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Vista: The wow starts later

About two weeks ago, I bought a new PC and decided it was time to make the leap to Vista. I went with the Home Premium edition, which is the version most people will probably buy, since it includes Media Center and all the fancy Aero Glass bells and whistles.

I play a lot of PC games, so I went with a fairly high-end nVidia graphics card and ASUS motherboard to go with my Intel Core 2 Duo chip. And that’s where I ran into my first problems. The infamous drivers. A few days later, after wrangling with Windows Update and workarounds from various Web forums, I thought I had all of my hardware working correctly.

Then I ran into bigger problems. My games would crash. Every single one. Other applications would freeze up for several seconds at a time. Transferring files across my wireless network took much longer than it should. For another week, I tried to track what actions triggered the crashes but they seemed to happen almost randomly.

After giving it the old college try for so long, I finally broke down and called tech support at the company where I bought my PC. I won’t mention their name here since Microsoft wouldn’t be happy with their advice.

I explained my issues and the support guy laughed. Calls like mine were pretty common. “Of course you’re having problems! Vista isn’t ready to be a gaming platform. Your best bet is to roll back to XP until a Service Pack comes out.”

Not ready to give up so quickly, I decided to set up a dual boot. This is easier said than done, but after another long weekend, I got Vista running on one partition and XP Pro on another. XP runs as well as it ever did and now I can enjoy the benefits of my speedy processor and video card without all of the BSODs.

But I’m hanging onto that Vista partition. It’s fun to mess with the voice recognition and some of the interface changes are definite improvements, such as the Start Menu search and the taskbar preview thumbnails. But for now, I’m treating it like a beta curiosity and sticking with a stable OS for my everyday tasks.