Windows XP Still Trumps Vista

Chris Pirillo sparked off a little controversy last week when he announced that he was “upgrading” from Windows Vista to Windows XP. It started with a post on Pirillo's blog entitled Windows Vista I'm Breaking Up With You.

Apparently lacking anything better to write about, a number of mainstream media outlets picked it up as a story and the usual controversy surrounding the opinions of a high profile blogger ensued.

But Pirillo's decision to move back to XP has some strong weight behind it and having experienced many of the same issues in my own limited use of Vista, I would, if I still had a copy of XP, probably move back myself.

Here's a few of Pirillo's complaints:

• My scanner doesn't really work (Hewlett-Packard Laserjet 3052). HP hasn't caught up with support yet, and software updates won't be available until SP1 time-frame. The software works like a charm in XP - amazingly well, as a matter of fact.
• Windows Movie Maker crashes on a regular basis.
• My IPFax software doesn't work (the driver will likely never be updated to be Vista-compliant). Never, EVER caused me a problem in XP.I need this software to work, and dual-booting to use this is not an option.
• I still can't get my Lifecam to work, but wound up purchasing the vastly superior Logitech QuickCam Ultra Vision instead (which puts Microsoft's new webcam software AND hardware series to shame).
• On the same machine (AMD Quad FX), XP trumps Vista in terms of performance. I don't have specific benchmarks on hand, but I can tell you the difference is quite palpable. This is even with most of Vista's eye candy tuned to a dull roar. We'll see if it runs just as quickly when everything's reinstalled there. I only discovered this after rebooting to try my scanner in XP - blazing differences, similar tasks.
• NVIDIA chipsets and video cards. Need I say more?
• I simply can't get to my OS X machine from Vista (or mount a WebDAV server).

There's several more, but I think this covers some common problems. The first and last issues in this list are my number one gripes about Vista.

Even as far back as its launch many people complained that Vista felt more like a beta than a true 1.0 release, and, as Pirillo highlights, for many that feeling hasn't changed.

Which isn't to say that XP is vastly superior, indeed I agree with Pirillo that in most respects Vista is far superior to its predecessor — the security improvements alone are tremendous — but it still isn't ready for prime time.

However, I'm curious what Compiler readers think… what are your experiences with Vista? What do you think needs to be done to improve Vista? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Here's a rather lengthy video response Pirillo put together to answer both journalists' questions and the comments from readers of his blog. The meaty stuff starts about 13 minutes in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HELrxLdP85c