This morning I rolled back Vista on my new laptop. I'm kind a surprised I did it - it was on a whim. It was the 5th time my wireless connection had dropped - forcing me to surf through the cluttered Control Panel trying to find how to disconnect and re-connect (no you can't do this from the system tray). Vista claims it can fix itself in this case, but never succeeds. After all that, a couple of my apps crapped out of me (that I know work well in XP). Next thing I know, my XP disc is in my tray and I'm booting into XP setup.
I'm writting to you from Windows XP Professional and I'm very happy about it. In the end Vista felt like it complicated everything - all the menus seemed cluttered forcing me to read more, click more, scoll more, THINK more.... it's a beautiful OS, but I wouldn't call it friendly. Several guys in the office are thinking about moving to Vista on their home machines and knowing I'm running it, they frequently ask me what I like about it... I always struggle to think of a feature that I'm really psyched about. It's pretty... that's all I can say. I've been wondering for years what Microsoft could possibly bring to the table to make me want to leave my comfy world in XP. I've yet to find anything. That's more of a compliment to XP than a slam on Vista
I'm a little nervous in my departure - I've never abandoned an OS upgrade before. This usually spells trouble - I just jumped off the wagon.... I'm on my own.... if enough people jump off, the wagon *might* listen to the jumper-off-ers and do something to make them want to get back on, but not likely. My dad ran Windows 98 until late 2006 because he refused to change what he knew and (thought) he liked.
Truth be told - when all of the driver madness and hardware flakiness settles down, the software vendors catch up and get their stuff stable, Vista will be in the fast lane back to my world. But they need to find a way to simplify their UI for users that don't want all this visual junk... By simpify, I'm really talking about a Power User Version where I don't have to wrestle with all this handholding.
