I tried to love it. I really did. I’ve always been an early adopter of new technology, and with that comes inherent risks I am fully aware of, and willingly submit myself to. I picked up, and paid $250.00 for Windows Vista Ultimate 64 bit edition. I installed it and was very pleased with the driver support available for such a new system. It automatically saw my raid 5 I had setup, and installation was a breeze. I was also taken back by the good looks and functional alternative to the alt tab solution we’d been living with for so long. I was infatuated. I was blinded.

From there I decided to count my losses. Jumping through hoops to install even recent applications was fine by me. I had to learn sometime. After a while I had things the way I liked them. I had completely switched to Vista. Months went by and I was plagued by random video card crashes, sata hard drive disconnects, and eventually a complete loss of my raid 5 due to all drives falling out of the array at once. The technician and computer nerd in my head began working together. What could cause this? I was running 5 hard drives (one of which was 10,000 RPM), an 8800 GTX superclocked, dual core processor, x-fi sound card, and 2 optical drives. This was one power thirsty system, and considering I was running a lower end 680 W power supply, I figured that when my system was under a heavy load, my PSU couldn’t keep up, and from there random components would shut off and turn back on. This would explain the video card lockups and hard drive disconnects while gaming. So what did I do? I went with the best! I picked up a thermaltake 1200 watt power supply capable of a stable 100A output across 4 rails. This was Satan in PSU form. I installed and it (the power supply) worked great, but guess what didn’t change? Still frequent lockups and hard drive issues. That was $400.00 I probably didn’t need to spend.

From there it came to me. I had only began seeing these issues since Vista replaced XP on my machine. All my drivers were up to date, every update had been applied OS wise. There was no excuse for these problems. I finally bit the bullet, and installed XP again. It was immediately clear that my system was incredibly more responsive. Not only that, but my system halved itself on memory consumption within Windows. It was like I upgraded my system, when I had merely downgraded it. From here I installed my games again. Bioshock, the game that was locking up the most was of course the natural test. This game never ran so silky. I was running at 50 – 60 FPS constantly with no lockups, where with vista I could game for sometimes only 5 minutes at a time prior to a crash, at 35 – 40 FPS. That shouldn’t happen.

This entire time I was fooled into believing that hardware was to blame when it was just a poorly written and bloated OS. Lesson learned. Do not use Vista. At least not yet. Maybe when SP 1 comes out, some of these issues will be addressed, but for now, use XP. Everything is greener on this side.