 performed better than Win 95. Win 95 better than 3.1 and XP SP2 really beats Vista in every way.

I am by no means running a marginal system but I crap my pants when I think of what Vista Ultimate would run like on my Single Core P4 2.4 ghz system, not that the clock speed is so bad, but I have less than 1 GB ram in there.

I have a 700 watt power supply, a bunch of fans, LEDs, I'm not an environmentalist, but I'm not leaving this thing on when I'm not using it, that's just stupid. So a "cold start of the warp engines" as Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott would say, takes longer in Vista than in XP.

Why? Why does the computer have to be less responsive as well as take longer when starting? I'll tell you why, it's running more BS in the background LOL. So an XP startup uses less ram, about 250 MB at startup, is more responsive with my quadcore, gets to the desktop faster, 30 seconds as opposed to over a minute, and when I start clicking shit, it goes. With Vista, is take a second or two, which is ok but why? Why why why why why why why mother f--kers? Faster Bigger Better!!!, not slower, bigger not better.... LOL

Another thing Montgomery Scott said, was "if it ain't broke don't fix it"...

This is where you start thinking about the burger you just bit into, the fact that it aint cooked all the way through, its red, and you are wondering if you are gonna get the shits from it, 12 hours later.

They changes the location of stuff in the system, the start menu is different, they call things different things in the OS, sleep modes are weirder, lots of things are different. I had my setup with a fair bit of icons on the desktop and my side bar wasn't a side bar it was a quick launch bar that hid itself. Now they have this "side bar" which is way toooo wide, and really the one outstanding feature a year from the release is an attractive clock called a gadget, you can also have the task manager graphs running there and a few other things. If you do a scan of them on the net, most of them are rated 3 2 or 1 stars out of 5 by users. LOL Great.

Well I have a clock on my wall, and a digital clock on the bottom right of the screen. This is innovation? Really you have to try harder Microsoft!

More bad VISTA, takes half your ram, and fills it with whatever, and in some circumstances it is supposed to speed up the system. Well, I'm not sure if you need 4 GB ram but with 2 it's working but nothing is faster because of it. It constantly buffers to 1 GB, and from what I understand if you add more ram it fills it half way, I just don't see any performance increase with it. Maybe something under the hood runs faster, but extracting the Supreme Commander wrar, was about as fast as on XP I think. Don't really know, I'll figure that out when I go back to XP Which means it's a great feature that has no meaningful benefit. Remember I've run this exact same computer hardware setup with XP, and now Vista.

It feels like with all this loaded into the memory you'd see efficiency and cutting down loading times. Well nope lol. Out of the box and as far as I can tell with the latest updates, there are 60 processes running, and I have no idea what the bulk of them do, but they appear to keep the OS in line and unhackable for the time being.

CHAPTER 4: The Annoying, Another thing that sucks, and this is legendary at this point, is the constantly popping up goddamn UAC thing. No not Union Aerospace Corporation. But it feels like a fucking demon inspired invasion from hell. UAC is User Account Control, and it is as annoying and useless. Basically everytime you try to install something, it asks your permisison to do it. Unfortunately if a program a year or two from now that exploits this OS, asks, you will be so sick of making a decision yes or no, if it's bad you are just going to click yes or have turned this feature off or fucking installed WIN XP SP3, that it won't matter.

Seriously Microsoft get your QA department head's head, extracted from his/her ass, and get this feature reworked and toned down! Today!

It seems VISTA wants permission for everything, a case of the terrible twos and the the babysitter on meth. Come on does it really have to ask me if I want to close a program or install a program? Does it really have to interrupt the process every time a program doesn't have the credentials or the right signature? Can't we give the UAC some jedi mind trickery where is says "you don't need to see any id, these aren't the droids you are looking for". For crying out loud, I swear I counted about 15 different instances and it is annnnnnnnnooooying!

With premium versions of Windows past, you used to get MS Word or Excel or something worth owning a computer for. Now it's Windows Media player? I mean seriously does anybody need WMP 11 vs WMP 10? I'm beginning to wonder if I need to ever see DX 10 vs DX 9 if I have to put up with all this other shit. I think paying the "Ultimate Price" MS Word could/should have been included. Just to be fair and add some value. Value that is seriously lacking.

