It took 8 months to realize it, but Vista really does suck.

I’m an operating system junkie. I’m on an eternal quest for the perfect operating system. One of these days I’ll admit that there is no such thing. I’ve tried all of the ‘big 3′ (Windows, Apple OS X, and numerous linux distributions) over the past 10 years and every one of them has huge drawbacks. Still.

As much as I hate to say it, for me, at least for now, the right choice is Windows XP. I never *hated* Windows XP. I just never liked it. What’s to like? It’s ugly, and like every other operating system from Microsoft, it just seems to suffer from ‘Windows Rot’ - where it just gets slower and slower with each passing bootup. That said, XP is light years ahead of Windows 98. And sorry fellow geeks, but Windows 2000 was never a real contender for a desktop user. Not when 70% of the 3rd-party device manufacturers won’t even write drivers for it.

So, what brought me back to XP? Well…here’s the story:

About 6 years or so ago I was running Windows XP and caught wind of this linux thing. So I looked around, didn’t like the goofy “Redhat Network”/subscription thing, and eventually settled on trying SuSe linux. SuSe was really polished and there was a lot to like about it, but I struggled with constant software dependency problems. After a few months of it I gave up and went back to Windows XP.

A few years later and my XP box is getting slower and slower. One night, even though I have always loathed the thought of paying the Apple tax, I went out and picked up a Mac Mini. For less than $500, I figured I couldn’t go wrong. And in some ways, it was a very cool little machine. But, contrary to what Apple said at the time, it didn’t work with my monitor (way dim and fuzzy), and of course right after I buy my Mini I find out that Steve Jobs is going to announce a new Mini line in a couple of months. I pimped out the Mini - upgraded RAM (OS X is a major memory hog - without 2gb it’s on the slow side), and a firewire external boot drive to speed the thing up. In the end I wound up having to spend $900 just to have a machine that was tolerable, speed-wise. I loved OS X, even though it still had some quirks. It is the best OS out there, bar none. Warts and all. But Apple the company sucks. Everything is expensive. Everything is obsolete the day you walk out of the store with it. Etc.

After having the Mini for a few months and deciding I really liked it and could live without a Windows PC, I planned on buying a new iMac which was set to be unveiled by Steve Jobs at one of Apple’s conferences. So the week before that I put the Mini on ebay. I wound up selling it for almost as much as I paid for it, and planned on putting the money towards an iMac.

But a funny thing happened. I had put what I considered a slightly high ‘Buy It Now’ price on the auction or the Mini, because I didn’t really care to sell it too quickly since I’d be out of a computer until the new iMacs were available. Sure enough, it sold within an hour or two of putting it on Ebay.

So, I pulled out the old PC and decided to give a new linux distro named Ubuntu a try. It was really gaining popularity at the time. And for good reason - it just felt *right* and was/is a great distribution. I wound up sticking with that OS for close to a year, though I had to keep a partition/dual-boot situation with Win XP in order to have access to Microsoft Money (there is to this day no decent personal finance software for the Mac OR linux….Quicken on the Mac? garbage. GnuCash? please.).

But eventually my freelance business started picking up, and my interest in the Flash platform grew and, at that time, before the Flex SDK hit the market, there was no way around it - either you needed a Mac or a Windows PC to create Flash apps. Apple was still too pricey, and I needed a new faster machine as my then 6 year old PC was getting awfully long in the tooth, so I bought a new machine that, you guessed it, came with Windows XP and also the promise of a free upgrade to Vista when it came out.

I stuck with XP for a number of months until I got daring and tried the Vista upgrade. Much to my shock, the upgrade went fine (I actually did a clean install), all my hardware was recognized, and everything worked fine. Unfortunately though, over time the thing got slower and slower. And the file explorer in Vista is utter trash. Why they took away the button to navigate UP one level in a directory tree is unexplicable. Not to mention the mixer/sound management in Vista is horrible.

So, I gave it up and tried the latest edition of Ubuntu, named Ibex/8.10. Unfortunately it doesn’t like my hardware, which is:

• AMD x64 5600+
• 4GB DDR2 RAM
• BioStar A770 A2+ board
• Nvidia GeForce 8600GT 512m

I get constant errors and it is overall kind of slow, given the hardware.

So, after not using it at home for more than a year, I’m back on XP. It works. It’s quick (for now). I’ll give it a few months and see how it work.