I've formatted and installed Windows XP after several months of using Vista RTM.
Vista is stunningly beautiful. It works like a charm and all those lovely features it has to make life easier are brilliant, such as the easy networking and search features.
But, third party support with regards to software and drivers is abysmal, and even once the driver manufacturors released their RTM drivers performance and stability were quite frankly, still shocking.
Hell, Visual Studio 2005 - despite having a recent service pack applied still has many, many issues that I haven't been able to get around - particularly with the ASP.NET development server.
Things came to an annoying end a couple of days ago when I tried installing a TV Tuner I'd bought off the intarweb. Vista decided that instead of installing the drivers for that, it would 'forget' that my DVD drive existed. Since installing the official sound drivers for my laptop I've also found it impossible to use my microphone - seriously limiting my ability to talk to people on Skype.
I've been putting up with driver issues since installing it, but this is my second install of Vista and its back to crawling along and not being that enjoyable to use. I've also had my credential cache corrupt itself making me unable to log into my laptop until I walked to work so I could be on the same network as the domain controller.
I hope that it gets sorted out, and that the following few months will improve matters - but Microsoft's hope that gamers will somehow be buying Vista because it brings greater performance is a joke. Maybe in a few years once new games are all using DX10 and new hardware means that the performance degredation from running DX9 games under Vista is unnnoticeable, but for now - Vista is for those people who don't mind putting up with what should really still be classified as beta software.
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