So we have people reporting great experiences, and people reporting horrible experiences. How can this be? I have a theory, as you might expect. Apologies in advance for length...
Vista was "rushed out": which might be a strange thing to say, considering it was expected a year before it arrived. The hardware manufacturers have a lot to do with it, in my opinion. I ran two separate Vista installs, though both are gone, and had drastically different experiences:
- home PC with AMD64, NForce4-based motherboard, GeForce 6600 video. I installed the 64-bit version, not long after Vista was released. As you can imagine, hardware support was a big problem: video OK, but it was months before NVidia released any Vista-specific drivers. I have "only" 2GB in this PC, and I found Vista to be a hog. It spent a lot of time writing to disk (which was a bit old), even after I stopped Indexing services. Since I use that PC to run a few games and as a "backup server" for my laptop, it doesn't need Vista or a 64-bit OS, so I've had XP SP2 back on for 6 months now.
- At work, months after the Vista release, the IT company I worked put out a beta of their internal Vista release, for business laptops. I installed it and had very few problems over the next 6 months before I left the company. Remote access (VPN) worked great, and it actually seemed faster than XP. A very old Window applications had a couple of interface problems, but nothing that stopped work. It was a business laptop, with a slightly old graphics chipset that Intel said they would not release full 3D graphics support for.
In both cases I had the well-documented problems copying large numbers of files in Explorer: I "worked around" the issue, as I tend to do: using a freeware Norton Commander clone. or the command line e.g. XCOPY and ROBOCOPY.
So I don't think it's as simple as "Vista is crap" - it never is. The work my company put in really made a difference, and other PC manufacturers can do the same. What I want to see from Microsoft in particular is testing, testing, and more testing, and a Service Pack that tightens the whole experience considerably.
That's why I say Vista was rushed out, despite being used internally at Microsoft - what they call "eating their own dog food" - it hasn't been enough, in my opinion. On the other hand, our varying experiences illustrate the role that hardware manufacturers have to play, because so much of the Vista experience depends on how well it works with a huge range of hardware.