Flight Simulator X, dropped the Windows Aero to some crappy minimalist view because I was running this program. It looked weirder than XP but it was VISTA. Didn't Microsoft also build FSX? Uh hello! I guess when you get to be a billion dollar you can make a fat lazy lame OS and think you can hold onto your monopoly doing that aye? Doubt it.

CHAPTER 5: The Just Downright Pathetic!

My sister is running XP SP2, on a pre 2000 computer say 1999 or 98, with a 300 mhz pentium 2. We raced just for the hell of it. I'm embarassed and sorry to report, that her system boots faster than Vista on my system. That should be a clue there to the Microsoft folks. Especially when it installs an update, it keep the computer running longer than it shuts down, then when you power it up again later, it still is running that update in the beginning. Come on! Do it once I get my stuff started! What is so hard about doing what I wanna do first, then doing your bs update stuff Microsoft? I mean we got 4 cores to share, I have two hard drives, can't you schedule your updates for when I'm taking a piss?

Also, I can't seem to get it to be compatible with software I wanna run. A year out from its release It doesn't wanna play with anything but Flight Simulator X. I can't get Supreme Commander to update, I cant' get the Crysis beta to work, I can't get CounterStrike 1.6 to even install.

I thought Vista was going to be necessary to run Crysis and that is really the whole reason I got Vista, DX10 and Crysis. I wanted to check it out and now I have. Biggest mistake in last 2-5 years of my life to be honest. It won't install Nero 6.6.1 so I can't burn DVD's which kinda defeats the purpose of a DVD RW DRIVE don't ya think? Another great program that guess what, doesn't work with Vista is CAM STUDIO, which records the desktop or whatever is inside the record box. Well thanks but no thanks, if the only thing I can play with on my computer are gadgets and Flight Simulator 10, and every time that loads it brings the desktop to Vista Basic on a copy of Vista Ultimate, Microsfot can keep this shit. VISTA SUCKS, a year after it's release. Calling the tech support ppl, the guy from New Delhi said, hey we know we got problems, we are working on SP1. Great news, for the suckers still buying this OS. I'm not a developer, or a techie, Just a guy who likes fast and powerful computers and fun games, but this just sucks. Sucks sucks sucks! With no redemption.

Honestly I'm at a loss, there seems to be a total trade of compatibility for security. I thought we were all getting along pretty well with Windows Update in XP, Windows Defender, and a free AVG virus scanner. Evidently I missed the day when Microsoft traded the keys to the vault for the UAC, and your point click, permission granting. Bill Gates talked about trustworthy computing initiative and it that is this, what we need is an intelligent computing initiative, one that isn't going to ask me twice when I am installing something if I really wanna do it.

I am having difficulty finding installed programs lol. Give me a break here MS, I found the control panel and the my computer, but that should come stock on the desktop lol. Next thing you know Vista SP1, is gonna hide the recycle bin so the malware doesn't get it raid your recyclables. Typing stuff in the search bar is nice, and after having a system for 3 or 4 years gets necessary but I just installed, why can't I find my programs?

I'm so fucking angry right now, All I can say is this is to be edited lol. I'm pretty confident with my lack of getting the Crysis beta to work, my inability to get Supreme Commander installed, and total lack of success getting my RAID 0 to function, I'm going to go back to XP SP2. It's going to cost me another $200 but I am just ready to get into tears over this. I feel ripped off and physically sickened by Microsoft. Well ok I don't feel that bad, but damn I feel as bad with Vista as I felt Good with XP when I had put the entire computer together, installed XP and updated to SP2 only to have to activate in 30 days. That was freedom, productivity, and performance combined. Unfortunately I made an expensive mistake choosing Vista.

But hey it's not all bad, in 2 or 3 years, this OS might actually be superior to XP, and I'll have an OEM copy rearing to go, call it a long term investment if you will. I have to go to sleep lol. Nobody want's to continue to read this ramble. Night all. Drink your milk, stay off the drugs, stay in school, and stick with XP. All shall be well.

The Wow starts now, yeah the Wow how the hell do I get back to XP, and who the hell is gonna buy OEM Vista off me?