Daniel Swan

Well after patiently waiting for Vista SP1 to come out and see if it improves the dreadful stability of Vista on my Dell Vostro 1400 – I installed it this week to find out that it has absolutely no effect at all.  Ever since I installed Vista on this machine it’s been up and down like a yoyo with IRQL related BSODs no matter how I configure it.  In fact some Vista updates have been prone to making the situation worse, which meant I ended up having to hand approve and test every update to make sure that it wasn’t going to make Vista *any worse* let alone any better.

So after my first post-SP1 Vista update BSOD I just jacked it all in.  One of the advantages of MSDN logins is that I can get valid versions of software quite happily. I’m now sat here, back in the familiar environs of Windows XP SP2.  In fact since I got my old Powerbook at home, I’ve been using Linux on the laptop less and less – so I trashed that too.  The Dell is now a Windows only zone.  I have had to make some compromises as I couldn’t install an unpatched XP SP2 CD due to the SATA/AHCPI setup on the laptop (so I turned it off), but after finding this excellent page, I managed to get all my drivers back onto the system and it runs perfectly.  I could have rolled my own SP2 install disc with the SATA drivers, but even my geek patience has some limits.

First impressions?  Well it takes up about 1/4 of the space of Vista (if not less), is significantly faster, and hopefully is more stable.  Vista is definitely pretty – Microsoft have done a lot of work on it – XP’s font rendering is clearly not as good, but right now I don’t care!  I’m glad I don’t have to put up with the awful Vista icons anymore in my home directory (I still don’t understand why I have to have icons on directories that are clearly named ‘Music’ ‘Pictures’ ‘Downloads’ etc.) .  The Control Panel is reduced back to a sane level of components.

Hooray for downgrades eh?  My Linux needs are now catered for in the shape of an Ubuntu VM (courtesy of the free VMWare Server) which runs just fine with a dedicated GB of ram in the VM, although I suspect I will just do most of my *nix based work on the Powerbook anyway.  At least I feel I have some flexibility now!

I do however have a little warning for the current XP2 installation.  Any signs of instability will not be tolerated.  The next BSOD I have, it’s all going.  The VM, XP, Vista, the lot and I will just turn my back on the Microsoft world forever, and Ubuntu will rule the machine.

Why not just run Ubuntu and have XP2 in a VM you ask?

I still like to play games…

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 23rd, 2008 at 2:17 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.