Hi-ho, hi-ho, it's back to XP I go!
Yup, that's right. I've canned Vista and gone back to XP. Why? I don't have the time or the resources to be on the bleeding edge. If I had a desktop at home that I use, I'd probably get Vista for it. As it is, my work laptop is my home computer too, so I can't spend time dealing with missing drivers, incompatible programs, inexplicable hardware conflicts, and so forth. And I've had ten, count 'em, ten blue screens since installing Vista. That's more blue screens than I ever got in XP in four years.
That's not to say there are things I won't miss about Vista. It's a great operating system. I mean, seriously good. As much as people like to rag on it for "not being innovative", it has a lot going for it.
That sounds duplicitous, doesn't it? If it's so great, why am I switching away from it? For the same reason I waited a year or two to switch from Windows 2000 to Windows XP. I knew lots of people who switched to XP right when it came out and they had pretty much the exact same experience I'm having now with Vista. It's just the nature of the beast. In a year or two I don't doubt Vista will be rock solid on the hardware that's out then. And on top of that, my next laptop will undoubtedly have Vista loaded already on hardware that's tested to run without a hitch using drivers that are well-tested.
So I'm not doing this out of the same mindset as the stodgy people who still declare that 2000 is good enough for them and XP brings nothing to the table, because that's just ridiculous. However, my workflow isn't open enough right now to deal with the newness of Vista. Vista brings a lot to the table for me, as much as XP did over 2000 (maybe more), but not with the system I'm using right now.
All I have to say is that I'm happy I migrated to a USB stick last month. It was a true test of whether that whole process achieved its goal of making me system-independent. I was able to make a quick five-minute scan of my hard drive to ensure there wasn't anything valuable I was leaving behind and then I rebooted, hit F11, and in 20 minutes my system was back to its factory install state with XP loaded and ready for me to use. No backing things up, no back-of-my-mind worry that I was maybe wiping critical files, and so on. Just easy.
And I have to say, going back to XP was like putting on a pair of old Birkenstocks. They may not look pretty anymore, but they fit so well and it's just a really comfortable fit.